Blues Brother
Rick Margolis -- School Library Journal, 11/20/2006
Poet J. Patrick Lewis examines the life of legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson in his latest picture book, Black Cat Bone (Creative Editions), one of this year’s Best Books.
A lot of people are convinced that Robert Johnson invented the blues.
No, he didn’t invent the blues, but he’s associated with it. I suppose there are all sorts of questions as to why he is the only pre-World War II blues artist whose records are still widely owned and heard today. I mean, there were other Mississippi masters: Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, Ike Zinnerman. In fact, all of those people were his mentors, but they are appreciated today only by blues aficionados.
Johnson died in 1938 at age 27. Why has his legacy endured?
I think partly it was the mysteriousness of him. In fact, when Sony Records (they owned Columbia) released Johnson’s “The Complete Recordings” in 1990, they were caught short. They hadn’t expected such great sales. The guy really is a mystery and this sort of lost-soul character in a way that no other musician of that time was.
I remember that recording. It blew people away and sold 400,000 copies in six months.
Right. The novelist Russell Banks has said that for a generation of music lovers, the experience of first hearing Robert Johnson was riveting and memorable in the same way you knew what you were doing when President Kennedy was killed. That may be a little over the top, but it’s certainly close to what many of today’s admirers of Johnson feel.
What was your impression the first time you heard him?
My reaction was sort of like Keith Richards’s. He said he thought he was hearing two guitars, and it took him a long time to realize that Johnson was actually doing it all by himself.
Popular legend has it that Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of two highways, at the stroke of midnight, in exchange for making him a great guitarist. What’s your take on that?
The early researchers seem to be of a single mind, and they mythologized Robert Johnson out of the realm of possibility. I don’t mean to be overly earnest or melodramatic, but I had an aim in this book. It was to transport myself backward in time and place and try to evoke this phantom memory of Johnson’s genius—and possibly to build my own very small monument to his uniqueness. Here was a fellow wrapped in the mystery of dark and violent Mississippi, and I wanted to see if I could peel away some of the shroud without in any way contributing to this grotesque mythology.
