Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson: the music not the myth

Johnson made his living as a juke-joint troubadour during the 1930s, traveling throughout the South. He was in enough demand to make $6 per gig, about five or six times the going rate. But he never made it to Chicago, where most contemporary blues recordings were being made. Instead, his reputation was largely built on regional word-of-mouth, and he didn’t have the national stature of prominent blues hitmakers of the era such as Kokomo Arnold and Leroy Carr.

When he finally did commit his music to tape in two solo recording sessions, one in a San Antonio hotel in 1936, the next in a Dallas warehouse in 1937, he produced 29 songs and several alternate versions. The songs were issued as 78-rpm singles, and one became a modest regional hit: “Terraplane Blues.” But his sound was already becoming dated by the time of his death at age 27 in 1938,  more indebted to the stripped-down Mississippi Delta style of predecessors such as Charley Patton and Son House than the band-oriented jump and swing sounds that were coming into vogue in the urban centers up north, where many Southern blacks were migrating in search of jobs. In part because of that, he was largely forgotten until a young white audience of hardcore folkies and aspiring rockers discovered him in the ‘60s – when Johnson’s music was issued on album for the first time.

A 1961 compilation anointed him “King of the Delta Blues Singers.” It was a status that Johnson did not enjoy when he was alive, though a number of his songs had become standards for subsequent generations of urban blues singers: “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues.”

The collection portrayed Johnson as the epitome of the stereotypical backporch bluesman, tormented by demons that drove him to an early death (in actuality, Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband who didn’t appreciate the philandering singer sleeping with his wife). What subsequent more-complete collections of Johnson’s music have made clear, including the recent “Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection” (Columbia Legacy), is that he was anything but a staunch traditionalist. He was instead a sophisticated modernist; a young, ambitious and supremely gifted performer who listened to a wide variety of popular music and synthesized it into an original style.

He not only borrowed from the Delta greats that preceded him like Patton, Skip James and Son House, but from the most popular urban blues hits of the day, as well as the country of Jimmie Rodgers, ragtime, polkas, Hollywood cowboy songs, Bing Crosby. He was a voracious listener and in time-honored blues tradition took snippets of other songs and used them as jumping-off points for his own. Instead of just stringing together unrelated couplets as many performers did, Johnson strived to create thematically coherent groups of images that developed narrative, character and mood. He was not just an itinerant entertainer, but a self-conscious artist striving to write timeless songs.

He was also a pre-eminent musician. Johnson was his own backing band, rapping his foot on the floor boards and simulating the sound of two guitarists with long, slender fingers that “fluttered like a trapped bird,” in the awe-struck words of one of his contemporaries, Johnny Shines.

His talents were perhaps wasted on the juke-joint circuit, where the emphasis was on long, loose, rhythm-based tracks and big voices that could project unamplified across a room full of boozing dancers. No one really cared enough to listen to how carefully he constructed lyrics, or how he developed counterpoint guitar lines and melodies that shifted throughout a song. Blues musicians like Patton won over crowds with their showmanship, playing guitar behind their back or with their teeth, and Johnson was talented enough to adapt and develop a following in such chaotic environments. But he wasn’t “the king” of his scene, as the 1961 compilation claimed.

Even at his two recording sessions, the more nuanced versions of his songs were rejected in favor of simpler, more upbeat takes. The shelved alternates include a stunning “Come on in My Kitchen.” While the more upbeat second take was issued by the label as a single, it’s the slower, more contemplative first take that’s the masterpiece. From its moaning vocal introduction, echoed within a few bars by Johnson’s slide guitar, the narrator details how he betrayed his best friend, and then was himself betrayed, all for the love of a woman. He is not angry so much as devastated. His voice drops to barely above a whisper to deliver a shiver-inducing aside that speaks to his feelings of abandonment: “Oh, can’t you hear that wind howl?”  

