The Hellhound on Robert Johnson's Trail

Biography of a Phantom by Robert “Mack” McCormick

If there’s one tale in the history of blues music that enchants the imagination more than any other, it’s the story of Robert Johnson. According to the legend, Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, at midnight, in order to master the guitar and make music. It’s a good myth, so why let the facts get in the way of a good story? (attrib. Farley Mowat)

Perhaps there’s a better one.

In a new book, written over fifty years ago, we follow the trail of Robert Johnson through the eyes and ears of Robert “Mack” McCormick. McCormick, a hard-working researcher, had a burning desire to learn as much as possible about his favorite musician, but in the course of his journey, he had mental illness, often laying out for days recuperating. Keeping a job was difficult, yet, working alone, he could find the energy and determination to chase down the history of Robert Johnson, the so-called King of the Delta Blues. I got wind of this important release from Ted Gioia.

McCormick was an irascible historian, keen to get the right facts, but because of his illness, inconsistent. He persevered and started writing a book about Robert Johnson in the early seventies. The result of his effort is, Biography of a Phantom, A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey (Smithsonian Books).

And while it might be easy for me to get into the material and review the pros and cons of McCormick’s tome, this publication leaves me perplexed. The book was edited by John W. Troutman, a museum curator, author, and musician. His principal gig is at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. where McCormick’s archive of recordings, notes, photographs and maps, lives. When McCormick died in 2015, his daughter was left to pick up the fragmented pieces of her father’s work. It was too much to handle so, after careful consideration, she donated her father’s rich archive to the Smithsonian, closing out his career as a folklorist and historian.

McCormick worked for the Smithsonian while researching his book about Robert Johnson. He was once the artistic director of their Folk festival. This book, published posthumously, is a chronicle of his travels and conversations with anyone who knew Robert Johnson. It’s one of the most interesting journeys in the history of music, but it was left unfinished. McCormick having shelved the manuscript for years as he became uncertain about himself and the Johnson story. Knowing that, I still enjoyed the tome.

McCormick tells his story in the first person, sharing his trials and errors, false leads and fact-gathering along the way. To keep himself on track, he took out a Shell map of the southern United States, marked it up and hit the road in his car. He traveled to Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee. He talked to the locals who knew Johnson or, at least, had heard his recordings.

McCormick’s fact-finding mission had interesting results: Robert Johnson grew up on plantations. He was more interested in music than work or school. As a kid he ran from place to place, often staying with extended family, only to return home. He was born in Hazlehurst, Miss. in 1911; died in Greenwood, Miss. in 1938. Many say he was poisoned by a jealous husband. But we’ll never know, because the record, curated by McCormick and other historians, remains scant. Myths and legends, often more interesting than the facts, emerge by rumour and supposition. McCormick dispels the myth of Johnson selling his soul to the devil.

The best chapter is “Listening and Remembering.” McCormick gathers a group of locals who either knew or heard Robert Johnson when he was alive. Many had purchased his records and hadn’t heard them in many years. To satisfy his own curiosity, McCormick had a copy of the Columbia LP, King of the Delta Blues Singers, issued in 1961. In the house of Cleveland and Lula Smith, McCormick played the album, one track at a time, in their packed living room. I was swept up by the emotional response of every person. McCormick writes, “When the music started, breaths were sucked in and held for the eight seconds of sharp, biting introductory guitar playing. An astonishing degree of recall can be triggered by familiar things brought back like this.” McCormick was right. The first track, “Cross Road Blues” opens the record. When the group heard Johnson sing “I went down to the crossroad”, McCormick reports, “They finished the line with him, ‘fell down on my knees’ and just that quickly, the intervening years fell away.” The people in the room, in their late 50s/early 60s, were trying to recall events that took place thirty years before. Stories like that one were engaging.

