Blues Men

Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Son House, Bukka White, Skip James

Robert Johnson was born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, May 8, 1911, but spent much of his early life in levee camps and on plantations in the northern Delta. He moved with his family to Memphis in 1914, staying there until 1918, when his stepfather sent him to live at the Abbay and Leatherman Plantation near Robinsonville, Mississippi. There Johnson began playing harmonica and associating with older blues musicians. He followed local bluesman Willie Brown to parties and fish fries, accompanying him on many pieces. Soon Johnson was playing with Brown and his partner Charley Patton when the latter came to town. By 1930, Son House was out of Parchman Farm and had settled in Robinsonville. House’s guitar playing had a profound effect on Johnson, and the younger man abandoned his harmonica for the guitar. House and Brown became a team, hopping rides to Memphis to play for tips in Church’s Park with Johnson tagging along. When they were drinking, House, Brown, and Patton would belittle Johnson for his lack of guitar skill. The young man soon left Robinsonville and headed back to Hazelhurst.

Robert Johnson married while in Hazelhurst and practiced his picking, learning new songs from phonograph records. There he fell under the spell of local guitarist Ike Zinnerman, a man whom locals claim he imitated closely. Johnson re-emerged in Robinsonville many months later without his wife but displaying a dazzling guitar technique and a raft of new songs sounding suspiciously like records by Lonnie Johnson (no relation), Skip James, Peetie Wheatstraw, Scrapper Blackwell, and Kokomo Arnold. His playing was a juxtaposition of shuffling rhythms and slide guitar leads that dwarfed the playing of his contemporaries. Some believed that Johnson had met the Devil at the Crossroads and exchanged his soul for his extraordinary ability. Although Johnson’s songs were derivative of other musicians’, they display a personal approach to familiar themes of loss, isolation, and paranoia, while introducing diabolical references. Johnson played everywhere, from the Kitty Cat Club in Helena, Arkansas, to the streets of Friars Point in front of Hirsberg Drugstore. His wanderlust took him to coal yards, speakeasies, levee camps, and taverns in the Midwest, on the East Coast, and even in Canada. But it was his recordings that were to have the widest impact.

Robert Johnson recorded twice, first in San Antonio, Texas, in November 1936 and again in Dallas, Texas, in June 1937. Listening to commercial records yielded artistic dividends for Johnson. The twenty-nine songs he recorded during those two sessions display an appreciation for the medium by being tight, thematically coherent, and short enough for one side of a 78 disc. Johnson’s performances were unequalled. Bottleneck leads alternating with driving rhythms and lyrics sung in a high tense voice create masterpieces of the genre.

His success was cut short a year later when he was poisoned behind the Three Forks Store in Quito, Mississippi. An ailing Johnson was brought to nearby Greenwood, where he lingered for several days at 109 Young Street before dying August 16, 1938. He was hastily buried in the Mt. Zion churchyard before being re-interred in the nearby Mt. Payne graveyard.

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Robert Johnson went down to the crossroad... ...where they say he struck a deal with the Devil. Fellow bluesman Tommy Johnson (no relation) said, "If you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where a road crosses that way, where a crossroad is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little 'fore 12:00 that night so you'll know you'll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself.... A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want." (As told by LeDell Johnson to David Evans and quoted from Peter Guralnick's Searching for Robert Johnson, copyright © 1982, 1989.)

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In 1936 and 1937, Robert Johnson recorded such immortal blues classics as I Believe I'll Dust My Broom, Sweet Home Chicago, Come On In My Kitchen, Crossroad Blues, Traveling Riverside Blues, Love In Vain, Hellhound On My Trail, and Me And The Devil Blues.

After the turn of the decade Patton began playing with Willie Brown, a guitarist who would later become a regular on his recordings. Patton’s music began to exert considerable influence; guitarist Tommy Johnson had moved to the Dockery vicinity circa 1913 and was soon playing Delta blues including Patton’s "Pony Blues."

Patton made his first recording in June 1929, cutting fourteen songs for the Paramount label, all issued on 78s. Such was the success of his initial session that he was invited four months later to Paramount’s new studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, where he recorded twenty-eight additional tunes. Patton’s polyrhythmic picking, accompanied by tapping the body of the guitar, created an intricate dance melody that its author could play for thirty minutes or more. Son House, who recorded in a 1930 session that also featured Patton and Brown, recalled that Charley "clowned" for an audience by playing the guitar behind his back or between his knees. Patton included regional landmarks in his tunes - places that a local record-buying audience would be familiar with, including a Moorehead, Mississippi railroad crossing, "Where the Southern Crosses the Dog," in "Green River Blues" and Parchman Farm in "A Spoonful Blues.

Howlin Wolf, who moved to Dockery in 1926, recalled seeing Patton on the town square in Drew, not far from Dockery Plantation. Patton’s hypnotic three-note songs also deeply influenced Clarksdale’s John Lee Hooker, who recorded his own version of Patton’s "Pea Vine Blues." Bukka White also cited a desire "to come to be a famous man, like Charley Patton," and demonstrated a similar knack for playing dance songs for extended periods. Patton’s last recording session was in New York City in February 1934, two months before his death.

Charley Patton died April 28, 1934, at 350 Heathman Street in Indianola, Mississippi. Patton's grave is located in Holly Ridge, Mississippi, and the tombstone acknowledges his pivotal role in the development of the Delta Blues.

