"So, let us not be blind to our differences - but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." JFK, June 10, 1963.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Robert Johnson: "Lost" Third Photo Emerges
There had been only two confirmed photos of Robert Johnson, that great blues player, who recorded in the 1930s and died in his 20s.
Now a third has surfaced and been restored (see above). In the photo, Johnson poses with a guitar next to friend and fellow bluesman Johnny Shines.
These are the two pictures that most people know:
In 1994, the US Postal Service used the photo booth image as the basis for a stamp (minus the cigarette).
I got into the "Robert Johnson revival" right around the time The Complete Recordings were released on CD in 1990. I had been listening to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, so it was only a matter of time before I was digging Robert Johnson, Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Blind Willie McTell, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Strangely enough (or maybe not), it was on a trip through Memphis, crossing the great Mississippi and adjacent lands that listening to the blues suddenly made sense to me... (in its proper context)....
Of course it was always a kick to know that the British rockers who came of age in the early 60s all grew up listening to Robert Johnson and trying to emulate Johnson, other American bluesmen, and early rockers like Chuck Berry... Robert Johnson's King of The Delta Blues Singers came out on vinyl LP in 1961 and had the grooves immediately worn out by the likes of The Stones, The Who, The Yardbirds, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, The Animals... Keith Richards famously said, as many listeners have remarked since, that he thought that there were two guitarists on the Robert Johnson recordings, due to Johnson's ability to strum rhythm on the guitar apparently at the same time he was picking out leads. (This phenomena may have contributed to the legend that Johnson sold his soul to the Devil at the Crossroads in exchange for becoming the greatest blues guitarist of all time.) The Stones did a cover of Johnson's "Love in Vain" (which they bizarrely credited to "Jagger/Richards", even though Johnson's 1936 recording of the song was well known, at least in the circles of blues aficionados that The Stones emerged from).
75 years after his death, Robert Johnson continues to haunt, disturb, and thrill.
I dare you to listen to "Me and The Devil, were walking side by side..." and not get goosebumps....
UPDATE: Just found out this photo was found for sale 8 years ago on eBay, but the seller did not know the identity of the two men in the photograph. Now the photo has been restored, authenticated, and released.
Robert Johnson poses with fellow blues musician Johnny Shines in the newly released photograph. Photograph: Robert Johnson Estate/Getty Images
Perhaps the most infamous music deal ever struck involved no contracts and no lawyers. The blues singer Robert Johnson, so the legend goes, acquired his unearthly musical talent after meeting the devil at a crossroads.
Until now, there were only two verified photographs of Johnson (1911-1938), who remains the most inspirational musician produced by the Mississippi Delta and the man Eric Clapton once anointed as "the most important blues musician who ever lived". This weekend a third, newly cleaned-up and authenticated image has been released by the Johnson estate showing him standing next to musician Johnny Shines.
Forensic work on the photograph began in 2007, when Lois Gibson, who works with the Houston police department, analysed the features of the long-fingered figure holding the guitar. Gibson, who found the identity of the sailor kissing the nurse in the Life magazine photo of Times Square on VJ day the second world war ended, has ruled that "it appears the individual is Robert Johnson. All the features are consistent, if not identical." The only differences, she added, were due to the angle of the camera or the lighting.
The new photograph came to light eight years ago, when a classical guitarist called Steven "Zeke" Schein was searching eBay for an old guitar. He spotted a thumbnail picture with a caption that read "Old Snapshot Blues Guitar BB King???" and bought it. On inspection neither man in the photograph looked like BB King, but Schein noticed the length of the man's fingers on the guitar and the way his left eye was narrower than his right.
One of the other two known photographs of Johnson is postage stamp size and is thought to have been taken in a booth in the 1930s. It was first published in Rolling Stone in 1986, the year that Johnson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and shows him in a button-down shirt, staring directly at the lens. A cigarette hangs from his lips and his long fingers rest on a guitar neck.
