Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition by Adam Gussow

Author:Adam Gussow [Gussow, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Music, Biography
ISBN: 9781469633671
Google: Mh00DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B06Y3GM56Y
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

’CROSS THE ROAD

The legend of Robert Johnson at the crossroads depends on missing time—a phrase, coincidentally, that waxes large in the contemporary folklore of alien abductions—and a disappearing act.

Johnson disappeared from the Robinsonville area of the Mississippi Delta late in 1930. His wife had died that April; during roughly the same period, Son House and Willie Brown began playing local dances that drew the inexperienced young musician like a moth to a flame. Johnson would pick up a guitar when the older men went on break and, as House later recalled, “go bamming with it” until the crowd complained.28 House and Brown considered him a pest. So Johnson left town. When he returned, after an absence of “six or seven months” in House’s estimation, he had suddenly—miraculously—been reborn as a prodigy, somebody who must have “sold his soul to the devil” in order to gain such talents, as House famously insisted to Welding three decades later. The power of the legend, to the extent that House’s story anchors it, depends as much on the brevity of the interlude as on the increase in instrumental proficiency. No mere human could have made that sort of great leap forward in so short a time, it is presumed, without divine, or demonic, intercession.

Scholars have known at least since Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues (1981) that Johnson was gone from Robinsonville for somewhat longer than House realized—at least a year and, by some recent estimates, as long as three years.29 (I explore this issue in detail in part 3 of this chapter.) It has long been known that Johnson retreated to the Hazlehurst area, his birthplace, roughly thirty miles south of Jackson, and that he studied guitar with an older Alabama-born bluesman named Ike whose last name has been variously misspelled Zinneman, Zinnerman, Zinman, and Zinemon. Ike, according to Stephen C. LaVere’s liner notes for The Complete Recordings (1990), “had always told his wife that he had learned to play guitar in a graveyard at midnight while sitting atop tombstones,” a fact that led Gioia (2008) to characterize the older man as “devilish.”30 Virtually nothing else was known of Ike and his relationship with Johnson until cultural historian Bruce Conforth published an article in Living Blues (2008) based on extensive interviews with Isaiah “Ike” Zimmerman’s unnamed daughter and grandson.31

According to those two, Robert Johnson—whom they called R. L.—lived for “a long time” with Zimmerman’s family, right in the family house; Conforth recently specified seven months as the term of Johnson’s residency.32 Although Conforth withholds the family’s precise location to maintain their privacy, another researcher has identified the town as Beauregard, Mississippi, five miles south of Martinsville (where Johnson met Callie Craft, who would become his second wife, during that period) and ten miles south of Hazlehurst.33 The Ike Zimmerman evoked by his daughter and grandson was a “strong” and “good” man, a family man with a well-paying job working for the highway department, but also a “womanizer” who “played guitar to chase women.” He played guitar behind his head, his daughter remembered, and “did all of that.

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