McCormick’s style fuses the personal with the fact-finding mission he set himself upon. Consequently, I can recommend the book. But it helps to know the history of Blues music, especially the Delta players like Charley Patton, Robert Jr. Lockwood and Lightnin Hopkins. McCormick name drops to put Robert Johnson into context. That also means a considerable discussion of Lonnie Johnson, Tommy Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson, and other blues musicians who came out of the South. I suggest you do some broad research into blues music before reading Phantom.

The Troutman Notes

The introduction and afterword are written by John W. Troutman, editor. To put McCormick’s book into historical context, Troutman goes to considerable length to explain his rationale. He seems reasonable to assert that McCormick saw the history of the blues as a white, middle-class historian, with a narrow view of the origins of blues music in America. Troutman explains the motives behind the “Blues Mafia,” a group he calls, “a small but culturally impactful, global community of white, male fanatics of southern Black vernacular music who first began to find one another in the 1940s.” This group and their influence, has been the accepted scholarship on the history of the blues, what it means and why it’s important. What upsets Troutman, and rightfully so, is that Black scholars were not invited into the conversation, let alone to write the history of the blues. Troutman says, “Rather than collaborate with living Black intellectuals to study Black music, these white collectors ... preferred to pursue, on their own terms, what they considered the Black experience...” And I agree that a group of white guys telling the story of an African-American experience leaves me weary and wary. But I wasn’t interested in that criticism as an introduction to McCormick’s book. Besides, most of those in the blues mafia were never funded by any agency, often working on their own time and expense to get the story right.

I was interested in McCormick’s method and Troutman does right to put it into context. I got to know McCormick in the sub-section, “The Man at the Door,” which would have been enough for me. Then Troutman makes, what I consider, an editorial mistake. While he honours McCormick’s intent to write “Biography of a Phantom as a crime thriller targeted to a general audience” he makes what I consider significant changes to McCormick’s manuscript.

One is the removal of passages featuring Robert Johnson’s sisters due to “ethical use of their stories.” McCormick was a bit of con-artist. He convinced Johnson’s siblings, Carrie Thompson and Bessie Hines, to sign an agreement allowing him to hold copyright over two photographs of Johnson they gave him. That agreement, and the mess it created, is explained in the Afterword.

Second is the decision by Troutman, to substitute “Black” or “African American” in the place of the word “Negro”, which McCormick used in the original work. Troutman says the author wasn’t comfortable with the word, “his archive reveals that he later questioned the use of the term ...” It’s a good reason to make the change, but some people may think it’s in the interest of political correctness.

Troutman’s portions of the book are important in understanding the complexity of cultural history. Not only do we have the case of a white guy (McCormick) looking to write the history of Black music, we have an elitist record company, Columbia, controlling the Johnson recordings.

Back in 1991, when digital technology was beginning to re-invent the audio file, Columbia released Robert Johnson, The Complete Recordings, a 2-CD box set with liner notes. I worked at HMV in Toronto in the Jazz & Blues department when the set came out. We couldn’t keep it in stock; the demand was enormous, becoming one of the store’s biggest, most consistent sellers.

Robert Johnson was de rigour; a force to be heard. The liner notes tell his story well, using scholarship from Steve LaVere, a “blues hunter” who followed in McCormick’s footsteps in 1973. LaVere was shrewd. He cut a deal with Johnson’s family which caused considerable stress to them.

Troutman explains the battle of LaVere versus McCormick, including a lawsuit filed in 1998, twenty-five years after McCormick started his journey. The rightful heirs to Johnson’s royalties were recognized with a million-dollar payout in 2000. It’s a long tale of corporate greed, personal self-interest and the battle for copyright, best told by other scholars, such as Ted Gioia.

In the end, Eric Clapton said it best, “I don’t think there’s any need to analyze too much ... people could simply appreciate his music ... for its truth and its beauty, without it having to be a scholarly event.”

Perhaps the same thing should be said about Biography of a Phantom.

Not so shameless self-promotion:

My latest book is Outside Looking In: The Seriously Funny Life and Work of George Carlin (Applause)