A Robert Johnson Lyric: My First Encounter
David Crosby quotes Johnson on the first Crosby, Stills, & Nash album
Prelude: 1967
After a childhood experimenting with making music on every instrument I could get my hands on, at fifteen, in the summer of 1967, I took up guitar.
I'd heard Virginia bluesman John Jackson play a couple of songs in a Mike Seeger concert in May that year and began playing a borrowed guitar six weeks later while on staff at a summer camp.
Jackson had an athletic, nimble, and driving ragtime guitar style that ran circles around the folk guitarists I'd been listening to. No one I knew played like that. If you could do that with a guitar, I wanted in.
My older brother had a guitar.
I did not.
In previous years, in my imagination, I hadn't been able to conceive of getting a rock and roll band together, but I remember clearly being thirteen and watching Paul McCartney sing Yesterday by himself on the Ed Sullivan show and thinking privately (naively, of course, but correctly) I could do that...
I spent the years between the Beatles’ arrival and 1967, somewhat anxiously hoping for some guitarist to play a song I could join in singing.
The neuroses of soap opera actors come to mind–their professional lives are entirely dependent on the vision and talent of someone else: a scriptwriter, a director, a producer, sponsors, lighting and camera professionals, music directors, theater owners...and, regardless of your talent and expertise, even if all that fell together, you could have the wrong color hair, skin, be too tall or short, and lose the gig through absolutely no fault of your own.
I realized after hearing John Jackson play, that this was a lousy life-plan: waiting for someone to play for me to be able to sing. You want to sing? Play!
The Boy Scouts
My father was an Assistant Scoutmaster, and, by fourteen, I was pretty much required to be an Eagle Scout. At fifteen, I took a summer job at the newly opened Goshen Scout Camps in the mountains of Virginia, twenty miles north-northeast of Lexington.
This turned out to be a very lucky break.
As a lifeguard and aquatic instructor (rowing, swimming, canoeing), I worked when the waterfront was open. Leaving an hour after meals, that turned out to be a very limited number of hours:
8:00-9:00 Breakfast
10:00-11:30 Waterfront Open
12:00-1:00 Lunch
2:00-5:00 Waterfront Open
The waterfront staff had the lightest-duty of anyone on the staff, by far (and the most amount of free time).
When I walked into the main lodge for the first staff introduction and orientation, I noticed an unattended guitar case parked against one wall. After the meeting, as the cooks retired to prepare the evening meal, I asked whose guitar that was, hoping to be able to look at it.
I was told it belonged to Vic, the cook's assistant.
I ducked my head into the kitchen and asked for Vic. He came over. We introduced ourselves and I asked about the guitar.
"Yeah, it's mine."
"I'm interested in learning to play. May I have a look at it sometime?"
"Play it anytime you want. I thought I'd have time to play it, but I won't."
Vic was up at 5:00 a.m. He helped the cook make breakfasts, sent food out to the villages, cleaned the dishes; then lunch, sent the food out, cleaned-up; then dinner, sent the food out, cleaned-up; prepped breakfast for the next morning, then fell down dead in his bunk, only to do it all again–Sunday dinner through Saturday lunch–all summer long.
" Take that guitar anytime, anywhere you want–if it's not here, I'll know you've got it and it's safe. Someone should make use of it. I'm happy for you to play it. There's a songbook in there, too."
This moment made us friends.
Vic was a Mormon kid, off the reservation for the first time and in some ways the wildest kid on staff, but he was kind, brotherly, and generous.
I'll never forget him and the gift he made me that summer.
Vic's Guitar
As Vic turned back to work in the kitchen, I opened that black, green-flocked, cardboard case for the first time. The guitar had a certain smell–wood, dust, a pleasant mustiness.
A large format paperback Peter, Paul, & Mary songbook lay on top of it. The book, thankfully, had not just chord names, but little chord diagrams over the music, too.
I began teaching my left hand to make the chords; my right hand to make the sound.
As Vic and his boss, 'Cookie' (a three-hundred-pound, apron-clad sweating monster of a man with a thin, scraggly beard and short, greasy black hair) labored away making food for us all, I was playing his guitar before and after breakfast; before and after lunch; before and after dinner until bed–five to seven hours a day, every day, all summer long.
I'd brought books to camp to read that I never cracked.
Within a week, I had a song or two nearly under my belt. By summer's end, I had a small repertoire, largely based on that Peter, Paul & Mary songbook and my memories of the recordings.