The second image was taken at the Hooks Bros photographic studio in Memphis. In it, Johnson sits cross-legged on a stool with his guitar, wearing a pin-striped suit and a tie. This portrait was used on the cover of Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, the two-CD boxed set issued by Columbia Records in 1990.
In the seven decades since his mysterious death, bluesman Robert Johnson’s legend has grown—the tragically short life, the “crossroads” tale of supernatural talent, the genuine gift that inspired Dylan, Clapton, and other greats—but his image remains elusive: only two photos of Johnson have ever been seen by the public. In 2005, on eBay, guitar maven Zeke Schein thought he’d found a third. Schein’s quest to authenticate the picture only led to more questions, both about Johnson himself and about who controls his valuable legacy.
In June 2005, Steven “Zeke” Schein was killing time on his home computer when he logged on to eBay and typed “old guitar” into the auction site’s search engine. Classically trained as a guitarist, Schein had turned his longtime passion for the instrument into a profession when, in 1989, he had joined the sales force at Matt Umanov Guitars, in Manhattan’s West Village. In the more than 15 years that Schein had worked there, he had cultivated a regular clientele that included Patti Smith, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, and record producers Daniel Lanois and John Leventhal; he had also sold guitars to Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp, among other celebrities. His job had also exposed him to the painstaking, detail-oriented detective work that often goes into identifying and authenticating vintage guitars. Even when the make, model, and serial number of an instrument are apparent, pinpointing its age and value sometimes requires scrutinizing the idiosyncrasies of its construction. The design of the instrument’s tailpiece, its headstock, the number of frets embedded in its neck, its paint job or finish—all could be identifying factors.
Schein enjoyed this aspect of the business, and when he had nothing better to do, he would sometimes log on to eBay to test his knowledge against the sellers who were advertising vintage guitars on the Web site. At the very least, he found it amusing that some people had no idea what they were selling.
As he pored over the mass of texts and thumbnail photos that the eBay search engine had pulled up on that day in 2005, one strangely worded listing caught Schein’s eye. It read, “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B.B. King???” He clicked on the link, then took in the sepia-toned image that opened on his monitor. Two young black men stared back at Schein from what seemed to be another time. They stood against a plain backdrop wearing snazzy suits, hats, and self-conscious smiles. The man on the left held a guitar stiffly against his lean frame.
Neither man looked like B. B. King, but as Schein studied the figure with the guitar, noticing in particular the extraordinary length of his fingers and the way his left eye seemed narrower and out of sync with his right, it occurred to him that he had stumbled across something significant and rare.
If there was one thing that Schein was as passionate about as guitars, it was the blues, particularly the Delta blues, that acoustic, guitar-driven form of country blues that started in the Mississippi Delta and thrived on records from the late 1920s to almost 1940. Not long after he’d begun working at Matt Umanov, Schein’s customers and co-workers had turned him on to this powerful music form, and, once hooked, he had studied the genre—its music and its history—with the same obsessive attention to detail that he brought to his work. And the longer Schein looked at the photograph on his computer monitor, the more convinced he became that it depicted one of the most mysterious and mythologized blues artists produced by the Delta: the guitarist, singer, and songwriter whom Eric Clapton once anointed “the most important blues musician who ever lived.”
That’s not B. B. King, Schein said to himself. Because it’s Robert Johnson.
If his hunch was correct, he’d made quite a find. Johnson is the Delta-blues guitarist who on one dark Mississippi night “went to the crossroad,” as he wrote in one of his most famous songs, to barter his soul to the Devil for otherworldly talent. At least that’s how the legend that’s become ingrained in popular culture has it. (In the song, “Cross Road Blues,” Johnson is actually pleading with God for mercy, not bargaining with the Devil.) A short life, a death under murky circumstances, and a body of recorded work consisting of but 29 songs only added to that legend. So did the preternatural quality of his guitar playing, the bone-deep sadness of some of his music and lyrics, the haunting quaver of his smooth, high voice, and the dark symbolism of his songs. In some respects, you could say that Johnson is the James Dean of the blues, an artist whose tragically foreshortened life and small if brilliant body of work make him a figure of great romantic allure. This was especially true in the 60s and early 70s, when little was known about Johnson, and his music was being taken up by the likes of Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. By the early 1990s, 50 years after his death, he was a platinum-selling artist, and since then he has influenced a whole new generation of guitar players, among them John Mayer and Jack White.
