Experiencing Robert Johnson for the first time is not like any other artist. It sounds harsh, grimy, as if your speakers have been coated in sludge, and his haunting voice whines and moans and stretches out each syllable, sounding like a tormented poltergeist trapped in a tiny room, and each song is full of weird, jarring echoes. Of course, there are technical explanations for the poor sound quality—he was recorded using the primitive technology of the 1930s and, lacking a proper studio, recorder all his songs in the corner of a small hotel room, so the weird echoes are accounted for by the way the sound bounced of the walls of the room. For any other musician, this would be distracting. On any album recorded today, these sounds would be the first thing edited out. But on Johnson’s songs, they actually enhance the music—his recordings sound ghostly, ethereal, the sound of a man who knows that he is doomed. The squeaky-clean, super-produced sound of many albums from later decades now sounds ridiculously dated, and yet these scratchy, sludgy recordings which weren’t even particularly good quality in 1936 have grown better and better with age. That is the meaning of the blues at it’s purest—all ornaments stripped away, the sound of a miserable soul alone with his (or her) guitar. Johnson’s records sound like the voice of a tortured ghost unable to find its way to heaven.
That doesn’t mean that all good blues is made by men without a roof over the head or a bed to sleep in, men who wander along country roads at midnight in hopes of finding a kindly soul. Plenty of great blues songs have been sung by the wealthy and middle class, and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s brand of blues is no less authentic than Robert Johnson. But Stevie’s albums inspire the questions, and Robert has the answers. Robert Johnson’s music is both the starting and ending point of an education in blues music. In between those two points there are horn sections and electric guitar solos and full bands and hi-fi production, but it always comes full circle back to a lonely, desperate man sitting with his guitar in the corner of a San Antonio hotel room in 1936, playing some of the most desperate, haunted songs ever put to record.
When I was a little kid, my dad had a CD called the Millenium Blues Collection that he listened to while he lifted weights in the basement. Whenever he played it, I would stop what I was doing and follow him down to the basement. Perched stock-still on the arm of the couch, I got the first step of my musical education. I had heard plenty of good music before—it played nonstop in our house from morning to night—but this was the first CD that I had ever connected to on a personal level, that I had been able to form an emotional involvement with. While I didn’t really understand the meaning of songs like “Smoking Gun” and “Hoochie Coochie Man,” I could clearly identify their emotional underpinnings—equal parts strutting, snarling pride and absolute, soul-wracking sadness. Emotional complexity is foreign territory for a five-year old, but I was able for the first time to begin to see feelings in more than just black and white. Susan Tedeschi’s tortured wailing on “It Hurt So Bad” (“She sounds like a dying duck,” my sister told me, and I punched her in the arm) was clearly the sound of a woman in agony, but the song wasn’t about getting hit or stabbed. That CD was endlessly fascinating to me because of its confusing mix of emotions. “It’s about love,” my dad told me, and no matter how much I pressed he couldn’t really explain it beyond that. “It’s just something you have to experience.”
In the decade or so since then, my relationship with the blues has deepened and broadened. I once found “Texas Flood” paradoxical because it was a song with hardly any lyrics, but I can now comprehend and appreciate the value of the song’s fantastic guitar solo, on both a musical level—Stevie plays with fantastic tone and inspired phrasing—and emotional—guitars can speak just as strongly as words. “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” once seemed like a silly sentiment to write a song about, but now I understand the mix of wistfulness and urgency behind the lyrics. Greg Allman was just twenty-three when he wrote the song, but he sounds like he has a lifetime’s worth of loss and hardship to look back on. In almost every genre I appreciate now, I can detect some ingredient taken from the blues that led me to it. Hip hop has the same chest-thumping braggadaccio and yearning for the opposite sex—and what is Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” if not a modern sequel to Robert Johnson’s “Cross Roads Blues”?—and metal has the same pervading air of darkness and despair—take songs like “A Tout Le Monde” by Megadeth or “Victim of Changes” by Judas Priest, which have direct antecedents in the blues (compare those two songs to “Help Me” by Sonny Boy Williamson and “Trouble No More” by Muddy Waters and you will see what I mean). Like I said before—it all comes full circle and, for me at least, that circle starts and ends with Robert Johnson, sitting before a microphone in a San Antonio hotel, crying over love in vain.
