Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald

Author:Elijah Wald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

11

THE LEGACY

ROBERT JOHNSON CREATED A BODY OF WORK THAT IS FASCINATING and inspiring, but also at times both frustrating and ambiguous. Unlike Lemon Jefferson or Charley Patton, who were already fully formed artists when they began to record, he entered the studio while still in a stage of artistic growth and flux. He had been playing for only a few years, during which he had progressed from rootsy Delta juke music through the work of uptown players like Carr and Lonnie Johnson, meanwhile assimilating the wide range of pop and hillbilly material that we know of only by hearsay. His final session found him still trying on various styles, from the smooth balladry of Johnson and Blind Blake to the eerie soulfulness of Skip James, and reports from his acquaintances suggest that he was also experimenting with a small band and moving toward a jazzy or “jump” combo sound.

Johnson’s death, just fourteen months after this session, thus leaves us without any clear idea of which directions he might have pursued, or how he would have sounded even a few years further on. To judge by the choices his peers went on to make, he could have done anything from forming a jazz group to quitting music entirely, and if we grant that he had a breadth of talent unmatched by any of those peers, that opens up still broader vistas. And that is not even taking into account what might have happened if the jazz impresario John Hammond had succeeded in his attempt to find Johnson and present him at 1938’s groundbreaking “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall, introducing him to the progressive, intellectual world of Café Society.

To get a sense of how little we really know about all this, imagine for a moment that Ray Charles had died in 1954, rather than continuing to develop and expand his work into the present century. By the early 1950s, Charles had recorded far more sides and achieved much greater popular success than Johnson, but he was still a relatively minor figure, despite having proved himself a brilliant synthesizer of the current blues-pop styles. He could play anything from the smooth cocktail jazz of Nat “King” Cole to gritty down-home sounds, to gospel-infused shouts. Still, he had not yet fused all of this into the unique personal style that would transform the black music world. Had he died then, there is no saying how the soul revolution would have developed, and there would have been no way to even imagine his later evolution, the genre-smashing ventures into country, modern jazz, and the pop mainstream. In the same way, we know a certain amount about Johnson’s talents, the influences he had assimilated, and the way he chose to apply all of that over two recording sessions, but we can never know which stylistic tics he would have retained and which he would have abandoned in the next few years, or even whether he would have continued to have much interest in blues.

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