ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In the film “The Search for Robert Johnson,” John Hammond asks Johnny Shines - Johnson’s traveling partner and friend - whether Johnson sold his soul to the devil. Shines holds out his hand. Give me your soul, he says. Go on, take it out of your body and hand it to me. You can’t do that. These are stories.
Host Nate Wilcox talks with Elijah Wald, author of “Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues,” in a conversation first released in 2018 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. Next time, in 4.11, Dr. Yuri Campbell joins Nate to look back on what this conversation taught us.
Elijah explains why Johnson was a minor figure in his own day: the stars in his world were Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Lonnie Johnson, Leroy Carr and Peetie Wheatstraw, and what was exotic about Johnson to his neighbors was that he had traveled and sounded like the people on the records. He makes the case for “Terraplane Blues,” Johnson’s one near-hit, as a dirty, funny song that English kids five thousand miles away played dark and scary because they didn’t get the jokes - and for Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law, as the singer Johnson was trying to sound like.
Also: how radio emptied the record market everywhere except the unelectrified countryside, and how jukeboxes came to take something like half of all the records sold in the late 1930s; Johnson as a human jukebox who could yodel a Jimmie Rodgers song for a white farmer; why the record collectors - in 1960 the only people who had heard any of this music - prized whatever was rarest, made Skip James a god and left Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leroy Carr behind; Big Bill Broonzy swapping his suits for work clothes for John Hammond, and Josh White’s smarter mix; H.C. Speir, the Jackson, Mississippi furniture-store man who all but invented Delta blues on record; and why the guitar, not the piano, became the fetish object of the British blues boom.
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* “Downhearted Blues,” Bessie Smith
* “Terraplane Blues,” Robert Johnson
* “The Devil’s Son-in-Law,” Peetie Wheatstraw
* “Devil Got My Woman,” Skip James
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