An ever so mild critique of Elijah Wald’s “Escaping the Delta”
By Frank Matheis © 2006
Musicologist Elijah Wald has already published two books since he released “Escaping the Delta- Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues”. It may seem unusually late for me to write commentary about a book published in 2004, but I had to think about it, to wait until I was ready. Sorry, it took me a while. I had waited for others to take it on, to no avail. Considering that Wald evidently intended to turn the blues world upside down, it is surprising that the big fish musicologists and powerhouse blues pundits most affected by the controversy kept such an uncharacteristically low profile. This book was not greeted by a great deal of published scholarly discourse and intellectual rebuttals. The predicted passionate discussions never came outside of the insular blues symposiums. One reason may be that Elijah Wald is a first rate writer and that this book, like all his others, is well written and researched, and holds up to skeptical scholarly scrutiny even if it expresses unpopular or blasphemous opinions. There is nothing like a bit of well-reasoned controversy to help spur book sales. Wald, I assume, would have accepted and even welcomed a much heavier tide of criticism. While my critique will most likely not evoke another round of book sales, maybe it’s time for me, a little fish, to add a few simplistic points to the minimalist debate.
As a consequence of Wald’s book, these are ironic times for poor Mr. Johnson, the famous, infamous and mythic bluesman who died at age 29 in 1938, with only 29 recorded songs– yet, he is arguably one of the most influential blues singer of all times. I believe it is safe to say that there have been more recorded covers of Robert Johnson songs than of any other blues artist, easily making Robert Johnson one of the most emulated figures in the blues. While his original 78 rpm Vocalian “race record” recordings sold only in the thousands, the Columbia/Legacy 2 CD box-set of his complete recordings, issued in 1990, sold more than a million copies worldwide, more than any blues record to date. They even put his picture on a US postage stamp, sans the dangling cigarette as to not influence the masses toward vice.
At the same time that Wald ‘s book hit the streets, British guitar superstar Eric Clapton led the blues charts with a tribute CD to his hero, entitled “Me and Mr. Johnson”. Indeed, it was Clapton and his British rock star compatriots who helped seat Johnson to the blues throne in the late 60s to ‘70s.
The blues press generally received Elijah Wald’s provocative “Escaping the Delta” with praise and sycophant accolades, while many in the blues establishment were left seething, outraged by the perceived dethroning of Robert Johnson – especially those who over-romanticized Mr. Johnson in previously published biographies.
Before I get started, let me clarify that I hold Elijah Wald in high esteem, as a writer, musicologist and musician. While we have never met personally, we have conversed and even collaborated when Wald contributed a commentary to one of my radio documentaries. We are on friendly terms and I respect him personally and professionally. “Escaping the Delta” is a superb book of which he can be very proud for many reasons.
Essentially, Wald, offers the hypothesis that Robert Johnson was basically irrelevant during his lifetime and that Johnson’s legacy was predominately the creation of white romanticists who hailed him as the most important hero of the early blues, and a founding catalyst of rock ‘n’ roll. Indeed, Wald argues that the very essence of the blues image was reshaped by a revisionist perspective, which formed a distorted view among white fans. The blues was a form of pop music, says Wald, not the traditional folk music romanticized by whites. He takes a new look at the history of blues, thorough a critical exploration of the Johnson myth, attempting to frame Johnson in the context of his time. Not only that, he makes a strong point that Johnson was a mere emulator who distilled the musical influences of his time, or, when you get right down to it, that he took heavily from others to the point of mere plagiarism. A separately sold Yazoo companion CD, “Back to the Crossroads- The Roots of Robert Johnson”, supports this contention.
The blues world is small. By comparison to any other American music genre, blues record sales are low, with few exceptions. The small blues world can be subdivided into the miniscule minority of devoted fans, serious listeners and hardcore aficionados who bother reading about the history and background, and subscribe to blues magazines; and, the vast majorities of regular people who just casually listen to the music, buy a few records and generally don’t care to become experts in the genre. Most of the latter group apply the common sense test: “does it sound good or not”, and could not give a hoot about musicological contentions and the intellectualization of pundits, or about petty black and white, race-based talk, usually perpetrated by white blues snobs. Most blues fans are not going to read “Escaping from the Delta”. The tiny universe of (mostly white) blues scholars and serious blues fans already knew that Johnson was relatively unknown in his lifetime and would not be in disagreement with most of the relevant points Wald makes in his expose.
I fall into the aficionado category. Having been a serious blues fan for more than 35 years, I own more than a thousand blues records covering the gamut of the genre. “I got them all” as they say. There are very few blues musicians who do not hold even a small space on my library shelf. I read all the major blues books and also play blues harmonica and feature blues on my radio programs. From my perspective, Wald may be fundamentally correct in many, but not all, of his points– most of which were not new revelations. The big question is: So what? My supposition is that all of what Wald wrote may be good and well, but the answer as to why Robert Johnson became a popular blues figure actually has nothing to do with the hypothesis put forth in his book. It is actually much simpler.
