…and leaves a whole lot of folklore in his wake
On the night of August 13 1938, future famous blues musician Robert Johnson was drinking and playing guitar in a juke joint near Greenwood Mississippi. The night seemed to be normal until he began getting ill. According to accounts, his suffering increased for three days and he bayed at the moon in agony until he, mercifully, died on August 16.
If you don’t know who Robert Johnson is, then a hipster in your neighborhood just had a stroke. You might not know him, but you know what he looks like sitting with a guitar across his chest, smiling, cross-legged, and with a bowler hat, he’s been the pictorial ambassador of American Blues in all of our lifetimes. Johnson was a blues guitarist in the 1920s and 30s who is known for his singular genius with a guitar, his death at an early age, which is considered a tragedy of music both early blues and contemporary.
Johnson’s lore partially resides in the time, place, and manner in which he played music. He was a roving musician, playing the juke joints and dance halls all over the Mississippi Delta, the gritty birthplace of American blues. Another level of the lore of Robert Johnson are the mysteries enshrouding his life and death. Though today he is widely regarded as the first and quintessential guitar genius, this wasn’t always the case. According to some of his contemporaries, Johnson was subpar on the guitar until he disappeared for a few months and came back a fingerpicking demigod. Legend goes that he sold his soul to the devil at the junction of Highways 49 and 61, which was evidently the place to be if you needed a skill, didn’t want to put in the time, and didn’t mind spending eternity broiling in hell fire.
Other Johnson mysteries are that nobody knows exactly how he died and nobody knows exactly where he’s buried. This information is completely dependent on whose stories you believe. His burial place is an unmarked grave in a Baptist graveyard, a pauper’s grave, or under a big pecan tree. And it seems as though Johnson might not have needed any help from the devil reaching that hell fire. He was known for having a different girl in every juke joint and he was also apparently a heavy drinker, according to some “drunk more than sober.” And it’s possible this love of women and whiskey that got him killed. Some have it that his whiskey was poisoned by the jealous husband of one of Johnson’s many lovers (roving musician my ear). One doctor later in the century deduced that he might have had an aneurysm brought on by whiskey and congenital syphilis. Either way, baying at the moon seems an appropriate reaction.
It is possible that he was deliberately poisoned, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that 1920s juke joints for black Americans were similar to white America’s speakeasies. During prohibition that both communities were subject to, bad alcohol flowed like arsenic. Dirty and dangerous whiskey killed many people as did bathtub gin. Juke joints however were blacks’ last bastion away from those white people and their pesky Jim Crow laws, segregation, intimidation, and murder. They were a venue where they could gather without (sadly) white supervision. In the early 20th century, juke joints were put up near rural work camps in order to attract workers who didn’t have a centralized location to hang out. They had no pub, so a pub of sorts was created. Here, people could play and listen to music and dance. Some owners sold moonshine and whiskey to visitors to make extra money. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that that moonshine or whiskey would be dirty and accidentally dangerous.
Though Johnson would never have known it at the time, one other folkloric effect of his death that lingered until decades later was the proliferation of the 27 Club. The 27 Club is the nickname for the (disturbingly) long list of musicians, artists, and actors who have died at the age of 27. Many of these people died as a direct result of alcohol or drugs, others died by by-products of that lifestyle, namely suicide, murder, or accidental death. Premature inductees include Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, and Amy Winehouse.
Through Johnson’s contributions to music, culture, and folklore – unwitting though that contribution might be – he is Hammered History. But what shall we drink to celebr-commemorate his death?
Considering the fact that he died of poisoned whiskey, let’s just stay away from an historical re-enactment. But we can drink a nice glass of brown liquor to stay true with what African Americans were drinking in the early 19th century. Cognac.
More than 200,000 African Americans were sent to France in the armed forces during World War I. Units of African Americans – such as the Harlem Hell-fighters – were relegated to fighting with the French Army because American soldiers didn’t want to fight alongside black soldiers. The French didn’t seem to have such a problem and it seems that black Americans were welcomed into French society more than were at home. The French didn’t stop there in being way smarter than Americans. The French seemed to understand the value of certain elements of American culture better than Americans did. Namely, they saw the huge value in blues and jazz. And so it’s in the clubs of Paris and all over France that black American performers such as Josephine Baker blew up. The French welcomed them into society and black Americans took on French aspects of culture, like being free and not terrified to walk out one’s door. Maybe this is why the French gave us the Statue of Liberty.
One of the aspects of French culture that black Americans took to was cognac, such as Courvoisier and Remy Martin. This was a huge contrast to the harsh and often dangerous whiskey that was being served in juke joints and occasionally killing off musicians. Drink a glass of Courvoisier today, toast to Robert Johnson, to the French spotting American culture, and to never being near the junction of highways 49 and 61.