Defiant and Haunted
While popular culture loves a mystery, its most obsessive fans abhor a vacuum; thus there are vast archives of bootleg album outtakes and Ph.D. dissertations on forgotten record labels. The lives of poor, itinerant black musicians in the rural South of the late 1920s and 30s aren’t the most well-documented of lives, but over the past 35 years, blues researchers and historians have done a pretty good job of revealing the man behind the Johnson myth, from his birth in Hazlehurst, Mississippi (May 8, 1911, is often cited as Johnson’s birth date, though his birth certificate has yet to be found), to his death, which probably occurred in the Baptist Town section of Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1938. According to Elijah Wald’s 2004 book, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, there is currently more information available about Johnson “than about almost any of the bigger blues stars of his day.” Still, in the field of Johnson research, attempting to separate fact from fiction from politics can be maddening. As Wald writes, “So much research has been done [on Johnson] that I have to assume the overall picture is fairly accurate. Still, this picture has been pieced together from so many tattered and flimsy scraps that almost any one of them must to some extent be taken on faith.”
The biggest hole in this patchwork is the one thing that would establish Johnson’s humanity in a society hooked on visual media: photographs. In the years since he died, only two known photographs of Johnson have ever been seen by the public. The first of those images is believed to have been taken in the early 1930s and has been described as Johnson’s “photo-booth self-portrait.” The size of a postage stamp, it provided the public its first real glimpse of Johnson when it was published, more than a dozen years after it was found, in Rolling Stone magazine in 1986, the year that Johnson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the photo, Johnson, wearing a button-down shirt with thin suspenders and holding a guitar, stares at the lens with eyes that look both defiant and haunted. A cigarette dangles from his lips, and although the guitar is only partially visible, his long left-hand fingers can be seen forming an indeterminate chord on the guitar’s neck.
If the photo-booth shot was a low-budget affair, the second image had production values. Taken by Hooks Bros., a photographic studio located in Memphis, it shows Johnson once again holding his guitar as he sits cross-legged on what appears to be a tapestry-covered stool. But this time, the bluesman is resplendent in a pin-striped suit, a striped tie, shiny dress shoes, and a narrow-brimmed fedora cocked over his right eye. He is smiling in the photo, but his eyes make him look like a deer caught in the headlights.
The Hooks Bros. photo was first widely seen in 1990, when it was featured on the cover of Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, the two-CD boxed set issued by Columbia Records that collected what, at the time, was Johnson’s entire surviving canon. The set sold more than a million copies, establishing Johnson as the biggest-selling pre-war blues artist of all time.
Schein had bought the boxed set about a year after it came out and had spent numerous hours immersing himself in the music and studying Johnson’s life story. The crossroads legend held little magic for him. After all, Schein dealt with professional musicians every day and knew plenty of talented guitarists and songwriters who toiled in obscurity or struggled for recognition, and even some who had died just as their careers were taking off. For Schein, Johnson’s appeal wasn’t any aura of mystery but rather his humanness. Born illegitimate, Johnson had lived a life freighted with alienation and misfortune. In 1930 he lost his first wife and their baby in childbirth, and yet, in the wake of this tragedy, Johnson managed to become a guitar virtuoso who still influences musicians today. He was “one guy with a guitar standing to [make] his peace,” Schein says. As far as he was concerned, Johnson’s story needed no embellishment.