Just recently I saw a show by an artist who Wald fleetingly mentions in his book. Vincent Van Gogh’s drawings were on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When viewing the artworks, I was thinking as much about Robert Johnson as about Vincent Van Gogh, both being two of my favorite artists, comparable in multiple ways – including their posthumous rise to fame and glory. With his rhythmic patterns of color, Van Gogh has always seemed to me to be the most musical of all visual artists. His two-dimensional picture planes evoke a rich texture, a melody of shapes and feelings that visualize music, even more than artists who openly attempt to accomplish this, such as Romare Bearden. Conversely, Robert Johnson’s inventive playfulness reminds me of Van Gogh in his sharp exaggeration of the essential and leaving the obvious vague, but strong. Like Van Gogh’s colors, Johnson’s music is a flowing swirl of sound, bold, daring and powerfully expressive; yet, with a backdrop of elegant emptiness – with compelling, longing, emotional singing – musical brush strokes. To me, they have always had a connection, the same expressiveness with different mediums.
During a single day at the Metropolitan Museum, 30,000 visitors filed past Van Gogh’s artwork, probably more people than had seen his work during his entire lifetime. Like Johnson, Van Gogh was fundamentally not important in the art world of his period, but today he is accepted as one of the most beloved, popular and celebrated visual artists of all time. Someone could write a book pointing to the fact that during the three years of Van Gogh’s most fruitful creative period (1887-90), he was not just an insignificant figure in Dutch and European art; rather, he was a struggling nobody, a complete unknown in the established, successful artist circles of his time. Does anyone remember Jean-Francois Millet and Jules Breton today; even tough they were superb artists and major influences on Van Gogh?
Wald claims “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note”. (*1) Later, Wald makes a point that there were many “popular” blues artists, who recorded more sides, sold more records and had achieved more fame than Robert Johnson: Tampa Red, Bumble Bee Slim and Peetie Wheatstraw to name but a few. As much as I love those guys, I don’t think anyone would sensibly argue that they had any more of an impact on “black music” than Johnson did. Indeed, none of the acoustic country style blues player of Johnson’s period could be compared to the black jazz singers and bands of the time, in popularity or record sales. The “race records” marketed to the pre-war rural audiences could not seriously be considered as significant influences on the evolution of “black music” How many stars in the history of so called “black music” later pointed to Peetie Wheatstraw or Blind Boy Fuller as a major influence? How many records of Bo Carter and Leroy Carr still sell today? How many people still cover their songs? Robert Johnson, on the other hand, has been widely covered by many black blues musicians since the post-war period. Elmore James, Sonny Boy Willamson and Muddy Waters covered Robert Johnson in the 1950’s. His stepson Robert Lockwood Junior and compatriot Johnny Shines continued his legacy. Even among contemporary blues performers, who learned their trade from the blues of the past, including from those who were popular, popularized or “rediscovered” during the 1960s blues revival, Johnson’s music was a major influence. The evolution of the blues continues and Johnson had a profound influence on this evolution, albeit not until more than thirty years after his death. Taj Mahal, Keb’ Mo, Little Whitt and Big Bo, Cassandra Wilson, Marcus Roberts, Guy Davis, Etta James, Cephas & Wiggins, Homesick James and Dr. Isiah Ross are just some of the black blues performers who have covered Johnson. Unless one assumes that contemporary blues is not “black music”, even when played by black performers, Wald is evidently in error. If one drops the racialist descriptive “black music” and just thinks of “music”, as some of us idealists still favor, Wald’s statement would be utterly false. Indeed and undeniably, Robert Johnson had a profound affect on the evolution of popular music, Rock-n-Roll and contemporary blues. Wald accepts this, but asserts that the subsequent popularity of Johnson is as the result of the invention of whites. One could likewise falsely argue that Van Gogh had no relevance on painting in Holland during his time and even if he had never painted a stroke, Dutch painting would have evolved with or without him. Van Gogh, however, emerged as the most popular post-impressionist painter because people worldwide embraced him. The fact that he was Dutch became essentially irrelevant. He became an internationally respected artist and the Dutch eventually accepted him. Does anyone today draw national distinctions as to how and why Van Gogh is so beloved? Intellectualize it all you want. It’s because when his work became available to the wide public, when people finally got to see his pictures, they loved it. Vincent Van Gogh became a superstar.
