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Topic: Robert Johnson in perspective Return to archive
04-27-03 01:53 PM
Riffhard It's been awhile since I really listened to the Robert Johnson Complete Recordings CD. So the other night I was imbibing in some fine Southern Sour Mash whiskey and I felt that primal urge to visit the crossroads. Man,I always get knocked out when I listen to that guy play!

The liner notes are great for this box set and I really love Keith's comments on hearing RJ for the first time at Brian's flat. He really hits the nail on the head when he relates the story of asking Brian who was playing guitar with Robert. I remember thinking the same thing before I ever even read the liner notes! It sounds like two different guitars! The guy was just so goddamned talented. 32-20 Blues is a perfect example of Johnson's picking while strumming technique.

Anyway,if you haven't played this outrageously great work recently do yourself a favor and visit the crossroads again. Just don't get down on your knees and make any deals with Ol' Scratch. Tell him I said hello.

Think I'll put on Dead Shrimp Blues right now,and then maybe Hot Tamales again!


Riffhard
04-28-03 10:32 AM
T&A Yep - RJ's the man. And it goes well beyond his prodigious guitar chops - the man's voice is other-worldly...to say nothing of his writing talents....absolute poetry.
04-29-03 03:07 AM
gypsymofo60 Pure genius!!!!!!!! Alongside Son House, and Bukka White he,(for me) IS The Mississipi Delta. Thank God for the likes of John Hammond who had the guts to bring this music out into the open when many would've lynched him for that effort alone. I have alot of trouble obtaining the more obscure bluesmen from that era. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.
04-29-03 10:08 AM
T&A Charlie Patton's another master of the genre - he was more a contemporary of Son House (about 6-8 years prior to the emergence of RJ). Also, Blind Willie McTell is a fave of mine.
04-30-03 05:43 AM
gypsymofo60 How about this guy Tommy Johnstone that Robert Plant always pays homage to, he's supposed to pre-date all the recorded bluesmen.
04-30-03 08:06 AM
stonedinaustralia "Robert Johnson was probably the first of the Delta bluesman whose work mounts an explicit challenge to the folklorist theory that individual singers are simply agents of their tradition, and that it is the tradition itself which is truly the artist. Certainly, Johnson borrowed musical an lyrical themes from Son House, Kokomo Arnold,Lonnie Johnson and others - just as they undoubtedly borrowed from their predecessors.But as recording first documented then supplanted the purely oral tradition, the singer-as-agent theory becomes more difficult to sustain.

There is no doubt that Shakespeare and Beethoven also worked in tradtions established by their predecessors, but I have not heard it suggested that their personal contributions were negligible, and that the traditon did all the work for them. It is because their work has survived - in the form of written words and music that we know what they have achieved; and Johnson's work has also survived , thanks to Don Law and his unweildy wax discs, as more than simply a series of echoes in the work of others.

His music ushers us in to a distinct and personal world; recognizably the Mississippi Delta as it existed in the thirties, a world depicted also by many of his fellow bluesman, but seen from a perspective utterly peculiar to him. Johnson's world - or to be precise , the inner world he superimposed on the acual , physical Delta, which he and his music inhabited - was uniquely and personally his. This is the key to his greatness, and it is true of him in a way it is not, for all their aqchievements, true of Son House or Charley Patton or Kokomo Arnold or Blind Lemon Jefferson. This is quality percieved by Law, Oertles and Hammond.

In their introduction to 'The Existential Imagination' (two academic types) define existentialism in terms of

...its emphasis upon the alienation of man (sic.) from an absurd world and his estrangement from normal society, his reception of the world as meaningless or negative, his consequent burden of soul-scarring anxieties, bringing with it his need to distinguish between his authentic and inauthentic self, his obsessive desire to confront his imminent death on one hand and his consuming passion to live on the other...

This description could perform such excellent service as a guided tour of the themes and preoccupations of Johnson's work, that it is highly tempting to proclaim the bluesman as some sort of proto-existentialist . Unfortunately, Johnson and the existentialists - despite their extensive common ground - part company before the journey even commences. Existentialism proceeds from the assumption that God is dead, and for Robert Johnson to embrace this philosophy would have meant abandoning not one, but two systems of belief. Johnson was split by his warring allegiances - not, as the simplistic explanation goes, to the neat Christian duality of God and the Devil - but to Christianity itself and the West African retentions we call Voodoo. No matter how heartily Johnson might have wished to be free of both, he lived and died in the belief that the entities and deities of the spiritual world held dominion over him - and none of them would hear his pleas.Poor Bob was laid low by the classic nemeses - the wrong woman and the wrong bottle of whiskey - but such is the power of his music (over sixty years) after his death that it takes no great effort of the imagination to visualize the contract that he signed at those ghostly crossroads stamped, in letters of fire, PAID IN FULL."


lifted entirely from "Crosstown Traffic" by Charles Shaar Murray (there's a whole chapter on and innumerable references to Johnson and it's well worth the read on that basis alone)

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