With the eBay photo still on his computer monitor, Schein dug up his copy of the Johnson boxed set and took another look. Not only was he more confident than ever that he had found a photo of Robert Johnson, he had a hunch who the other man in the photo was, too: Johnny Shines, a respected Delta-blues artist in his own right, and one of the handful of musicians who, in the early 1930s and again in the months before Johnson’s death, had traveled with him from town to town to look for gigs or stand on busy street corners and engage in a competitive practice known as “cuttin’ heads,” whereby one blues musician tries to draw away the crowd (and their money) gathered around another musician by standing on a nearby corner and outplaying him.
Steven “Zeke” Schein at Matt Umanov Guitars in New York City.Photograph by Gasper Tringale.
Shines had died in 1992. His picture was included in the boxed-set booklet, and Schein saw a resemblance; if both of his hunches were right, then the photo was even more of a find. At that point, Schein became possessed of two thoughts: One was “to hold the photo in my hands,” he says. The other was “to protect it.”
Because the image had just recently been listed, by a New York–based antiques dealer, bidding was still at a reasonable $25, but Schein guessed that the ending bid was going to be many times that initial figure. He had just sold a beautiful 1920s Stella acoustic guitar—a favorite among the old country-blues musicians—and when he added together the money he’d gotten for that and some extra cash on hand, he came up with a budget of $3,100. If someone spends more than that, he figured, the bidder will also know it’s a photo of Robert Johnson, so it will be protected.
A co-worker of Schein’s set up a computer “snipe” program that automatically bid on the picture up to the specified limit, and Schein held his breath. Approximately $2,200 later, he held the photo in his hands. What had he gotten for his money? An extremely fragile, three-inch-by-four-inch photo that bore no identifying marks that could be traced to a photographer’s studio, no date stamp that could establish when the picture had been taken, no provenance whatsoever save for a note from the seller saying he’d purchased the photo in Atlanta. Schein was still convinced that he had found and purchased a photo of Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines. The question was, could he convince anyone else? And, if he could, would he then be able to navigate the complicated and treacherous legal minefield surrounding Johnson’s lucrative and much disputed estate?
The Right to Play the Blues
The story of Robert Johnson is usually presented as a Faustian bargain, but it is really a tale of possession. Johnson was the product of an affair his mother, Julia Dodds, had with a plantation worker. Johnson had unusually long fingers and a bad left eye (that has been attributed to a cataract), and by the time he had recorded his canon, he had earned the right to sing and play the blues.
His youth was spent moving between homes in Memphis and Robinsonville, Mississippi, 30 miles south of Memphis, where he lived with his mother and her second husband on a plantation. There he was known for his interest in guitar and his reluctance to work the fields.
It was in the aftermath of his wife’s and child’s deaths—Johnson was approximately 19 at the time—that his musical education is believed to have begun in earnest. In 1930 the ferocious blues singer Son House had moved to Robinsonville to begin a fruitful musical partnership with the guitar ace Willie Brown, and Johnson became a regular presence at their performances, although the two elder bluesmen perceived him as a nuisance. House’s recollection of Johnson—as told to folklorist Julius Lester in 1965—was of a “little boy” who would commandeer either his or Brown’s guitar during their breaks and irritate the audience with his marginal skills. Perhaps Johnson sensed, too, that he was not ready for the stage, because around this time he moved back to the Hazlehurst area, his birthplace, where he began an apprenticeship with a blues guitarist named Ike Zimmerman (the spelling of his name is disputed) which would transform Johnson into the virtuoso he is known as today.
That Robert Johnson is remembered as a guitarist who could play almost any song after hearing it just once on the radio; a singer whose repertoire, like those of most itinerant bluesmen, included numbers made famous by Bing Crosby, Irish standards, and even polkas, in addition to his own songs; a performer whose travels took him as far north as New York City and even Canada in search of an audience; and an artist who could move an audience to tears and then disappear into the crowd as if he had never played at all.
