Bob Dylan on Robert Johnson

I copied Johnson's words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction-themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease. I didn't have any of these dreams or thoughts but I was going to acquire them. I thought about Johnson a lot, wondered who his audience could have been. It's hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. "The stuff I got'll bust your brains out," he sings. Johnson is serious, like the scorched earth.

 As great as the greats were, he goes one step further. You can't imagine him singing, "Washington's a bourgeois town." He wouldn't have noticed or if he did, it would have been irrelevant. More than thirty years later, I would see Johnson for myself in eight seconds' worth of 8-millimeter film shot in Ruleville, Mississippi, on a brightly lit afternoon street by some Germans in the late '30s. Some people questioned whether it was really him, but slowing the eight seconds down so it was more like eighty seconds, you can see that it really is Robert Johnson, has to be-couldn't be anyone else. He's playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar. There's a harp rack with a harmonica around his neck.

But I'd never heard of Robert Johnson, never heard the name, never seen it on any of the compilation blues records. Hammond said I should listen to it, that this guy could "whip anybody."  I had the thick acetate of the Robert Johnson record in my hands and I asked Van Ronk if he ever heard of him. Dave said, nope, he hadn't, and I put it on the record player so we could listen to it. From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up.

From Spirituals to Swing
An Early Black-Music Concert from Spirituals to Swing

And it completes a circle, since in the early Sixties the young Dylan heard the first reissue of Robert Johnson’s music and, he says, “Johnson’s words made my nerves quiver like piano wires”. In Chronicles Dylan says it was the combination of Robert Johnson’s “dark night of the soul”, Woody Guthrie’s “hopped-up union meeting sermons”, Brecht and Weill’s sardonic style in Pirate Jenny and the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s surreal dislocations that came together and gave him his own voice.

Robert Lockwood Jr. on Bob Dylan & playing a Robert Johnson song (steady rollin' man)

Steady Rollin' Man

Robert Johnson