Robert Johnson and the Mississippi Blues

Robert Johnson, the ultimate of blues legends, how did this obscure musician come to be hailed long after his death as the most important artist in early blues and a founding father of rock 'n' roll? Robert Johnson was born May 8th 1911, around 1918 Robert moved with his mother to the area around Robinsonville and Tunica in the Mississippi Delta. Some people remember Johnson being known as Little Robert Dusty, though records at the Indian Creek School in Tunica as Robert Spencer. He attended this school for several years.

By the time he was nineteen, Johnson married Virginia Travis, but his sixteen year old wife died in childbirth. According to some this was a major trauma for him and set him to his life of rambling. Over the next seven years Johnson would roam far and wide, impressing everyone he met with his musical abilities. By 1936, Johnson had proved his abilities among his peers, but he still had not gotten the respect and reputation that came with a recording career. Sometime that year he walked into H.C Speirs furniture store in Jackson. Speir had expanded from selling phonographs and records to acting as a talent scout, and had been responsible for getting pretty much all the Mississippi blues singers their record deals.

By the mid-1930s, the record companies were shying away from rural artists, but Speir was impressed with Johnson and got in touch with Ernie Oertle, the Mid-South agent for the ARC Company. Oertle was interested, and arranged a debut session for Johnson. Johnson did three sessions that week; he recorded sixteen songs doing two takes each. This was the depths of the Depression, and new blues artists were not selling very well unless they had the Chicago band sound behind them. Still Johnson's debut produced one moderately good seller.

In those days, rural artists were rarely paid any royalties for their records. Even if they were offered the option of a royalty deal, it was a gamble that few would take when balanced against a lump sum, paid immediately in cash. Johnson probably got a few hundred dollars for his sixteen sides. A small payment considering what they would become, but a fortune for a wandering guitarists in the midst of the Depression. ARC, the company was happy enough with Johnson's sales that they invited him back for another session just seven months later. Johnson recorded another thirteen songs then hit the road again. Unfortunately Johnson wasn't on the road long before he got sick and died in Greenwood Mississippi. The cause of death was syphilis.

Robert Johnson created a body of work that is fascinating and inspiring, but also at times both frustrating and ambiguous. Johnson's death just fourteen months after his final session leaves us without any clear idea of which direction he might have pursued or how he would have sounded even a few years further on. To judge by the choices his peers went on to make, he could have done anything from forming a jazz group to quitting music entirely. Until the 1960s Johnson's name was all but forgotten, except by his immediate neighbors, his playing partners, and a handful of white folk and jazz fans. It was these white fans that would crown him king of the Mississippi Delta, and whose opinion has come to be the gospel of blues history. Johnson's obscurity and mystery were part of his appeal, setting him apart from the kind of blues that was still regularly featured on radio playlists throughout the United States. Even today, when Johnson CDs have sold in the millions, Johnson posters are hung on walls, conferences are held about his music, and his face graced a postage stamp, if you go to a blues festival in the Mississippi Delta and take a poll of black listeners, you will find that many will not even recognize his name.

Black fans in the 1930s heard a good singer and writer in the contemporary blues mainstream, with a solid beat, interesting lyrics, but little to distinguish him from a lot of similar and far better known stars. The few white fans who heard him at that time seem to have considered him a brilliant rural primitive. In the 1960s, mainstream black blues buyers who stumbled across an LP reissue of his work would have heard a guy who sounded like the old fashioned countrified music their parents or grandparents might have liked. Meanwhile young white fans were embracing the same recordings as the dark, mysterious, and fascinating roots of rock 'n' roll. The Robert Johnson that most listeners have heard in the last forty years is a creation of the Rolling Stones. Indeed for most modern listeners, the history, aesthetic, and sound of blues as a whole was formed by the Stones and a handful of their white, mostly English contemporaries.

Check any popular image of an old-time blues singer. He is male and black, of course. He plays guitar. He is a loner and a rambler, without money or a pleasant home. He is a figure from another world, not like the people next door or anyone in your family, or anyone you know well. And his music is haunting, searing, and cuts you to the bone. That is how the blues struck a small clique of English kids in the late 1950s and early 1960s and through their eyes that the rest of the world has come to see it. Johnson defined everything that had drawn them to the blues, to break out of the boring, ordinary world of suburban England or Eisenhower America.

Blues Guitar Lesson: How To Get Your Guitar To Wail

One of the essential ingredients for the blues is the musical "tension" that is created by forcing the flatted 3rd note over a major 3rd; it's like a musical equivalent to "sweet and sour".

Here's how it works...

