The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Johnson · recorded for the American Record Corporation under Don Law, San Antonio 1936 and Dallas 1937 · compiled by Frank Driggs · Columbia · sixteen sides, eight to a side
Mode
Delta blues; twelve-bar and near-twelve-bar forms, the bar stretched or cut at the singer’s breath
Mythos
The pursued wanderer: the hellhound on the trail, the devil at the door and walking alongside, the stranded man at the crossroads at sundown
Phase
Sixteen sides chosen from two recording campaigns, November 1936 and June 1937, set in an order that is neither chronological nor built, ending on “Hellhound on My Trail”
Presentation
Long-playing album of 1961, compiled from 78 sides; sixteen tracks, eight to a side
Register
One voice from falsetto to growl, one acoustic guitar in standard and open tunings, slide on several sides, the walking bass and the turnaround
Scale
One man, two Texas cities, five days of recording; three minutes a side
Governing Proposition
Sixteen three-minute sides cut by one man with one guitar for the race-record market, issued as a long-playing record more than twenty years later, carry a single disclosure through comedy, lust and prayer: a man with no fixed place in the Jim Crow Delta carries his dread inside him, and the dread has the shape of pursuit.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on a man at a crossroads with the sun going down. He kneels and asks the Lord to “save poor Bob”; he is trying to get a ride. That is nearly all the song says. What it does not say is why a man alone on a road in the Jim Crow Delta should fear the dark, and it does not need to. The danger is the thing the song knows and will not name, and the slide carries it: the voice strains over the guitar, and the guitar answers like an echo on an empty road.
This is the first of sixteen sides, and none of them is long. Robert Johnson recorded twenty-nine songs for the American Record Corporation in two campaigns, both supervised by Don Law: in San Antonio, Texas, on 23, 26 and 27 November 1936, and in Dallas, Texas, on 19 and 20 June 1937. He sang and played acoustic guitar alone on every side. He died in August 1938, near Greenwood, Mississippi. Each side was cut to the length of a 78, about three minutes, and Johnson wrote to that length: verses, a figure to open, a figure to close, nothing to spare.
The album on which these sides are judged came later. In 1961 Columbia issued sixteen of them as a long-playing record, compiled by Frank Driggs, eight to a side. The recordings are the matter of the record, and the record is the unit: its sixteen sides in its order. The later legend, the bargain struck with the devil at the crossroads, belongs to that reception and not to the song, which is about a man who cannot get a ride before dark.
Movement II
The third side rises by quiet. The slide finishes the voice’s lines, so that the song becomes a dialogue between a man and an instrument that speaks for him, and at its height the slide drops almost to a whisper and the voice half speaks a line about the “rainin’ outdoors”. It is one of the furthest of the sides from a strict twelve-bar count. The bar stretches or is cut where the breath falls, which a solo player with no band to keep time is free to do.
That freedom is the record’s form. The guitar does a band’s work: an independent bass on the low strings, often the walking boogie figure of urban piano blues, treble figures above it, slide and fretted notes in a single line, and the turnaround that marks the end of each chorus as his signature. The voice moves from falsetto to a growl and places its rhythm against the guitar rather than on it. On the best sides the making cannot be separated from what is made.
On others it can. Several sides here share one accompaniment model, with the same figures, the same turnarounds and the same frame: “Kindhearted Woman Blues”, “Rambling on My Mind”, “Terraplane Blues” and “When You Got a Good Friend”. Two or three could go and the record would know nothing less. That is the charge a compilation carries. A corpus was chosen from, not a whole compelled, and the sequence is neither chronological nor built. The form is an instrument on some sides and a habit on others.
Movement III
The second side is a comic song of a car as a woman’s body, and it sold better than anything else Johnson recorded. It is fine entertainment and does not rise. Beside it on the record stand two answers to other men’s hits: “32-20 Blues”, which reworks Skip James’s “22-20 Blues” of 1931, and “Milkcow’s Calf Blues”, which answers Kokomo Arnold’s “Milk Cow Blues” of 1934. Johnson was a commercial artist aiming at the race-record market, and these sides show it plainly.
