Eclectic Company: All Roads Lead to Crossroads

Let us now praise famous bluesmen, or at least – as we near the 100th anniversary of his birth (May 8, 1911), the almost 75th anniversary of his recording of “Cross Road Blues” (November 23, 1936), and the performance by New England’s Scott Ainslie, and Louisiana’s Sam Broussard and David Egan of “100 Years of Robert Johnson” (January 20, 2011, at Central School), as part of the Louisiana Crossroads concert series and radio broadcast – the elusive, evocative and enduring guitarist Robert Johnson. In his introduction to Alan Greenberg’s play Love In Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson, director Martin Scorcese said "The thing about Robert Johnson was that he only existed on his records. He was pure legend."

Scorcese’s take is absolutely the right one – Johnson’s mystique completely outweighs his slight biography (he died at 27) and brief discography (29 recorded songs, plus a dozen or so variant outtakes – with wild and mostly fictive speculation that there is a 30th song out there waiting for a musical archaeologist). But having been lauded in story (in books such as Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music , Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta , and Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues ; and in films and television documentaries such as Stones In My Passway, The Robert Johnson Story by Martin Spottl, The Search for Robert Johnson by Chris Hunt and Hellhounds on My Trail - The Afterlife of Robert Johnson by Robert Mugge), and revealed in musical retrospectives (most notably, The Complete Recordings of Robert Johnson , which won the 1990 GRAMMY award for Best Historical Recording), simply speaking the name Robert Johnson invokes the mystery and history of the blues.

I learned the meaning of the blues – “It’s about a man lost his woman, which was all he had” – attributed to many well-known early blues masters, almost as soon as I picked up my first guitar. But it was the late author and record producer Robert Palmer and his rich descriptions of Delta blues that first brought me to the south – to Memphis, Tennessee and Oxford and Clarksdale, Mississippi and Pine Bluff, Arkansas – and it was the blues that led me to buy my last and best acoustic guitar – the Gibson L-00 (sometimes called LL-00) – reissue of a petite instrument first made in 1936 or 1937, the years in which Robert Johnson laid down his entire lifetime of recordings. Some musicians, especially those of the British rock invasion of the 1960s, will tell you that at bottom, it’s all blues. In fact, it was English guitarist Eric Clapton’s band Cream, and their cover of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads,” that initially sold me on the stuff, and left me blues-scarred for life. Which is one more reason that Lake Charles is such a welcoming town – every Friday, from 9 to 1 we can listen to KRVS’s “Blues Box,” and judge the effects of that mythical meeting at the crossroads for ourselves.

But I digress.

Somewhere in the muddle of stories told about Robert Johnson, he’s remembered by fellow bluesman Son House as a relatively adequate novice sing and strum man, whose musical ability appeared to have improved miraculously overnight. Around that same time, as stories circulated about Johnson’s music growing broader and deeper until the tales became legend – that is, gossip widely repeated until treated as gospel – the itinerant musician was alleged to have had a fateful meeting with the Devil, probably at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi (home of the Dockery plantation, on which the blues are said to have been born), at which time we are told, he made a Faustian bargain to sell his soul in exchange for unearthly musicianship. A few years later, having produced all the recordings on which his legend will be anchored, Johnson dies, in Greenwood, Mississippi, allegedly from drinking poisoned whiskey proffered by the jealous husband of one of his paramours. We’re told that Johnson’s body was buried without a casket or marker, but today, three headstones in three different places claim to be his gravesite. How did he learn to play guitar so well? Where does Robert Johnson lie? We will never be sure about any of this. End of story. Or at least, it would be the end of the story, but for the truly fateful, provable meeting at the crossroads that changed popular music in our lifetime – that is, where black blues sparked the imaginations of young white boys, and ultimately produced the r/evolution in style that is rock and roll.

Which comes together nicely in Lake Charles when Todd Mouton brings his “Louisiana Crossroads” concert series to Central School and Bulber Auditorium, this year for five shows, the last of which is co-sponsored by the Banners Series. All are simulcast on KRVS (88.7 FM), the Lafayette and Lake Charles public radio station. Yeah! The series explores the influences on and intersections of Louisiana’s music, and is in its 11th season. This year, performances by The Bluerunners, reuniting to explore their rockabilly-meets-zydeco, becomes rock, Cajun and folk music; the Dylan LeBlanc band’s alt.country-styled pedal steel and acoustic guitar work; the aforementioned “100 Years of Robert Johnson” showcasing music that’s drawn from and through Johnson’s Delta blues transformed into roots music of many kinds; the pairing of The Swinging Haymakers’ trad-oriented country with Dash Rip Rock’s rockabilly; and Buckwheat Zydeco & the Ils Song Partis Band, need I say more?, will visit us monthly from October through March, except December. (One show, a Thanksgiving weekend performance featuring the Steve Conn and Sonny Landreth collaboration of soulful songwriting and virtuoso instrumentation, will only be held in Lafayette at the newly completed theater in the Acadiana Center for the Arts, but will be broadcast on KRVS as usual.) For more information about the shows and the artists, go to www.louisianacrossroads.org, and get an eye- and earful.