The notes in a "E" major chord are: E - G# - B

An "E" minor chord consists of: E - G - B

Notice how the only difference is that in the "E" minor chord the "G" is not sharpened.

Since the notes "G" and "G#" are only a semitone apart (one fret apart) when both notes are sounded simultaneously they create musical tension (dissonance).

Blues players have taken this idea a step further by often playing double stops derived from a major chord a minor third above the original chord.

Now in earth language...

The system of measurement that musicians use to identify the distance between one note and the next is called interval.

On the guitar the distance from one fret and the next is called a semitone.

The distance of two frets is called a tone.

Review:

one fret = semitone

two frets = tone

three frets = tone and a half or minor 3rd

Using our blues in the key of "E" as an example:

The key note is "E"; the notes of an E major chord are E - G# - B

The note that is a minor 3rd above "E" is "G"; the notes of a "G" major chord are: G - B - D

Concept: Blues guitarists create double stops from combinations of notes of the chord that is a minor 3rd above the key.

Hence you could play any combination of two notes from the "G" major chord and play then over an "E" chord for a really cool wailing blues sound.

Here's how all that theoretical information transfers to the fretboard.

Using any single string on the guitar as our musical "measuring tape" we can identify a minor 3rd interval by playing the note 3 frets above (higher) from where you started.

Here are some examples:

EX 1. minor 3rd interval: root note "E" - minor 3rd interval above is "G"

-0---3----
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EX 2. minor 3rd interval: root note "G" - minor 3rd interval above is "Bb"

-3---6----
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EX 3. minor 3rd interval: root note "A" - minor 3rd interval above is "C"

-5---8----
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EX 4. minor 3rd interval: root note "C" - minor 3rd interval above is "Eb"

-8---11---
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Mike Hayes develops systems and products to help you succeed in your guitar playing. Find out more about how to learn guitar fast with his popular free ecourse, available at: => http://www.guitarcoaching.com/

An Introduction To The Blues

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When did blues emerge? Perhaps you may have heard the mythic "the blues been here since time began, since the first lyin' woman met the first cheatin' man." The simplest and clearest definition of blues is the one used by musicians, as when they say, "Let's play a blues." This is a certain sequence of chords, commonly known as the twelve-bar blues, and there have been literally thousands of songs composed in this pattern. This commercial definition uses the word as a grab-bag term for all sorts of older African-American music that cannot be filed elsewhere: The rule seems to be that if a black person played it before 1950 then it must be the blues. Genres and categories are not however descriptions of music; they are ways of grouping and marketing music. Or, to put it another way, such divisions do not deal with how music sounds, but how it is perceived. Our present day idea of blues has been largely determined by people who had little if anything to do with the culture that produced the music, and who codified their definitions after blues had ceased to be part of the mainstream black pop scene. No one involved in the blues world at the time was calling their music art. It was working-class pop music, and its purveyors were looking for immediate sales, with no expectation that their songs would be remembered once the blues vogue had passed.

Since the coming of the folk-blues revival in the late 1950s, hundreds of middleclass white kids (and some black kids as well) have built themselves this image of work shirts or overalls, hunching over guitars and mumbling Mississippi field inflections. It is important to remember that these musicians were practiced professionals, some with many years of stage experience, and that they presented themselves as not pure, down home blues women or men, but as successful stars. Their costumes were famously gaudy, and they were known for having an uncanny control over their audiences. As commercial entertainers they were keenly aware of the current trends and once they became established as recording stars they used many of the same sorts of sale gimmicks as the vaudevillians who preceded them. If some of these artists are now remembered purely as blues players it is only due to the commercial strictures of the recording scouts. The songs that blues artists played in the studio not only failed to represent their day to day repertoires, but were often created specifically for the recording session and never performed before or since.

Black Southerners had a deep tradition of private and communal singing, much of it with roots reaching back to Africa. Histories of the blues frequently begin with a discussion of this music, the "work songs," "moans," and "field hollers," and treat the commercial blues compositions as an outgrowth of this folk tradition. However the blues that was being sold as sheet music and on recordings, performed on street corners, theaters, rent parties or picnics was not simply a commercialization of the styles that black Southerners had sung to ease the burdens of work, sorrow, or boredom. The problem was that of familiarity, the people who were buying records were not spending their hard earned cash just to hear the same stuff they listened to or sang during their workdays in the fields. To folklorists, this music was fascinating, but to blues buyers it was not even music. Especially during the 1920s and 1930s, the peak period of black migration to the urban North, the blues records coming in from New York and Chicago were seen by a lot of Southern blacks as representing the antithesis of old time field songs. Blues was the music of the present and future, not of the oppressive plantation past.