Clearly, Johnson was a man of some ambition, and in November of 1936 he traveled to San Antonio, Texas, for the first of two recording sessions for the American Record Corporation. Once in the makeshift studio, he played facing a corner, with his back to the technicians and other musicians who had come to record, a move that has been variously interpreted as shyness, an attempt to prevent other guitarists from seeing his unusual playing style, or a street-savvy technique for getting the most sound out of his acoustic guitar. Whatever the case, Johnson recorded approximately 16 songs over three days, most of them in two or three takes. One of those tunes, “Terraplane Blues,” a double-entendre-laden number, was issued as a 78-r.p.m. single on the Vocalion label and became a modest regional hit, selling approximately 5,000 copies. As a result, Johnson was invited back to Texas, this time, in June 1937, to Dallas, where he recorded another 13 tracks, but no more hits.
A little more than a year later, Johnson would be dead—and probably destined for obscurity had his music not already gotten the attention of a record producer who would exert a huge impact on popular music in the 20th century. By the time John H. Hammond Jr. came across Johnson’s records, he had persuaded Benny Goodman to integrate his band, discovered a young Billie Holiday in Harlem, and recorded Count Basie, but he was just getting started. As a talent scout for Columbia Records in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Hammond would discover Aretha Franklin and sign Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan to the label.
Hammond’s role in Johnson’s legacy is pivotal. He first championed Johnson in print in 1937 when, writing under a pseudonym for the left-wing publication New Masses, he asserted that “Johnson makes Leadbelly look like an accomplished poseur.” Then, in 1938, Hammond sought to feature Johnson in a concert he was producing at Carnegie Hall that December called “From Spirituals to Swing.” He sent an emissary into the South to track down Johnson and bring him back to New York. But as the day of the show approached, Hammond learned that Johnson was dead—possibly murdered. On the night of the concert, Big Bill Broonzy took Johnson’s place, but Hammond memorialized the late Delta artist by playing two recordings of his songs for the Carnegie Hall audience.
More than 20 years later, Hammond would expose Johnson’s music to a whole new generation of listeners. Columbia now controlled Johnson’s recordings, and in 1961, Hammond oversaw the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers, the first album-length collection of Johnson’s music, which helped spark a blues revival in America. According to the album’s producer, Frank Driggs, it sold approximately 10,000 copies upon its initial release—impressive for an obscure, dead, vernacular performer.
“The Music Almost Repelled Me”
Not long before the album became available to the public, Hammond had given a young Bob Dylan an early acetate copy of the LP. Near the end of his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan recounts the rather intense effect King of the Delta Blues Singers had on him. If he hadn’t heard the album at such an early, formative stage in his career, Dylan writes, “there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn’t have felt free or upraised enough to write.”
King of the Delta Blues Singers had an arguably larger impact across the Atlantic in Britain, where a new generation of rock ’n’ rollers were learning their chops and finding their influences. One of them was a shy, alienated teenager named Eric Clapton, who was given the Johnson album by one of his early bandmates. “At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play,” Clapton writes in his recently published memoir, Clapton: The Autobiography.
The chance of this music’s having such an immediate and visceral effect on an aspiring rock star today is, frankly, pretty slim. To ears accustomed to modern, computer-generated effects that can make almost anyone sound like a guitar god or a vocal powerhouse, Johnson’s music can sound thin and primitive at first spin, even though it’s remarkably complex and polished for its time. As Clapton explains in his autobiography, Johnson employed a fingerpicking style that had him “simultaneously playing a disjointed bass line on the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings, and lead on the treble strings while singing at the same time.” Occasionally, Johnson worked in some bottle-slide playing, too, which involves placing a small glass bottle or sleeve over the left pinkie, then sliding it up and down the guitar’s neck to create the pitch-bending wail that is a signature of the blues. Even accomplished guitarists can have a hard time re-creating Johnson’s sound, let alone mastering it. Says Dave Rubin, an author for the music publisher Hal Leonard Corporation who led the team of musicians who transcribed Johnson’s songs for the guitar instructional Robert Johnson: The New Transcriptions, “When you get to ‘Crossroads’ and ‘Preachin’ Blues’—oh my God, forget it. It sounds like three guys playing.”