Johnson’s voice was not particularly powerful – certainly it was no match for the scarifying wail of a Patton or a Howlin’ Wolf. But it was remarkably pliant and he worked the microphone like another instrument to create a theater of vocal effects that amplified the emotions in the lyrics. He adopts a high, keening, almost desperate tone as if he were being strangled in “Hell Hound on my Trail,” and ranges from muttered asides to wordless falsetto cries in the mercurial “Me and the Devil Blues.” His guitar playing is equally staggering: Johnson plays with a violence that suggests a piano hammering sixteenth notes on “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day,” and plays like he is indeed possessed (so those rumors were true!) on “Preachin’ Blues (Up Jumped the Devil),” a song in which the blues takes human form and turns the narrator’s life upside down.

Another voracious listener and musical synthesist, Bob Dylan, arrived in New York the same year the first Robert Johnson compilation was released. In the winter of 1961, the 19-year-old Dylan was on a mission to meet his hero, Woody Guthrie. During the next three years he would become the hurricane-haired prince of the Greenwich Village folk scene, celebrated for the topical songs that would stamp him as the dreaded “voice of a generation.” But Dylan himself quickly tired of finger-pointing songs and instead found a new vocabulary for singer-songwriters that drew on everything from rock ‘n’ roll to French symbolist poetry.

Like Johnson, he would use traditional forms as a foundation for new songs. His deep appreciation for American roots music – the blues, country and gospel songs that emerged in the first half of the 20th Century – was immediately apparent. At 22, he recorded a version of the old mountain soul lament “Moonshiner” that in its nuanced, layered depth and musicality far outdistances “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The recording was left off Dylan’s early albums in favor of his mounting stockpile of originals, but it remains one of the greatest performances of his career, a signpost of things to come: the undulating, finger-picked acoustic-guitar accompaniment and bittersweet harmonica, the voice dipping and diving with an agility that belies the notion that he’s not a great singer.

By the time of “Blonde on Blonde,” his 1966 double-album, Dylan was writing originals that took the existential longing of “Moonshiner” to surreal extremes. During sessions for the album in New York, Dylan recorded at least two terrific versions of “Visions of Johanna,” but still wasn’t satisfied. He nailed the song a few months later in Nashville, the empathy of the musicians – right down to the gentle taps on the crash cymbal by drummer Kenny Buttrey – enhancing a lyric that still fascinates, mesmerizes and haunts.

The song describes a room – or is it just a place in the narrator’s mind? It includes a handful of characters, all in the shadow of the mysterious Johanna, who may be a muse, lover, siren, ghost, devil – if she even exists at all except in the narrator’s dreams.

Dylan was routinely writing great songs during the ‘60s, but what is even more astonishing is that he kept writing them decades later. The Grammy-winning 1997 album, “Time out of Mind,” punctuated his late-career renaissance. Few artists can claim to be writing songs in their fifth and sixth decade as compelling as their best early work, but Dylan has continued to deliver performances brimming with brilliance.

One of his best songs, “Mississippi,” was left off “Time out of Mind,” in part because Dylan and his producer, Daniel Lanois, felt the performances were lacking. But an outtake from those sessions that surfaced on the 2008 compilation “Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased, 1989-2006” (Columbia Legacy) suggests otherwise (a lesser, brisker version of the song was finally included on his 2001 album “Love and Theft”). Much like Robert Johnson once did, Dylan swiped a line from an older song (a 1930s prison lament called “Rosie”) and built a new narrative out of it focusing on lost love and mortality, tinged with a faint glimmer of hope. The performance has the feel of an after-hours slow dance, suiting the ruminating lyrics and inspiring one of Dylan’s best late-period vocal performances – by turns rueful, wistful and impish. “Things should start to get interesting right about now,” he sings as the song winds down.

Dylan has always kept things interesting, for himself and for listeners willing to look beyond the caricature. Like Robert Johnson, his best songs and performances can’t be reduced to myth. They raise far too many questions, they shift every time we hear them. They live on precisely because they can’t be pinned down.

greg@gregkot.com