A few years back a team of sound engineers with love in their heart and methodical hands cleaned up all thirty nine Robert Johnson songs from the original recordings. In 1971 my father, may he rest in peace and may I one day forget the image from last June, five days before his 89th birthday, of him staring blindly, slack-jawed at the acoustic tile in his room on the dementia ward, inherited the voice library as it’s curator. I was fortunate enough to get to run the recordings during the Watergate hearings as he floated down the Mississippi from Davenport to play Dixieland. There was and probably still is, a Bix Beiderbecke convention, and my dad participated in it for the better part of thirty years. Bix was the first white guy to be a Dixie Land talent, a young man with a golden horn who died early.
Although I loved playing with the banks of top of the line TEAC reel to reels, the Watergate hearings themselves were boring. I found in the voice library archives original field recordings of Robert Johnson and, even more precious to me, the Lomax recordings of Leadbelly on the chain gang. For listening pleasure the remastered Robert Johnson sounds better, but in my head I hear every pop and dampening of the original recordings.
From the originals it’s hard to imagine that Robert Johnson had sold his soul to the devil to be a guitar player, whoever mixed the original had the gain up on the vocals and dampened and bass heavy on the guitar. Um, that and the whole Devil thing doesn’t work well for me. The story is cool; the idea that of all the things someone might gamble eternity on that playing the guitar would be the top of that man’s list. I think if there were an actual absolute evil who played tricks with contracts for the immortal soul that basic hubris would have most people trading for of far less value; Money, Sex appeal, fame (as opposed to the talent and work it takes to be famous for actually doing something like, say, playing the guitar).
Religions tend to bend credulity by creed alone, but the idea that the aloof embodiment of good and evil, who won’t speak to warring nations or flood victims, occasionally barter with individuals, Johnson, Lot, Job, for intangible and ephemeral minutiae of their linear and short traverse through this vale of tears.
Robert Johnson is a bit like Shakespeare. 1) Dead. 2) Fully committed to be dead 3) It’s really hard to write a song or a play without a bit of those guys peeking over your shoulder. 4) Every Decade or so there’s a big production of paying homage and covering their stuff.
Great or not so great is subjective, you either like bill (‘speare) and bobs (Johnson) stuff or you don’t, but the themes and the infra structure are so damn universal that playwrights and songwriters who have never heard of bill or bob manage to tread on their toes anyhow.
Sorry, rambling, thought I should check in now and again. It’s really cold outside, thermometer says 7 but windchill brings to -10, again, farenheit. Cold.
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