Listen: Stones in My Passway <Click here to play...> 

(In the accompanying mp3 file, Robert Johnson's guitar is heard through the left speaker, and my guitar transcription through the right speaker.)

The first time Keith Richards heard a Robert Johnson recording, he asked his friend, Brian Jones, who the other guy was playing with Johnson. I experienced exactly the same sensation. The separation between the thud of the bass part and the sound made by the treble strings is so pronounced, that it does sound like at least two different guitar parts. (This separation between the bass part and melody is illustrated particularly clearly in the fourth verse of the attached song, when the walking bass is interspersed with treble notes, but it is evident in Robert Johnson's guitar playing in other ways too--in fact much of the time, although not, alas, in my attempt to copy it.)

After the linear intro, which Robert Johnson plays with a bottleneck, the first chord of this song ("Stones in My Passway") exemplifies what is mysterious about Robert Johnson's guitar playing. My starting point in attempting to understand Johnson’s guitar playing was a transcription by Woody Mann, who suggests the song was played in a G tuning. Like a lot of blues musicians, Robert Johnson often made use of tunings other than the standard, classical ones This was in part so that a major chord could be easily created using a bottleneck or a single finger making a barre going straight across the strings. But in Johnson’s hands open tunings also have the effect of giving simple chords unexpected (often dissonant) shadings. I must have spent half an hour trying to decipher the first chord alone. I keep hearing different notes in it. How he produces the sound is still a mystery to me.

 
Robert Johnson, circa 1935.

 When I first heard a Robert Johnson record, my most salient impression was that the instrument accompanying the voice wasn't a guitar. It sounded like a completely different instrument to me. Even the chords that are strummed sound more like a piano where the notes in a chord are hit simultaneously, rather than plucked sequentially like the strings on a guitar.

Years later, after a long time spent in the music wilderness, no longer able to relate to rock music, or at least to call it my own, and in search of something more “authentic”, I decided to find out more about rural, acoustic blues music and I acquired a number of instructional guitar videotapes on the topic. One of the interesting discoveries was that, in contrast to the image of the blues-rock guitar god burning up and down the fret-board, in acoustic blues, the hand plucking the strings, demands at least as much skill as the one on the fret-board.

In finger-style playing, the thumb plays the bass strings, functioning like the left hand on a piano. Some blues musicians like Mississippi John Hurt typically used alternating patterns across the fourth, fifth and sixth strings, giving the rhythm a jaunty quality. Other musicians, such as Mance Lipscombe, make use of a bass note played on the same string throughout (I have heard this described as a “monotonic bass”), which gives his songs a more insistent, driving feeling. In both styles the first finger, or possibly first and second fingers, plays the higher treble strings.

As with other acoustic blues musicians, the fingering on the fret-board in Robert Johnson's songs is comparatively simple. It is the way that the strings are plucked, strummed and deadened, which contributes a great deal to the particular sonority of his playing.

The variation in the sound depends not only on whether the strings are strummed, or plucked, but also on whether the strum is a downstroke or an upstroke. Similarly, a bass string sounds completely different depending on whether it is struck and allowed to ring, or if it is muted. The bass in Robert Johnson's playing is muted but also surprisingly loud, giving it a percussive, colorless quality, from which the pitch of the note has largely been extracted. The treble strings, as noted before, are the opposite, their ringing overtones suggesting more notes than have actually been struck, giving them a much richer, and also, untypical harmonic shading. The chords often have a discordant, eerie quality, which along with a great deal of rhythmic variation, help to make the songs seem much more unpredictable than the ubiquitous blues pattern we know so well – even though, in terms of the basic structure, this is exactly what they are.

Robert Johnson, circa 1935.

 It is something of a disappointment to me that after all the time spent trying, though I have largely matched the rhythmic aspect of Robert Johnson's playing, and may even have got the tuning and fingering on the fret-board largely correct, when Robert Johnson mutes a bass string, it produces an idiosyncratic, deadened bass sound; when I do so, it produces something of the same effect, but there remains something about the sound which tells you that it's the sound of a hand muting the bass string. This is also true for the chords – mine always sound like chords strummed or plucked on the guitar, Robert Johnson's are just sound – so much so that, as I said before, at first, I wasn't even sure that they were produced by a guitar. Therein lies the small and yet enormous difference – but on the other hand, unlike Robert Johnson, I didn't sell my soul to the Devil in exchange for a unique guitar style – which brings me to a few tidbits around the music.

I suspect that even a dirt-poor white itinerant musician working in the late 1930s might have left more of a paper trail than Robert Johnson, and I wonder if this isn't in part due to racism. There is, according to the television documentary I saw, very little physical evidence left of the life Robert Johnson led. Even though he died a comparatively short time ago (1938), there isn't much to go on so as to triangulate the juke joint where he died, much less the crossroads where he did his deal with the devil.

B.B. King, the last of the generation to have begun playing music in the South before moving north and strapping on an electric guitar, claims to have seen Robert Johnson playing amidst a circle of people in a forest glade. It's a story I heard such a long time ago, that at this point, I am unsure about how much I am contributing to it, but, according to my recollection, B.B. described the peculiar, spooky, grip Robert Johnson had on the crowd. Another musician whose name I can't remember, said of Johnson, that when he wasn't drunk, which was seldom (I remember this particular turn of phrase), he wasn't too bad a guy.

Even without the character references, there's a whiff of sulfur around Robert Johnson. The song entitled “Me and the Devil” is the most conspicuous reference to his preoccupation with the Devil, but you only have to scan the words to his songs to see how often the Devil crops up. My attraction to the songs was principally the guitar playing, but being a frightened Catholic boy at heart, to whom the Devil always seemed much more tangible than God the Father, or even Jesus for that matter, Robert Johnson's interest in the Devil added a layer of intrigue.

There are other qualities in Robert Johnson that I see in myself. For a man who was, by all accounts such a big bad man, there is a naked, vulnerable, self-pitying streak in the words to his songs. He sometimes features himself as a “poor Bob” character in his songs, as he does in the third verse of “Stones in My Passway”. Neither does he have the clichéd, husky, masculine voice that is thought to characterize the blues. He doesn't sound like a “hoochie-coochie man”. In fact, his voice is thin and plaintive – slightly strangled even – more like Billie Holiday than Muddy Waters.

The vulnerability of his voice makes it seem authentic as opposed to the projection of a macho, stagy sort of persona, helping to distinguish a song such as “32-20” from the everyday misogyny implicit in other songs from a pre-politically-correct era and the threat is genuinely nasty.

“I send for my baby, man, and she don't come,

All the doctors in Hot Springs sure can't help her none.”

Often, as in a lot of blues songs, the words in Robert Johnson's songs seem fairly formulaic, but there are many other evocative lines. I chose to cover “Stones in My Passway” partly because of the title. I might have chosen “Hellhound on My Trail” for the same reason. I also love the image of “blues falling down like hail” from that song, which is enhanced by a particularly strange, descending, linear figure on the guitar.

Some of the lines are probably the result of having to fit in with a rhyming scheme, and maybe on occasion, can be attributed to my mishearing the recording. For this reason, I have been reluctant to look up the words to “Kind Hearted Woman” (one of Robert Johnson's best guitar arrangements), which tells of “a kind hearted woman [who] studies evil all the time.” It's a notion that, like much about Robert Johnson's music lingers in the mind after you've stopped listening to it.