Johnson’s guitar chops were just one part of the equation, however. For a blues singer, he was more of a crooner than a croaker, and his voice sometimes had a quaver that could sound haunted or seductive. There was also an urgency to Johnson’s singing that made him sound “like he’s about five minutes away from the electric chair,” Driggs says. Lyrics such as “She got a mortgage on my body now, a lien on my soul,” from “Traveling Riverside Blues,” could also have a devastating poetic economy. In Chronicles, Dylan recounts writing Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper to examine their structure and finding “big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction—themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease.” (Dylan could have been talking about himself.) He doesn’t put much stock in criticism that is often leveled at the blues artist: that Johnson’s work is derivative. In Chronicles, Dylan plays King of the Delta Blues Singers for his friend Dave Van Ronk, the respected folksinger known as the Mayor of MacDougal Street, but Van Ronk mostly hears a musician mimicking his predecessors. “He didn’t think Johnson was very original. I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite. I thought Johnson was as original as could be, didn’t think him or his songs could be compared to anything.”
The “photo-booth self-portrait” of Johnson, believed to have been taken in the early 1930s. It is one of only two known photos of Johnson that have been made public. From the Granger Collection, New York.
What Dylan understands about Johnson is that, while his influences are easily divined, in all but a few cases, every guitar lick, vocal technique, or lyrical flourish that he borrows or steals he makes his own. For example, Rubin explains, while Johnnie Temple’s “Lead Pencil Blues” was the first recorded example of the “cut boogie pattern”—the chugging, trainlike guitar line that’s a staple of basic rock ’n’ roll—it’s Johnson’s harder, more propulsive version, found, for example, on “Sweet Home Chicago,” that other guitarists began to adopt, from Elmore James to Chuck Berry and beyond.
“To me, he was the synthesis of his generation,” says blues guitarist and singer-songwriter John P. Hammond, whose father was the John Hammond who signed Dylan and oversaw the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers. Hammond fils discovered Robert Johnson independently of his father, in the late 1950s, when he heard one of the bluesman’s songs on a Folkways album compilation. “He was my inspiration to want to play,” Hammond says of Johnson. Hammond joined a number of artists in the 60s who were influenced by Johnson, covering his music on their albums or in their concerts, or both. The Rolling Stones reworked Johnson’s “Love in Vain” for their now classic 1969 album Let It Bleed (although they credited the writer as “Woody Payne,” presumably to avoid copyright problems), and that same year Led Zeppelin’s second album included “The Lemon Song,” a track that owed much to Howlin’ Wolf but also took part of its lyrics—“You can squeeze my lemon ’til the juice run down my leg”—from Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues.”
And then there was Clapton. Initially taken aback by the intensity of Johnson’s work, he writes in his autobiography that, after letting the record get under his skin, “I realized that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man’s example would be my life’s work.” In 1966, with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, he recorded Johnson’s “Ramblin’ on My Mind,” and then, in 1968, with the band Cream, he worked up an electrified and modified take on Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” called “Crossroads” that became one of his signature hits. But only after recording his 2004 homage to the blues musician, Me and Mr. Johnson, and filming a companion DVD, Sessions for Robert J, was Clapton left with the sense that “my debt to Robert was paid.”