That is why the turn, though real, is a synthesis. From Charley Patton and Son House came the Delta bottleneck tradition; “Walking Blues” and “Preachin’ Blues” come from House’s material. Johnson turned that tradition inward, compressed it to three minutes, and laid onto it the bass and turnarounds of the piano. The voice moved from the public delivery of the juke house to private address, and the lyric from the stock verse shared by every singer toward one haunted speaker. No single prewar Delta player recorded a guitar that did all this at once. But the parts existed, the market was known, and the stake was small.
The swerve of 1961 was larger, and it was not the work’s. To issue a prewar country bluesman as a long-playing album, to an audience that was new and largely white, was a curatorial act. It changed who heard these sides and how. What the sides themselves risked was the risk of any record made to sell, and the axis that scores the turn and the stake together sets it below the bar the summit requires.
Movement IV
Late on the record comes the side that puts the devil at the door. He knocks, and then the two walk “side by side”. The worst lines, the violence the singer will do to a woman, are delivered flat and almost amused. Then he asks to be buried by the highway, so that his spirit can “get a Greyhound bus” and ride. In two minutes and a half the song goes from the knock to the grave, and nothing in it could be cut.
This is where the archetype carries the song and stays particular. The devil is a companion and a visitor, not a symbol; the bus is a Greyhound; the treatment of the woman is shown and not seen through, which is one reason the disclosure stops at the line. In “Preachin’ Blues” the blues itself is a creature that jumps up, a “low-down shakin’ chill”, and the preacher’s form is turned to it while the guitar drives. In “If I Had Possession over Judgment Day” a man wishes for the power of God over a woman. The sacred and the demonic run through the record as presences, not ideas.
But the myth is built in three sides and absent from the other dozen, and the sixteen were not made as one structure. Winterreise carries its wanderer through twenty-four songs; here the wanderer appears in “Crossroads Blues”, “Me and the Devil Blues” and “Hellhound on My Trail”, with “Stones in My Passway”, its road “dark as night”, close behind. What the record builds, it builds strongly, and in three or four sides of sixteen.
Movement V
The record ends on its summit. A treble figure will not settle; the guitar hurries and stops; the voice rises to falsetto and drops to a mutter, singing of blues “fallin’ down like hail” on a man who must keep moving. There are three stanzas and no instrumental verse. The irregular bars are the inability to rest, and the end does not resolve. A hound of hell is set on a man who has done something or is something, the Furies on a Mississippi road, and the sequence, weak elsewhere, has its true close.
One law holds from the first side to this one. “Terraplane Blues” and “Hellhound on My Trail” are the two furthest apart, a car and a hound of hell, lust and terror, and both are on the road; the voice that leers in one is the voice that mutters in the other. Desire and dread are one restlessness. What reached out from that law was large. Muddy Waters and Elmore James carried the sides into Chicago from the 78s; the LP reached the young English and American players of the 1960s; Cream recorded “Crossroads” in 1968, Led Zeppelin borrowed from “Traveling Riverside Blues”, and the songs are played by every generation since. Charters, Marcus, Guralnick and Wald kept reading them; whether the 78s were mastered fast, raising the pitch, is still disputed.
The limits are the limits of the form and the trade. The social order of the Delta is present only by implication, and labour, the family, the state and history never appear in the words; the sound is field-grade, from one microphone; the presence of this LP has partly passed to The Complete Recordings of 1990. Against that stand sixteen sides kept in print almost continuously since 1961, and a record that is still, for most listeners, the first door into prewar blues. It closes on a man still running, and the record leaves him there.
Act III · The Twelve
Inside each side almost nothing is idle. A 78 held about three minutes, and Johnson writes to that length: “Hellhound on My Trail” has three stanzas and no instrumental verse it could lose, and “Me and the Devil Blues” moves from the knock at the door to the burial by the highway in two minutes and a half. The subtractive test bites on the album, not the songs. “Kindhearted Woman Blues”, “Rambling on My Mind”, “Terraplane Blues” and “When You Got a Good Friend” share figures, turnarounds and a frame, and two or three could go with no loss of what the record knows. “32-20 Blues” and “Milkcow’s Calf Blues”, answers to other men’s records, are the most separable. A compilation chosen from a corpus was not compelled as a whole.
