His birthday present was a Stella concert guitar. Its brown-finish wooden fingerboard included dot inlays along the frets, its sound hole had a rosette design, and its six-string configuration featured a classic tuner headstock: The instrument was beautiful, luxurious, and ghastly. A guitar meant Robert would actually have to play it; a guitar meant Robert would actually have to be good.
“Where’d you get the money for this?” he asked Leroy, whom we would later question through the bars of his cell at Angola, where he was serving 10-to-20 for bank robbery after a steady eight-year descent into iniquity. “They give you a raise at the lumber yard?”
“I tried my hand at the tables. Beginner’s luck.”
The first twelve years of Robert Johnson’s childhood, regardless of his present concerns, could be seen as a paradigm of musical development. At the age of nine he’d proven himself a quick study of the harmonica and Jew’s harp under his brother’s patient tutelage. At the age of six he’d glued Coca-Cola poptops to the soles of his saddle shoes and danced taps on the granite slabs in his neighbor’s barn lot. At the age of eight he’d taught himself the mechanics of percussion by slapping spoons against the flank of his thigh. What frightened Robert Johnson about owning a guitar, however, was its undeniable, inescapable portent of maturity. Guitars were for men.
“You got to name it,” his older brother said through a handsome grin. “Every guitar’s got to have a name.”
At the same moment Robert was going to tell Leroy he had no such inkling, he heard his own name spoken by someone standing on the sidewalk in front of the house. Robert squinted against the sunlight and wiped sweat from his brow what better to catch sight of a woman leaning against the mailbox stenciled with the counterfeit name of C.D. Spencer. The past years had been hard on her for certain, hair gone gray, cane in hand, face left wrinkly, but she still cut a powerful figure much the same. Robert gripped his guitar and managed to say, “Momma.”
Our husband spent the next few years living with his mother in Robinsonville, Mississippi, a sharecropper settlement in the northwest corner of the Delta. During those idylls of his youth—chopping cotton at the Abbay & Leatherman Plantation outside of a town called Commerce, reciting the alphabet at a one-room schoolhouse built along the banks of Indian Creek—Robert Johnson never forgot the strain of his life’s ambition. He practiced on “Julia” every chance come his way.
One afternoon when Robert was fourteen, his mother found him playing the Stella six-string in an empty bathtub left for rubbish in a field near their house. The acoustics of cast iron suited the instrument’s sound. Robert was busy learning how to use the key of a sardine can as a guitar pick, but he cut his song short when he noticed his mother crossing the field. She sat on the bathtub’s roll rim and said, “Fiddle sounds right sweet.”
“I guess so.”
“I mean it, dear heart.”
“I know so.”
“Listen here a minute. I’m sorry about what happened this morning. I shouldn’t ever do such a thing to you.” Julia’s eyes followed the trajectory of a bumblebee, but nary a flower blossomed along the ground. “It’s just that when you asked me about the thing you did, all grown up and the like, I realized you take after somebody I knew a long time back.”
“Take after who?”
“That’s why I’m sitting here talking to you now. Got something to tell you. It’s about time you were knowing about it. And I didn’t want Dusty to hear.”
It cannot be said Robert got along with his stepfather. Straw boss of roughly eighty-five tenant sharecroppers around Commerce, respectable deacon in a local congregation, and modest resident of Tunica County for all of fifty-one years, William “Dusty” Willis was given his nickname because he had a tendency to walk so fast a cloud of dust would billow around his feet and legs. He did not allow for spare moments. Dusty Willis thought of his second wife’s son as a spoilt city boy whose guitar was the devil’s tool. He called it a pitchfork.
“Dusty doesn’t want to hear nothing, Momma.”
“Anything.”
“Dusty doesn’t want to hear anything, Momma.”
“He’s done his best to raise you like you were his own son. Past couple years he’s kept food over your head and a roof on the table. But Dusty’s not your father. You never even met him.”
“How’s that now?”
“The father you know isn’t your real father.” Julia swept a cow killer from her threadbare knee-high, frowning at the bug’s coat of red and black fuzz. “You’re not a Spencer. You’re not a Dodds. You know you’re not a Willis. Your real father’s name was Johnson.”
Julia told her son about a “love affair” she had with “the kindest, gentlest man” around the time of her husband’s departure for Memphis. She told him how her husband, try as he might, never forgave the sin. She told him of her own guilt over the “union at night” whose only consequence worth mention was the “blessing of his birth.” At the end of his mother’s confession, Robert said not a word to her—he had questions plenty, but answers would come—even as she stood from the tub broken beyond repair, even as she left the grassy field scattershot with clover.
What stuck longest with Robert was the name of Johnson. During the years to follow, he felt it necessary to adopt the name as his own, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone the truth. To Ms. Pamela Lafayette, headmistress of the Indian Creek School, he remained Little Bobby Spencer, the boy with poor eyesight and beautiful script who sat in the third row from the back. To Mr. Samuel Oglethorpe, overseer of the Abbay & Leatherman Plantation, he remained Dusty Willis Junior, a farmhand earning a dollar a day to wield a hoe through clumps of buck brush. Robert Johnson never told anyone his real name until the day he met our predecessor.
On Saturday, April 11, 1928, Robert Johnson decided he would run away from home. Such thoughts were nothing new. Earlier in the evening, just as usual, Robert’s stepfather had forbidden him to attend the Saturday night ball held regular in a barn behind the Robinsonville Mercantile, and later in the evening, just as usual, Robert put a row of feather pillows beneath his patchwork coverlet and snuck out his bedroom’s double-hung sash window. He had yet to get caught.
The Robinsonville Mercantile was a good hour away, but Robert made it there in forty-five minutes easy. Tonight was special. Son House and his crew, legends throughout the dance halls of the Delta, bluesmen of bluesmen, professionals along the circuits of the South, were expected to arrive from a gig in Fayetteville and begin their first set at nine o’clock. Although most Saturday night balls didn’t get up running ’til well past ten, “The Godfather of Blues Music” could draw an early crowd by virtue of reputation alone. Somewhere close to a hundred souls were milling about the dry goods stock when Robert arrived at the scene his stepfather would often refer to as the devil’s larder.
He joined a group of friends from the county, Johnny Boyd Johnson, Frank Diamond, Harpo Wells, Curtis Peters, Albert Tad Lipscomb, and Johnny Shines, who over the next nine years would accompany Robert to St. Louis, Charleston, Toronto, and New York. All of them were talking biggity about their talents in relation to Son House—“I can play circles around him” and “He got nothing hear-tell over me”—when the man himself walked through the crowd past them towards the barn. Afterwards, the boys scarce made a sound except until a girl standing near them did.
“Catmightydignifiedtilthedogwalkby.”