Toward the end of August, I contracted mononucleosis and spent a few days in the infirmary. Recovering before camp ended, I returned to the guitar in the lodge and the waterfront.
When camp ended, I bid Vic and his guitar farewell. My waterfront director, Jim Knowlton, offered to take me to his parent's vacation house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland for a few days to decompress, and then drive me home to Alexandria, saving my parents having to come out and pick me up. Jimmy and I had become pals, too.
A (very) big brother for me, Jimmy was a football player at Tulane, a big guy, with a heart to match. He always looked out for me.
On the Easter Shore, Jimmy made us his special hamburgers–he liked to put the condiments inside the burgers, seal them in, then broil them. They were gigantic and delicious. We walked the shore and talked about the summer and the coming year.
Before he took me back to Alexandria and headed on to Louisiana, Jimmy asked me, "So, are you going to keep playing guitar?"
"Yeah."
"Then you need this."
And he handed me his copy of Phil Ochs' I Ain't A-Marchin' Anymore. I'd heard Tom Paxton, Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Peter, Paul & Mary, Simon & Garfunkel, the Kingston Trio, but not Ochs. His work was inspiring.
On my sixteenth birthday, that late September, I received a little $60 Yamaha six string.
My parents had budgeted $30 for each of the boys' birthdays that year, and coming last in the calendar, they didn't think it fair to give more to me. But I wanted nothing else. They were stuck.
I didn't find out until 1995 (when my first CD came out) that my older brother Bruce had ponied up the extra thirty bucks. It was a surprise that he never held it over me, never mentioned it. Decades later, when I heard he wanted a guitar in his life again, I bought him one as a sort of reply. I remain deeply grateful for his generosity.
From Jimmy's gift to me, Phil Ochs' smart and funny protest songs became significant additions to my repertoire. I figured them out by ear.
1968-69
Over the next two years, I spent almost every waking hour figuring out how to play songs I loved–by Ochs, Dylan, The Byrds, The Lovin' Spoonful, Buffy Saint-Marie, Paxton; Peter, Paul & Mary, Simon & Garfunkel, and even a few by the Kingston Trio.
I had not found my way back to John Jackson yet (that would come in 1971).
I knew that there was tantalizing roots music out there somewhere, but it seemed just beyond the reach of the music that my friends and I had access to.
The first folk concert I took Barb to was a Peter, Paul & Mary show at Wolf Trap Farm outside of Washington, DC with Gordon Lightfoot opening. They were all at the height of their powers. It was a wonderful concert. A few members of our church youth group went with us, sharing the driving.
In 1969, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash turned up on the airwaves. We all quickly bought their first album. I immersed myself in the sounds, with no idea what Stills was doing (he played most of the instruments on most of the tracks for the album).
That spring, I met more experienced players at a church camp retreat who clued me into a modal (root and five) guitar tuning that Stills seemed to be using [E-B-E-E-B-E]. This opened a door wide for me. I had played a little in Open-E major [E-B-E-G#-B-E], but Stills' tuning was something harmonically more ambiguous and wonderful.
A Robert Johnson Lyric
In between the last two cuts of that record, after Long Time Gone, Crosby was looking for a vocal timbre to sing 49 Bye-Byes and Stills suggested he sing that old blues line he liked. Crosby replied that wasn't the feel he was looking for. Stills pushed him on it, and Crosby sang a quote from a Robert Johnson tune:
"You better come on in my kitchen, cause it's going to be rainin' outdoors..."
They kept it between the tracks and to my ears, this was the most affecting lyric on the record: solo, unaccompanied, and devastatingly poetic. I was mad about it. Where was THAT song? It would be 1975 before I'd hear Johnson's recordings and the full song.
Baltimore, 1970
Barb and I dated for two years in high school and in the spring of our senior year, Crosby, Stills, & Nash headed out on a national tour, coming to the Baltimore Civic Center on Memorial Day weekend, Saturday, May 30, 1970. I booked tickets and took Barb to the only big rock 'n' roll concert of our high school years.
On that Saturday afternoon, commandeering my family's big two-tone Chevrolet Caprice station wagon (which drove like a barge and felt like one, too), I picked up Barb at her house and headed across DC and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to Baltimore, managed to find the Civic Center and get parked without wrecking it.
I was never so relieved to park a car in all my life.
We locked the car, noted the parking place, and hustled into the Civic Center to find our seats down on the floor maybe twenty yards from the stage. The place was jammed.
