Mrs. Anderson's intimate and heartening memoir about family time with Robert Johnson helps rescue Robert from the myth-mongers who began making things up about him before his body was cold: the Faustian bargain with the devil; the illiterate, natural genius stumbling out of the fields and into the recording studio; the loner with no knowable past and too little future; the romantic and mostly fantastic accounts of his short life.
As much as Americans prefer myths over truth, even at this distance–eighty-six years after his death–an actual glimpse of this young man is deeply rewarding.
Meeting Mrs. Anderson
Four months into the pandemic, in July 2020, I got a call from a music shop owner in Amherst, Massachusetts asking if he could give my phone number to a Mrs. Annye C. Anderson, Robert Johnson's 94-year-old stepsister.
My answer was immediate and definitive.
Mrs. Anderson's book, Brother Robert, had come out in June, and Peter Lauterbach, her co-author had other projects and couldn't help her with a second book.
When she called, she introduced herself as Mrs. Anderson and told me immediately:
"I'm old-fashioned. I don't go with all this first name business.
I am Mrs. Anderson to you, and you are Mr. Ainslie to me–until we get to know each other better."
Reading her book, it is clear that her insistence on this formality is about racial as well as personal dignity. For centuries in America, Blacks lived and died with only a first name, and even old men were called 'boy.'
Mr. and Mrs. (and Captain–amazingly all white men returned from the Civil War with that rank) were reserved for Whites only. Claiming last names and honorifics ran in her family, and in her nineties, she still insisted on them–especially with Whites; especially with strangers.
Mrs. Anderson was twelve in 1938 when a telegram reached them with news of Robert's death. As she was growing up, her musical, funny, kind, and entertaining stepbrother was in and out of the family homes in Memphis–a welcome and respectful presence when he was around.
When I visited Mrs. Anderson at her apartment in Amherst, Massachusetts she wouldn't let me take her photograph. Promoting the book was hard because everybody wanted to take a photograph. But, the pandemic had prevented her from going out to the beauty salon to have her hair done and she wasn't going to allow any photos to be taken until she had gotten herself fixed up.
I brought Mrs. Anderson a copy of my book of annotated transcriptions of Johnson's recorded songs, Robert Johnson/At the Crossroads (Hal Leonard, 1992).
In return, she spontaneously gave me a copy of Brother Robert: Growing Up With Robert Johnson and inscribed it.
There was nothing transactional about this. It wasn't a trade because there was no deal-making involved. We exchanged gifts, neither of us expecting anything in return.
And, as you might know, Mrs. Anderson got the better of me: she gave me a quart of her homemade barbecue sauce, about which she said two things: it was Robert's favorite, and, even if she told me all the ingredients that were in it (which she wouldn't), I still couldn't make it like she did.
I was in her debt when we left that day. But reading her book, immersing myself in her Memphis family lore, and watching these very specific and particular memories come alive amplified that debt.
I apologized to Mrs. Anderson when I gave her my book. Completed in 1992, I knew there were inaccuracies in it.
In the years leading up to my book's publication, I followed the information and reasonable speculation of the time–for instance, that Robert was estranged from his mother’s first husband, Charles Dodds Spencer, and unwelcome in the homes of the Memphis side of the family (something Mrs. Anderson emphatically denies: Robert was welcome and she said his son, Claude, would have been welcome, too.)
So much has been learned in the past 32 years, with Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta; Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow’s rigorous Up Jumped The Devil, and now Mrs. Anderson’s more informal and deeply personal Brother Robert, we have a much more complete portrait of this likable and ambitious young man.
In framing his life and the transcriptions of Johnson's music, I worked hard to humanize him–to place him in a historical context and accord him the respect he deserved as an intelligent artist and a young musician aware of his surroundings and the events of his time–a young man trying to escape a life of sharecropping, oppression, and poverty. The quality and characteristics of his recorded work led me there.
The strongest evidence we had–and what makes us care about Johnson at all–was cut into the grooves of the old 78s. It is there that our attention could rest on solid ground. I was on the right track. Mrs. Anderson's account takes much of my informed conjecture and fleshes it out, literally. Brother Robert becomes flesh and bone.
During our visit, I offered to play her some of Robert's songs. I played her some standard tuning pieces and some slide guitar (When You Gotta Good Friend and Come On In My Kitchen).
The moment I started, she nodded and when I finished one, she said, "I knew the minute you started that was Robert." There are few compliments to compete with that.
