In the mid-1980s, I dove into Robert Johnson's tracks for a second time.
My first attempt, in the mid-1970s, just scratched the surface of Johnson's guitar techniques. A decade later, I had enough guitar experience to make real progress and in a few months, I had pretty much cracked the code.
Until then, my usual practice was to satisfy my reasonable–but undeniably aggressive curiosity about something (often, but not exclusively musical) then having sorted it out, move on to something else. I was amassing knowledge, following my nose, figuring out how to do something, then something else, and something else.
But I had a three-year-old and a newborn on the way.
Stirring in the middle of one particular night I thought: "You need to capitalize of what you know. You can't keep jumping to the next thing. You have learned something that has value to others. To support the family, you have to actually try to capitalize on what you know."
So, I stopped myself from lunging toward the next (musical) shiny object and started transcribing Robert Johnson's guitar parts. It was 1986, I was thirty-three.
Envisioning a book with more than just transcriptions–biographical information, historical context, annotated lyrics, and photos of the men who had known Johnson–I spent the next six years preparing the material, reading voraciously, contacting sources, and painstakingly transcribing Johnson's guitar parts–18-24 hours per song, in real-time with a cassette recorder, sharp pencils, a gigantic eraser, and a pair of headphones–(no Amazing Slowdowner software existed).
From his published recordings, it appeared that Johnson's material was in the public domain, but quickly I learned it was not. Though I am quite sure Johnson did not sell his soul at the crossroads, it is entirely possible that he gave up his publishing rights (an expensive, tangled story I won't get into here.)
One of the books I read was a screenplay by Alan Greenberg, Love In Vain for a movie about Johnson's life. What was most interesting to me in the book was not the script itself, which was fine, but the footnotes most of which pointed to an elusive, unpublished blues researcher, Mack McCormick.
Dropping Pennies into the Void
I eventually secured contact information for Mack. I called and left him messages. I sent letters. Then registered letters. Over the years, every now and then I would reach out again.
It was like dropping pennies into the void–I never even heard them land.
In the late 80s and early 1990s, performing out of my home base in Durham NC, I often told audiences about the book I was writing, while introducing some of Robert's tunes, and mentioned that much of the information I had came from a man I'd never met.
As had become my custom, I would ask for anyone who knew Mack to come speak with me after the show. Over the years, through hundreds of shows, no one came to the foot of the stage who knew Mack.
Until one afternoon, at a Parks & Rec. performance in a small park in Raleigh, North Carolina, as I was packing up my guitars and striking the sound equipment, a guy came to the edge of the stage and complimented me on the music. I thanked him.
Then he said, "I know Mack. We were roommates in college..."
I was thunderstruck. And immediately began asking too many questions. My informant confirmed his location (where my letters were disappearing) and when I asked if he could help me connect with him, he looked at the ground and frowned.
Speaking in confidence, he said that he was pretty sure Mack suffered from manic depression and ventured that it was entirely likely that his life's work would remain unpublished until after his death, which it did. He was discouraging about the prospects of Mack ever replying to me.
My irritation at Mack's silence dissipated entirely, suddenly wrapped in deep sadness and compassion. I stopped bothering him and waited.
Biography of a Phantom
More than thirty years later, John Troutman's carefully edited release of McCormick's Biography of a Phantom arrived in the mail.
The book details seven years between 1968 and 1975, when McCormick was doggedly driving thousands of miles, knocking on hundreds of doors, combing through local phone books, and making many thousands of phone calls, in hope of finding someone, anyone who may have known or even run across Robert Johnson.
Written originally in the 1970s, the book was rewritten several times, with some iterations purposefully obscuring or contradicting earlier versions. The trajectory of the manuscript seems to have traced McCormick's descent into mania, a descent accelerated by being out-maneuvered by his competitor in all things Johnson: Steven C. LaVere.
Steve LaVere
In 1991, the L.A. Times published an article by Robert Gordon, Hellhound on the Money Trail, detailing a portion of the twisted history of LaVere's greed and malfeasance, dating all the way back to his college days when without permission he removed photographs and negatives of old blues players from Ernest C. Withers' photography studio (characterized by LaVere as an "old friend") and copyrighting the images in his own name.
There's also this from Gordon's article:
“LaVere used to run this little shop on Cooper,” recalls Jim Dickinson, “a curio shop, used records and that kind of shit, and Nazi stuff. I mean for real Nazi shit.”
The store was called the South Cooper Street Curio Shop; after LaVere left Memphis, the building was destroyed in a fire that may have been set by striking firemen.
“That’s where I first saw the pictures of Robert Johnson. And he had dogs that he kept there all night because he was paranoid someone was going to steal from him what he had stolen.
"He was here for a good many years, all through the seventies. Used to drive an old Buick.”
(“Oh yeah,” says LaVere, “we sold all kinds of stuff, anything that would sell.”)
“Outside behind the old 'Home of the Blues',” continues Dickinson, referring to another Memphis record store, “they used to throw away the old 78s, and I’ve seen LaVere and [folk guitarist-folklorist] John Fahey stand behind 'Home of the Blues' and if there were three of a certain thing, they’d take one each and they’d break the third one. I saw that personally.”
The rarer the records, the higher the value to collectors.
The sacking of the library at Alexandria, Egypt comes to mind. Barbarians at the gates.
A Life Complicated by Mania (Not Robert Johnson's)
John Troutman, as curator of music and musical instruments at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, received McCormick's archives (what Mack and his children called the Monster).
A detailed examination of the Monster showcases the tortured greed and, in many instances, dishonesty that became routine in McCormick's–and his competitor Steven LaVere's–lust after Robert Johnson.
These white men victimized Johnson's surviving family members, made competing quasi-legal arrangements with them, and left the family abused and in many ways far worse off than if they'd never been 'found' at all.
And all this was before a Mississippi court established Claude Johnson, as Robert's common law son and most direct heir. (Several future BluesNotes will address that case, it's too much for one installment.)
Concluding Thoughts
In his afterword to Biography of a Phantom, Troutman concludes:
"Biography of a Phantom is on the one hand a testament to Mack McCormick's extraordinary reach and tenacity as a researcher and writer, and on the other it is a disturbing cautionary tale on the profoundly complex, at times harrowing, and sometimes haunting practice of telling (or selling) others' stories. Emerged from a vast archive filled with evidence to support either contention, it is both things, in ceaseless entanglement, surrounded by hellhounds and phantoms."
I think it is fair to say that both these men–Mack McCormick and Steve LaVere–were originally attracted to Johnson's legacy by the power of his music, the mystery of his skill, and his foreshortened life. But both turned to the dark side where a certain kind of specialized power, greed, and money beckoned.
McCormick's descent was complicated by his mental illness.
LaVere's was not.
All evidence seems to point to the fact that loving Robert Johnson's music can be fairly dangerous for one's soul–something to be undertaken with a certain eye for evil.
The devil is in the details.
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Thanks for being here.
Scott Ainslie
https://ScottAinslie.Subtack.com
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https://CattailMusic.com
I would hit the “like” button, but that was too disturbing. By the way, how did the capitalizing work out?