Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

Johnson, Robert 133
finally to the guitar. In Robinsonville he came
under the tutelage of guitarist Willie Brown. He
moved back to Hazlehurst, which he had left in
early childhood, where he met an Alabama-born
guitarist named Ike Zinnerman (sometimes
spelled Zinneman). Zinnerman liked to tell people
that he had learned to play guitar while sitting on
tombstones in a cemetery at midnight. He took
Johnson under his wing and continued the young
man’s musical education.
Supernatural beliefs were ubiquitous in rural
Mississippi when Johnson was growing up. One
popular tradition concerned hellhounds, otherwise
known as black or demon dogs, said to be
huge and to possess glowing red eyes; they were
the Devil in canine form. Such notions were not
confined to the American South—they have been
richly documented in the British Isles and elsewhere—but
their presence among African-
Americans of the period was noted not only by
folklorists but in area folk music, for example in a
J. T. “Funny Paper” Smith blues with the lyric: Get
home an’ get blue an’ start howlin’, an’ the hell
hound get on my trail.” Johnson began hanging
out with older, accomplished bluesmen such as
Brown, Son House, and Charlie Patton and learning
from them, though nothing then suggested
that he would ever be their musical equal, much
less surpass them. (“You can’t play nothin’,” House
told him [Johnson 1990, 5].) Perhaps, at least in
part, because they failed to take him seriously,
Johnson set off on his own, and they did not see
him for anywhere from a few months to two years,
depending upon which account one credits. On
his return the older men were astonished to find
that their young companion was “singing and
playing with... dazzling technique and almost
supernatural electricity” (Palmer, 1981). It is here
that the deal-with-the-devil legend starts, according
to some, prominently including the respected
folklorist Mack McCormick. Many years later
McCormick interviewed some of Johnson’s relatives,
who told him of their belief that Johnson
had met Satan at a crossroads at midnight and
secured his musical talents in a pact with hell.
They even said they knew where the crossroads
was (apparently the intersection of Highways 49
and 61 in Clarksdale.) On the other hand, House
and other musicians who knew Johnson would
profess to know nothing of the story when interviewed
by blues researchers decades later.
Johnson took up residence in the Arkansas
Delta town of Helena, where local and itinerant
blues musicians, including such destined-to-be
seminal performers as Rice Miller (aka Sonny Boy
Williamson II), Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Slim, and
Elmore James, regularly played in the many nightclubs
and juke joints. From his base in Helena,
Johnson traveled and sang throughout Arkansas
and Mississippi, often in the company of the
young Robert Lockwood Jr., with whose mother
Johnson was living at the time and who was
himself destined to become a well-known bluesman.
Johnson, a compulsive traveler, was soon
rambling all over the United States and even into
Canada, performing (often with youthful guitarist
Johnny Shines) in bars or street corners, singing
any kind of music that brought in even tips for
him to find his way to the next town. In 1936
Johnson came to the attention of Ernie Oertle, a
salesman and talent scout for the American
Record Company. Oertle set up a Vocalion recording
session for Johnson in San Antonio, with Don
Law (later famous for his work with Johnny Cash)
producing. That November he recorded sixteen
sides, including “Terraplane Blues,” which would
become his one popular hit. In June 1937—again
with Law, though this time in Dallas—he recorded
thirteen songs. Of these twenty-nine, twenty-four
would be commercially issued. Most sold only
modestly, and most had been deleted from the
Vocalion catalog by the time of Johnson’s death
the following year.
Johnson was murdered in August 1938. An
inveterate womanizer, he was engaged in a passing
dalliance with the wife of the owner of a roadhouse
called Three Rivers, near Greenwood,
Mississippi. He and David “Honeyboy” Edwards
were two weeks into an engagement there when
someone, apparently the aggrieved husband, saw
to it that Johnson was given a bottle of poisoned
alcohol. He died on August 16.
Sadly, his death ended his chance to fulfill his
stated ambition to play in New York City. In 1938
the influential record producer John Hammond, a
white man with a keen ear for African-American