Why did Robert Johnson become so popular? Why do blues lovers from Japan to Finland, from Mali to Main Street America love Robert Johnson? Today, people have lots of choice. Thousands of blues CDs have been issued. Could it really be because blues writers have influenced the audience with mythological tales, persona glorification? Is it all immaculate conception? I don’t think so. It seems to me that people love Johnson, like Van Gogh, because once he was brought out of obscurity and offered to the public, people finally got to hear his music, and they loved it. If blues pundits really believe that it came from books, marketing hype or Faustian myths of selling his soul to the devil and all the things that were written about Johnson, they are kidding themselves. Average people don’t read blues books. The blues press talks to itself. You could take all the books written about the blues, from Samuel Charters seminal “The Country Blues” and “The Roots of the Blues” to all the books written about Robert Johnson, stick them all in a potato sack and it would not make or break a difference in record sales. Robert Johnson did not become an internationally beloved artist who sold a million box sets because of what was written about him. People listened when CBS issued “Robert Johnson-King of the Delta Blues Singers” in Europe in 1966 (in the US in 1961; many British musicians obtained the earlier US issue). The record made an impact on budding young musicians who ended up becoming influential on buying decisions of thousands of young people, which gave the record a huge marketing boost. Like millions of kids in the late 1960s, I first heard about Robert Johnson through musicians like Eric Clapton. However, one statement from Eric Clapton that Robert Johnson was his favorite musician may have been enough to move thousands to buy the LP, including musicians worldwide; but, not enough to make us actually like it. I was fourteen years old and I loved it then and I love it still. By the time Columbia issued the Robert Johnson box set twenty-four years later, millions of people had heard Robert Johnson from hundreds of covers on recordings by other blues musicians, who had learned the songs from original 1961/1966 LP. The popularization of Robert Johnson was a 20th Century phenomena, which posthumously turned the once obscure young musician into a top selling, widely beloved star and influential force on contemporary blues.
Wald is right that many blues writers incorrectly over-romanticized and glorified Johnson, but he never once embraced the notion in his book that the audience can think for itself and that people are not as easily fooled as the media tends to believe. Robert Johnson was not the first entertainment figure that was mythologized and deified beyond reason to legendary status. Americans, in particular, have the propensity and need for that kind of hero-worship and exaggeration for actors, rock stars and sports figures. Know-it-all-writers of liner notes and media kits can glorify someone all they like, but people will make up their own minds. Wald correctly pointed out that this is yet another case in American culture where a little hot air made the image balloon rise. Terms like “King of the Delta Blues” are mere marketing slogans and when we are sold an artist with the notion that he is the most important musician in the genre, it is not much different than being told that a brand of potato chips is the best tasting of them all. Does Wald not know that we all saw beyond that all along? After all, we are the baby-boomer TV generation who has been bombarded by commercial messages since birth. In the end, it’s the substance, not the stories or the hype.
People don’t love Robert Johnson because he allegedly sold his soul to the devil at midnight at the Mississippi crossroads or because he led a wild life and died a tragic, premature death by poison by a jealous husband, or because John Hammond wanted him for the “From Spirituals to Swing” concert. They don’t love Vincent Van Gogh because he was a starving artist, cut his ear off for a longing love, struggled with his demons and because he took his own life. They love, admire and respect them on their true artistic merit, because Robert Johnson was an awesome player, and Vincent Van Gogh because was a brilliant painter. People respond to what they see and hear with their own senses and judgment, to what touches them in the heart.
Ultimately, people also see beyond the petty racialism that continues to plague the blues as a musical genre. No other musical form anywhere in the world, possibly besides Jazz, is so marred by race and racism. Rather than to celebrate the on-going cultural success of African-American heritage, the international embrace of the cultural contribution music, the same pitifully primitive, cliché arguments arise over and over. Robert Johnson is not popular because of white writers, blues pundits or white audiences. He is popular because many people worldwide eventually got a chance to hear him and realized he was an awesome musician.
As far as Johnson copying others, no doubt it’s true. But one thing I learned as a blues lover is that I could spend ten years pointing out that thousands of blues songs are plagiarized. Soon someone will write another big, fat blues book that nobody will read: “The Encyclopedia of Stolen Blues Lyrics, Melodies and Riffs.” They all did it. It was not unique to Johnson and it does not change a thing.
I love the blues outright and can make a list of hundreds of musicians who have touched me in a special way. If I had to take just one blues CD to a desert isle, it would still be Robert Johnson (John Coltrane, Lester Young and Miles Davis would sneak into the back-pocket). It’s not because of what he was and what he wasn’t. It’s because of how his music makes my soul tingle.
( * I think it is a useless, invalid discussion point to any longer apply meaningless, defunct terms like “black music”. Does music have a racial identity beyond its origins? Should people judge music by the race of the performer, the audience or the origin of the music? Choose either one as an answer and you expose a contradiction. The racialist perspective leads to people judging music with their eyes. Racial criteria are as profoundly nonsensical in music as anywhere.)