As interest in Johnson’s music was rekindled, curiosity about the man grew. When King of the Delta Blues Singers was released, in 1961, Johnson’s life was almost a complete mystery, save for the lurid bit of information included in the album’s liner notes that he had been murdered, “poisoned by a jealous woman.” But as Columbia’s Johnson release helped spark new interest in the blues artists of the 20s and 30s, field researchers and journalists began to comb the South in search of clues to the lives musicians led. Johnson “was the toughest case to crack,” says blues researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow, author of Chasin’ That Devil Music and the first person to track down an actual document pertaining to the blues musician: Johnson’s death certificate, which Wardlow found in 1968. The record indicated that Johnson died at the age of 26 on August 16, 1938—the same month and day that would claim Elvis Presley in 1977—although it is believed today that Johnson was actually 27. The document lists no cause of death, but years later someone checked the back of Johnson’s death certificate and discovered notes that suggest the owner of the plantation where Johnson died believed syphilis was the cause. It is one of the niggling details that fly in the face of what has become the generally accepted story of Johnson’s death: that he was somehow slipped poisoned whiskey after a juke-joint owner who had hired Johnson to play at his establishment discovered that the blues musician was keeping time with the owner’s wife. Some researchers suspect that Johnson may have survived the poisoning, only to succumb to pneumonia that attacked his weakened immune system.
But one aspect of Johnson’s life remained stubbornly concealed. In 1971, Columbia released a second volume of King of the Delta Blues Singers, and its cover featured an artist’s rendering of Johnson at his first recording session, playing his guitar while facing the corner of a room. As on the first album, the features of his face were barely discernible for good reason: no one yet knew what Johnson looked like. But that was about to change. And with it would begin a new and disputed chapter in Johnson’s story.
In 1972 a Smithsonian field researcher named Robert “Mack” McCormick, who had been on the blues musician’s trail for more than a decade, located Johnson’s two half-sisters and came away with not only photos of Johnson and members of his family but, reportedly, first publication rights as well. McCormick, who had a reputation as an inspired researcher and an excellent writer, had gone as far as to travel to Mississippi on the Rolling Store, a bus that had been converted into a canteen for sharecroppers—and, in a 1976Rolling Stone piece, he told writer Peter Guralnick that he had even tracked down and interviewed Johnson’s killer.
McCormick intended to write about this and other revelations in a book about Johnson that he had tentatively titled Biography of a Phantom. Presumably, it was where the first published picture of Johnson would appear as well. But Guralnick’s Rolling Stone piece reported on another man on Johnson’s trail who had come up with his own trove of historical gold and would use it to steal McCormick’s thunder and essentially take control of Robert Johnson’s image and music. A year or so after McCormick had located Johnson’s kin, a record collector and researcher named Steve LaVere, the son of the late jazz pianist and vocalist Charles LaVere, tracked down one of the half-sisters, Carrie Thompson, in Maryland, and hit the jackpot. (Thompson and Johnson were both the children of Julia Dodds but by different fathers.) Since McCormick had come and gone, Thompson had found two more photos of Johnson, the Hooks Bros. photo and the photo-booth self-portrait, and in 1974 she permitted LaVere to make copies of them. Under the assumption that she was Johnson’s next of kin—the second half-sister had reportedly died by then, though Johnson’s mother and other half-siblings were still alive—she also signed an agreement that transferred to LaVere “her right, title and interest, including all common law and statutory copyrights” to the two photographs, as well as a handwritten note Johnson had purportedly composed on his deathbed and, most important, all musical works and recordings of Robert Johnson.
The deal also gave LaVere first right of refusal for any subsequent Johnson-related photos or documents that might be found, and, more crucially, appointed him as Thompson’s agent “for the purpose of collecting royalties in connection with any and all works of Robert L. Johnson” and authorized him “to use whatever means at his disposal to make such collections.” In return, he would split any royalties generated 50-50 with Thompson.