Brother Robert is dedicated to her daughter, and to her Sister Carrie, "who suffered greatly and never got her reward"–a clear reference to the victimization of the family by Blues scabs and shysters who made money off the recordings, photographs of her brother Robert, and stiffed the family of their share.
Though Sister Carrie helped shepherd a sizeable estate into being, the way the legal cases broke (and likely back-channel negotiations with Steven C. LaVere) she and her family entirely cut out of the estate they had helped protect.
On top of having photographs essentially stolen from them and receiving no benefit in return, when Sister Carrie requested their return, Blues researcher Mack McCormick sent her an empty envelope. Sometimes it is embarrassing to be white.
Throughout Mrs. Anderson's account there is unnecessary cruelty in their treatment at the hands of Whites, and though horrifying, one should not be surprised.
Greed and racism have always gone hand in hand.
Mrs. Anderson's book begins this way:
I called him Brother Robert. He called me Baby Sis, or Little Girl. We weren't blood. We were family.
First time I remember Brother Robert he helped us move to Memphis from the country in 1929.
My little legs couldn't make it up the big staircase leading to our new house. I felt someone scoop me up and carry me. On his long, lanky legs, he took those steps two at a time.
From then on, he was around sometimes for the rest of his life.
Those were the years Brother Robert was into his music. He used to sit out on those tall steps, and pick his guitar, way up in the air.
I saw him go from wearing patches to pinstripes clodhoppers to Florsheims.
I knew him when he supposedly agreed to his deal with the devil, while he made records, right up to when the telegram came to our sister's house with the news that he had died.
I don't recognize the person in the stories other people tell.
As a child, Mrs. Anderson had to stay close to the family home. Her mama didn't want her traipsing around after Robert downtown. When she was old enough she could go with Robert to the movies down on Beale Street.
Once I got to go to Beale Street, I’d tag along with Brother Robert, Brother Son, and Sister Carrie to the movies at the Palace Theater. They liked to see Mae West and Bette Davis, and I was a nuisance, always running to the bathroom and wanting popcorn.
Most of the movies we saw at the Palace were Westerns. Buck Jones and Tom Mix were Brother Robert’s favorite cowboys. He wore that big Stetson, like them. All of the young men in our family wore Stetsons–that was on the go.
My father and Uncle Will wore Dobbs.
At the Palace, Son and Brother Robert saw Gene Autry in Tumbling Tumbleweeds. Gene and another guitar player did a song called “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine.” That piece became a part of Son and Brother Robert’s repertoire whenever they entertained...
It’s my understanding that Brother Robert would hang out at the Palace while waiting on his next gig.
Mr. Barrasso, the owner, let you stay all day on one ticket price. Brother Robert would sleep while the movie played over and over–and the Looney Tunes, shorts, and newsreels ran.
He’d sit with the guitar across his chest, watching the old-time cowboy movies. He’d cool off in there on a hot day, or warm up on a cold day, until the time to meet up with his friends, or return to Sister Carrie’s.”
[p. 51-52]
And then, a few pages later, this:
Brother Robert spoke at times of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. He knew about the NAACP and kept up with the Scottsboro Boys’ case–the people involved had been hoboing to Memphis, just like Brother Robert often did. He followed Paul Robeson’s activism and enjoyed Robeson’s movie Showboat.
He was no dummy, he read the paper. You can hear his awareness of racism in his music.
He doesn’t want sundown to catch him where he isn’t supposed to be. He’s telling you something. He knows if you get wrong in the white folks’ neighborhood, they’ll harm you…”
[p. 57]
It turns out that the hoped-for romantic mythology of Robert Johnson is a good deal less interesting than the intelligent, ambitious musician himself.
Johnson was, in many ways, the first modern bluesman who incorporated recorded music in his oral tradition of firsthand performances by Delta blues masters.
Politically astute and aware, he was not some miraculously talented rube who wandered out of the fields to amaze us, but a talented working musician and recording artist with a very refined idea of what he was doing. The evidence is there in his recordings, and now, in these recent books about his time here.
For those who want to have a fuller picture of the man behind his remarkable recordings, made when he was just 25 and 26 years old, the books mentioned here are all valuable. And the recordings, re-issued numerous times and in different editions, are all worthwhile.
In the digitally remastered Centennial re-issues, with headphones on, you can hear Johnson turn his head off-axis, away from the microphones as he is singing, presumably to look at his guitar neck. It is a thrilling experience and makes one feel like you are in the room with him.
I recommend these books and this deep listening to you.
Thanks for being here,
Scott Ainslie
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The older I get, the more embarrassed I am to be white.