Score: 8.0 / 10
What the record brings into the open can be stated: a man with no fixed place in the Jim Crow Delta carries his dread inside him, and the dread has the shape of pursuit. “Crossroads Blues” is a hitch-hiker at the “sun goin’ down”, kneeling to ask the Lord to “save poor Bob”; the danger of the dark road is never named, and does not need to be. “Hellhound on My Trail” sings of blues “fallin’ down like hail” on a man who must keep moving, and the guitar hurries and stops. Sound discloses as much as words. The axis stands at the line: half the sides disclose desire and wit more than a condition, the condition is seen through one consciousness only, and the treatment of women is shown, not seen through.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The height is dread, held cold. “Hellhound on My Trail” is the summit: a treble figure that will not settle, the voice rising to falsetto and dropping to a mutter, an end without resolution. “Come On in My Kitchen” rises the other way, by quiet, the slide answering the voice and the line about “rainin’ outdoors” half spoken. “Stones in My Passway” has its road “dark as night”; “Crossroads Blues” strains the voice over the slide; “Me and the Devil Blues” delivers its worst lines flat, almost amused; in “Preachin’ Blues” the blues is a “low-down shakin’ chill” and the guitar drives. Six or seven sides of sixteen rise. “Terraplane Blues”, “32-20 Blues”, “Milkcow’s Calf Blues” and “Kindhearted Woman Blues” entertain and do not.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The legend is set aside. The bargain at the crossroads belongs to later reception, not to “Crossroads Blues”, which is a song of being stranded. What the sides build is the pursued wanderer: the hellhound is a hound of hell set on a man who has done something or is something, the Furies on a Mississippi road; the devil walks beside him “side by side” and knocks at his door; the blues in “Preachin’ Blues” is a creature that jumps up; judgment day is a man wishing for God’s power over a woman. In three sides the archetype carries the song and stays particular, with its Greyhound bus and its Friars Point. On the other dozen myth is absent, and the sides were not built as one structure.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The departure is real and mostly a synthesis. Johnson took the Delta bottleneck tradition of Charley Patton and Son House, turned it inward and compressed it to the three minutes of a 78, and laid onto the guitar the walking boogie bass and turnarounds of urban piano blues. The voice moves from public juke-house delivery to private address; the lyric moves from the communal stock verse toward a single, haunted speaker. That is a turn. The stake was small: a commercial artist aiming at the race-record market, two sides answering other men’s hits, and his best-selling side a wager on a proven path. The swerve of 1961, a prewar country bluesman issued as an album to a new audience, was the compiler’s act, not the work’s.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the songs stop knowing what they know. The pursuit in “Hellhound on My Trail” is in the rhythm: the broken treble and the irregular bars are the inability to rest. In “Come On in My Kitchen” the slide finishes the voice’s lines, a dialogue between a man and an instrument that speaks for him; in “Crossroads Blues” the slide is the voice’s echo on an empty road. With no band to keep time, the bar stretches to the breath, and that freedom is the sound of one consciousness. The sequence, counted once, is weaker: neither chronological nor built, though it ends on a true close. Several sides on one accompaniment model show the form as habit as well as instrument.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: sixty-five years on this record, and nearly ninety on the sides. Guitarists have transcribed and argued over the parts for decades; the tunings and fingerings of “Come On in My Kitchen” and “Hellhound on My Trail” are still disputed, and players keep finding more in one guitar than they took to be there. The literature keeps yielding: Samuel Charters’s The Country Blues (1959) before the LP, Greil Marcus in Mystery Train (1975), Peter Guralnick’s Searching for Robert Johnson (1989), and Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta (2004), which re-reads Johnson against the record market. The open question of the records’ speed reopened how they should sound. Part of the yield is the legend and the life, and the formal yield is in a small form.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The intrinsic force is one guitar made to do a band’s work, bass, rhythm and answering voice at once, and the blues made the speech of a single troubled interior. The force is shared with his sources, Patton, House and Skip James among them, and is synthesis as much as invention. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Muddy Waters and Elmore James carried the sides into Chicago from the 78s; the LP reached the young English and American players of the 1960s; Cream’s “Crossroads” (1968), Led Zeppelin’s borrowing from “Traveling Riverside Blues” and a long line of covers followed. Few records of the century redirected so much music. The delay, twenty-three years, and the sharing hold it below Kind of Blue and Low at 9.1.