ESCAPING THE DELTA:
ROBERT JOHNSON AND THE INVENTION OF THE BLUES
By Elijah Wald
Amistad/HarperCollins, US$24.95
11 January 2004 - Blues guitarist and longtime music writer Elijah Wald can make a claim few musicians can: He traveled to Morgan City, Miss., in 1991 for the dedication of blues master Robert Johnson's gravemarker. When Wald and his friends played "Terraplane Blues," he knew that "the song had come home, back to where it was good fun rather than a historical artifact. ''
That basic outlook informs this fine book. Wald takes the blues home, puts the music in context with its varied audiences, from the original fans in the juke joints to the listeners who heard blues songs long after their creation, from record buyers and audiences in clubs through the work of enthnomusiciologists Alan Lomax and John Work, to the rediscovery and popular dissemination of the blues by people including Mick Jagger and John Lennon, when British musicians introduced Americans to much of their own literary heritage. Robert Johnson, the central blues figure of legend who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, lived with the hellhound on his trail, and died young, emerges anew in a fresh and revisionist history.
While many people love the myth of Robert Johnson as a mysterious, forbidding man, the creation largely of whites' desire to see "noble primitivism" in the Mississippi Delta, Wald sees instead that "Robert Johnson and his peers were intelligent professionals, well versed in the trends of their day and the tastes of their time." Johnson fed into myths white writers wanted to find in the Delta, and they romanticized his image. As singer Little Milton said of the stereotypes whites often brought to the table, "I fail to see the significance of just the down and out, you know, that kind of thing."
The biography of Robert Johnson Wald presents is rather brief, but a substantial section of "Escaping the Delta'' is devoted to an extended analysis -- three chapters long -- of Johnson's first recording sessions. (To get the most out of these chapters, you'll need to be listening to music or else have an encyclopedic musical memory.) Wald does not deny Johnson's great accomplishment but points out that "white fans would crown him king of the Delta, and (their) opinions have come to be the gospel of blues history,'' while relatively few black artists knew him.
If you love lists, Wald provides plenty of them. A particularly interesting one is a list of blues artist who released more than 100 sides from 1920 to1942. Tampa Red tops the list with 251; Robert Johnson doesn't make it at all. There's a a terrific disconnect, according to Wald, about the really popular musicians and the ones who receive disproportionate treatment in the history books. One of the most fascinating appendices lists the records on the jukeboxes in Clarksdale, Miss.
Wald's is a story of race, to be sure, of black musicians, primarily, and black and white audiences. And he sets his history in a full social context. But he is not without humor or a sense of irony, as this story demonstrates:
"White writers, performers, and audiences, living in a world where blackness is routinely equated with toughness, violence, primitivism, and innate rather than conscious artistry, have a tendency to interpret songs rather differently than black songwriters, musicians, and audiences that supported blues as a modern, relevant pop style. Dave Van Ronk, one of the pioneer white revivalists, told me of a performance he once gave at a blues festival in New England. He arrived late, and did not know who else was on the bill, but gave his usual show, ending with a shouting steamroller version of 'Hoochie Coochie Man,' full of aggressive macho bluster. Exiting to wild applause, he found to his embarrassment that Muddy Waters, the song's originator, had been sitting in the wings watching him. Waters, always the gentleman, hastened to put him at ease. 'That was very good, son,' he said, putting his hand on Dave's shoulder. Then he added, 'But you know, that's supposed to be a funny song.' "
Wald's book is full of just such insight and intelligence. The only drawback? It should have come with a CD. Read it with the music playing or plan a trip to the nearest music store.
By Susan Larson
Book editor, Times-Picayune
slarson@timespicayune.com