The stage before us was set with three high stools, and six microphones on separate stands.
When the concert started, the boys came out and basically passed Stills' Martin D-45 back and forth as different members of the group led their own songs. They sang like angels.
With Barb next to me, I was in heaven.
They broke for an intermission, during which the stage was reset for an electric set, stools and instrument mics removed; amplifiers, bass, and drums added.
When we’d returned to our seats, Stills launched the band into Wooden Ships, and possibly another song, before walking to a microphone down stage. He addressed us:
"I'd like you to join me in welcoming to the stage an old friend of mine. We made a lot of great music together in the Buffalo Springfield. Please welcome Neil Young."
Young was an unadvertised guest. I think they were trying to figure out if they could tour together without killing each other. (I think the jury remained out on that for a long time, but the next album was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.)
Young walked purposefully out on stage, plugged his own guitar into an amp, turned to us, and launched the band into Ohio.
Kent State
Twenty-six days earlier, on May 4th, Richard Nixon's National Guard opened fire with live ammunition on antiwar protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and seriously injuring nine. The dead included Jeffery Miller who was shot in the mouth; Allison Krause, shot in her left side; William Schroeder, shot in the back, and Sandra Scheuer, shot in the neck.
All these students were between 270 and 330 feet from the National Guard when it turned and fired on them. No one has ever claimed responsibility for issuing the order to fire, but an order clearly had to have been given for the Guardsmen to turn in such a coordinated way and fire on the students.
Just over three weeks later, at 120 dB, twenty yards from the stage, we heard Neil Young sing a song he'd written in about two hours. Those kids' bodies were barely in the ground when that song overwhelmed us.
It was a bit like having one's skeleton tattooed.
The marks are deep.
Unforgettable.
Ohio
Tin soldiers and Nixon comin'
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drummin'
Four dead in Ohio.Gotta get down to it.
Soldiers are cutting us down.
Should've been done long ago.
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?Four dead in Ohio
Four dead in Ohio...Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
The Power of a Song
Some kind of wonderful alchemy comes into play when a piece of music, a lyric, or a song hits you hard–that one line from Robert Johnson's Come On In My Kitchen, being blind-sided by Ohio for the first time live, within weeks of the Kent State killings–the intellect and the emotions fuse–a permanent memory is set.
The author of all the lyrics (and much of the dialog) for The Wizard of Oz and the Great Depression hit, Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? once noted:
Words make you think a thought.
Music makes you feel a feeling.
And a song makes you feel a thought.–E.Y. 'Yip' Harburg
According to modern brain science, whatever is strongly marked with emotion–positive or negative–is both more deeply set in the memory, and easier to recall. This is one of the hallmarks of good teaching, good music, and good performing.
There are a handful of moments, a discrete collection of surprises, that set me on the road to the life I have lived and live yet. I owe significant debts to the original performers that I cannot repay.
My only recourse is to take my lasting gratitude for those moments, fashion work, and hope to pass it on, triggering some small part of that kind of experience in someone else.
The Ending
In my experience, there are no happy endings. Endings always suck.
Instead of that fabled happy ending, we should be looking for a long, happy middle. And then, do our best to extend that happy middle as far as we can, so that when the end comes, we can be grateful for the ride.
I'll close with a favorite quote from Kurt Vonnegut:
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'
What is good in our lives can go by us in a minute and we find ourselves dwelling on, stewing over, and remembering everything that went wrong.
Instead, try to notice when you're happy. Mark what moves you.
And then–if you play music–play it slow.
It will make things better.
Scott Ainslie
https://ScottAinslie.Substack.com
https://Patreon.com/ScottAinslie
https://CattailMusic.com
Thanks for your story. I started playing guitar when I was 18 in 1963, influenced by many of the same artists you mention. I never worked on it as hard as you have, but the music lives in my soul. I really got into the Blues when I moved to Chicago in 1967. I still play and sing with a little jam session but have not done anything professional for a long time. That's ok. I added Irish music to the mix where I played with other Irish musicians when I lived in Boise, Idaho. I have been back in Virginia for almost 18 years, now, amazed at how "For What It's Worth" is still so true with what is still going on today.
When I’d see Rahsaan Roland Kirk at the Keystone in SF, several times during the show when the spirit was right, he’d yell out”Bright moments! Bright moments!”
Thanks for reminding us to notice and remember them.