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: sixteen sides as recorded, in this order, in print or available almost continuously since 1961. Presence is the widest the tradition has: the songs are played by every generation of blues and rock guitarists, the sides are heard far beyond the audience for prewar blues, and the record is the usual first door to it. Two charges: part of the LP’s presence has passed to The Complete Recordings (1990), which carries the same sides, and from 1938 to 1961 the recordings lay nearly silent. The fabric is transfers of 78s with surface noise, and the voice and guitar carry through. Sixty-five years place it level with Kind of Blue at 9.0, above Low at 8.7.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of a small medium. The guitar is master work: independent bass and treble, the walking boogie figure on the low strings, slide and fretted notes in one line, the turnaround as signature. The voice ranges from falsetto to growl, its rhythm placed against the guitar rather than on it. Johnson commands the three-minute side, shaping each song to it with an opening figure, verses and a close, and in “Hellhound on My Trail”, “Come On in My Kitchen” and “Crossroads Blues” the making is load-bearing. The charges: one accompaniment reused across several sides, some rough intonation, and field-grade sound from one microphone. His command of the record is in the shaping of the side, not its sound, which holds it below Kind of Blue at 9.3 and Low at 9.0.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs the whole: a single voice and guitar, the blues form bent to the breath, and restlessness. The two most distant sides are “Terraplane Blues”, a comic song of a car as a woman’s body, and “Hellhound on My Trail”, a song of pursuit by something not human. They obey the same law. Desire and dread are one restlessness, the car and the hellhound are both on the road, and the voice that leers in one mutters in the other. The range of tone is wide, through comedy, lust, grief, terror and prayer; the range of form is narrow, one voice, one guitar, one family of forms. The narrowness and the sides made for the trade hold it from the top.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, the lowest of its axes. Consciousness is held, in the inward first person of every side. Eros is held at length, from the comedy of “Terraplane Blues” to the violence of “Me and the Devil Blues”. The sacred and the demonic are held: the prayer at the crossroads, the devil at the door, judgment day, the preacher’s form turned to the blues. The road and the machine are there, the Terraplane and the Greyhound bus; the natural order is glimpsed in rain, stones and sundown. What holds the figure is absence: the social order of the Delta is present only by implication, and labour, the family, the state and history do not appear in the words. Sixteen three-minute songs hold this much, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.0: one guitar made to do a band’s work, carried into Chicago and then by this LP to the players of the 1960s, and sixteen sides in print almost continuously since 1961, still the usual first door to prewar blues. Then The Bottomless Well and The Made at 8.8, and The Sublime at 8.7, its height dread held cold in “Hellhound on My Trail”.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.1: consciousness, eros, the sacred and the demonic and the road are held, and the social order of the Delta only by implication, with labour, the family, the state and history absent from the words. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.0, where several sides share one accompaniment and two answer other men’s records, and The Swerve at 8.2, a real turn assembled from existing parts on a commercial path.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Imperishable at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep meet it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.1. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate, and by the aggregate, 8.5 against the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · King of the Delta Blues Singers, the LP issued by Columbia in 1961, compiled by Frank Driggs: sixteen tracks in their original order, eight to a side, from the sides Robert Johnson recorded for the American Record Corporation under Don Law in San Antonio (23, 26 and 27 November 1936) and Dallas (19 and 20 June 1937). The LP is the unit and the recordings its matter; the sequence is counted once, under The Living Form. Judged from knowledge of the recordings and their reception, with no recording or lyric sheet in hand. The 1970 second volume, The Complete Recordings (1990) and later editions are evidence, not the object. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words. Not given, being unverified here: the catalogue number and pressing, the running time, which takes the LP carries, the session of each side, which sides were first issued on it, the rooms in which the sides were recorded, the guitar setting of each side, and the part of others at the label and in the liner notes. Whether the 78s were mastered fast is stated as disputed and charged to nothing.