Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues.(Book Review)

Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. Elijah Wald. New York: Amistad, 2004.

Recognized as the greatest blues artist ever recorded, guitarist Robert Johnson (1911-1938) embodies for popular culture the Delta blues of the 1930s. In this fine book, musician and author Elijah Wald becomes the latest of such renowned commentators as Sam Charters and Peter Guralnick to tackle Johnson's life and music. What makes this book unique is that Wald argues that Johnson's place in the history of the blues has been misrepresented through much mythmaking, and that Johnson in his day was "essentially a nonentity." By looking at both Johnson's later white fans and black reactions of his time, he demonstrates how Johnson went from a nobody to the reigning figure in current perceptions of the blues.

Wald believes that understanding Johnson means defining the blues as popular music that flourished in the United States from the jazz age to the dawn of disco and soul. Johnson emerges as an ordinary individual, neither exemplifying the antisocial "grungy, hard-bitten machismo" of the dominant blues image, nor confined to the "wild Delta primitivism" that many white purists have imposed upon him. He was, concludes Wald, a minor commercial figure and representative of many bluesmen who were "intelligent professionals" well versed in the many commercial genres of popular music of their day, and eager to make money in mainstream, big-selling pop. Delta residents recognized commercial successes like Lonnie Johnson and Leroy Carr--whose polished professionalism caused later white listeners to reject them--but few knew of Johnson beyond the musicians with whom he played and whom he influenced. In the Delta, Johnson was memorable not because he exemplified the best of the local style, but because he assimilated the most popular sounds from the outside.

Wald analyzes the blues scene from within rather than through the distorted lens of "modern fans, experts, or academics." Johnson is a convenient vehicle for two reasons. First, Johnson is the only prewar blues artist whose records remain popular today, and is thus ...