Patton befriended House, who began working as a musician around the Kirby Plantation. In 1930, Patton brought him, guitarist Willie Brown, and pianist Louise Johnson to Grafton, Wisconsin, for a recording session with Paramount Records. House’s influence on the Delta School of musicians can be judged from a handful of recordings made in Grafton. His song "Preachin’ The Blues Part I & II" was a six-minute biography of his life and served as inspiration for Robert Johnson’s "Preaching Blues" and "Walking Blues." House’s powerful vocals and slashing slide guitar style established him as a giant of the Delta School but did not lead to commercial success. House continued playing with Willie Brown during the 1930s and developed a relationship with a young Robert Johnson after moving to Robinsonville, Mississippi. After Johnson had learned to play guitar, he began to gig with House and Brown, learning the older musicians’ licks.

House, Willie Brown, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin, and Leroy Williams were recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax near Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, in 1941 for the Library of Congress. Lomax returned the next year to record House in Robinsonville, but the musician did not make another commercial record until the "blues revival" of the 1960s. His influence, however, would be felt through the recordings of Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Elmore James, Robert Nighthawk, and other successful blues artists.

Son House died October 19, 1988.

Upon his release from prison in 1940, White traveled to Chicago for a follow-up session to "Shake ‘Em On Down." The resulting twelve songs transcend blues as music, becoming powerful ruminations on imprisonment, isolation, loneliness, Jim Crow justice, and the freedom of the rails. White’s post-Parchman success was short-lived, however, as a stint in the U.S. Navy during World War II curtailed his playing. During the 1940s, he occasionally played juke joints with Memphis legend Frank Stokes after the latter had moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi. White later settled in Memphis, playing occasional gigs and influencing his young guitar-playing cousin B.B. King. Like Skip James, Mississippi John Hart, and Son House, White was rediscovered during the 1960s "blues revival," and was once again celebrated for his slide guitar, throaty holler, and inspired compositions.

Bukka White died in Memphis, Tennessee, February 26, 1977. He is buried in Memphis.

Skip James, born June 21, 1902, in Yazoo City, Mississippi, at the "colored" hospital,  was raised on the Woodbine Plantation, fifteen miles south of Yazoo City and a mile and a half from nearby Bentonia. His bootlegger father left his wife and son in 1907, a step ahead of the local revenue agents. His mother bought him his first guitar for $2.50 in 1912. Henry Stuckey, a guitarist five years older who lived on nearby Sataria Plantation, taught James the venerable eight-bar staple "Drunken Spree." James’s mother moved the family to nearby Sidon in 1914 in an attempt to reconnect with her husband. The reunion fizzled and fourteen-year-old James ran away from home for a year. In 1917, he returned to Bentonia, where his mother was then living. There he attended high school and worked on the weekends at Gooching Brothers sawmill. During this time James took rudimentary piano lessons from his cousin Alma Williams, a schoolteacher.

James dropped out of high school in 1919 and left Bentonia to work and live at a road construction camp near Ruleville. During the next two years he worked in various levee and lumber camps around the Delta. While working in a lumber camp James composed his first song, "Illinois Blues." On weekends, he would pick his guitar for tips in the nearby towns of Drew, Louise, and Belzoni. In 1921, James moved to Weona, Arkansas, to work as a lumber grader at a sawmill camp. There he met pianist/pimp Will Crabtree. By James’s account, Crabtree was a huge man from nearby Marked Tree, Arkansas, who influenced his piano playing and lifestyle. James remained in Weona until 1923, hustling women and working as a pianist. After a dispute with one of the women, James moved toMemphis, where he worked as a pianist at a brothel on North Nichols Street.

Likely as a result of the passage of Prohibition, James returned in 1924 to Bentonia, where he remained for six years. During this time he worked as a sharecropper, but soon began bootlegging "white lightning" to pay for the fancy clothes and jewelry that he had come to enjoy during his days as a pimp. He also practiced his guitar playing, working dances with Henry Stuckey in Bentonia, Sidon, and as far away as Jackson, Mississippi. James developed his three-finger picking style, a style practiced by Charley Patton, Mississippi John Hart, and Jackson native Bo Carter. James’s trademark sound came from his E-minor tuning, which he called "cross-note tuning."

His digital dexterity, unusual sound, falsetto singing voice, and proficiency with a guitar convinced Paramount Records talent scout H.C. Speir to recommend James to the label based on an audition in Speir’s music store at 111 Farish Street in Jackson. In February 1931, he waxed eighteen sides at Paramount’s Grafton, Wisconsin, studio that were subsequently issued. During the session James established himself at the forefront of blues musicians, evidenced by songs such as "I‘m So Glad," "Devil Got My Woman," "Special Rider Blues," and "20-20 Blues."

Speir attempted to persuade James to record again in late 1931 or early 1932, but the musician had "gotten religion" as a result of a meeting with his father and refused the offer. The elder James had reformed his habits and become a Baptist minister. James followed his father to Plano, Texas, where he attended, but did not graduate from, seminary school. James remained with his father during the 1940s, returning home to Bentonia upon the death of his mother in the early 1950s. He was rediscovered in 1964 and together with Son House and Mississippi John Hurt sparked interest in the blues revival of the time. A rock version of "I’m So Glad" became a million seller, but James denounced it. He recorded and toured during the 1960s before being stricken with cancer.

Skip James died October 3, 1969, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is buried at Mercon Cemetery, Bala-Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

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updated 9 December 2008