Contract in hand, LaVere went to Columbia Records with an idea to produce an anthology of Robert Johnson’s complete recordings. According to a 1991 piece by Robert Gordon in L.A. Weekly, Frank Driggs, the producer who had worked on both of the King of the Delta Blues Singers releases, was already planning just such a project for Columbia, but John Hammondpère added Steve LaVere as a co-producer. In addition, Gordon reported, Hammond, a friend of Charles LaVere’s, signed away the copyrights to Johnson’s music, which Columbia Records may not have even owned. (If Johnson ever signed a contract with American Record Corporation, it has yet to be located, but chances are that, by the 70s, the copyrights to his recordings had expired and his music had entered the public domain.) Driggs told Gordon, “LaVere got a deal such as nobody I’ve ever heard of getting in the history of the business.”
It appeared that all rights to the blues artist who had possessed the Hammonds, Clapton, Jagger, Richards, Plant, Page, and Dylan were now in the possession of Steve LaVere.
When Mack McCormick heard about LaVere’s deal, he contacted Columbia and notified the label that his agreement with Johnson’s half-sisters preceded LaVere’s. Columbia put the anthology on hold for 15 years, during which time vinyl LPs gave way to plastic CDs. In 1990,Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings was finally released. LaVere was listed as a producer, and the biographical essay published in the boxed set’s accompanying booklet carried his byline. Mack McCormick was not involved at all. The Complete Recordings went gold, rekindling interest in Johnson yet again. It put a nice chunk of change in LaVere’s pocket, and it also cemented his status as the gatekeeper to all things Robert Johnson. In that role he soon became known for litigious ways. He sued or threatened to sue bands and artists, and their representatives—including, successfully, ABKO Music, former record label of the Rolling Stones—who had covered Robert Johnson songs and, he alleged, not paid proper royalties. When the cartoonist Robert Crumb drew a vivid homage to Johnson, based on the photo-booth self-portrait, and then had it reproduced on T-shirts and, later, silkscreen prints, LaVere threatened legal action. Initially, Crumb says, “I wrote back a letter that said, ‘Fuck you. It’s my drawing and I’ll do what I want with it.’ ” But faced with the prospect of an expensive legal battle, he eventually settled with LaVere. “If I ever want to use that drawing commercially again,” Crumb says, “he gets part of the action.”
In the late 90s, LaVere also sued McCormick—unsuccessfully—in an attempt to gain possession of the photographs that the Texas researcher had been given by Carrie Thompson. One of the images is of Johnson. It is believed to be another shot taken during the Hooks Bros. studio session, but has yet to be seen by the public. One of the few people who have seen it is Guralnick, who wrote about it in his 1989 book, Searching for Robert Johnson. In the photo, Johnson is joined by a man in a sailor’s uniform—his nephew, who was in the navy (and, according to a comment attributed to Carrie Thompson, was the owner of the pin-striped suit Johnson is wearing). The whereabouts of this photo are currently unknown, and McCormick’s Biography of a Phantom was never published. McCormick did not respond to my requests for an interview, but in a 2002 profile by Michael Hall in Texas Monthly, McCormick revealed that he suffers from crippling “manic-depressive illness,” and that he had abandoned his Johnson book. “It ain’t happening anymore,” he told Hall. “I lost interest.” But a source who has had contact with Mack McCormick in the last two years told me, “One of the reasons McCormick’s Johnson book has never seen the light of day, I think, is that he seems scared of litigation from a notoriously litigious guy like Steve LaVere.”
Dealing with the legacy of Robert Johnson had become a particularly brutal game of cuttin’ heads, and Steve LaVere seemed to be the man holding the sharpest scythe.
Younger than His Years
When I first encounter Zeke Schein, almost two years have passed since he purchased the photo. I hear about him through a friend, a lawyer who has represented me in business dealings. Schein is also a client, and, one afternoon when he is on break, we meet outside Matt Umanov and head to an Italian espresso joint a few storefronts away. After telling me that his legal name is Steven, but that “no one” ever calls him that, Schein places an 8-by-10 blowup of the photo on the table in front of me. The first thing I notice is the repeating pattern of warning bars that have been superimposed horizontally across the image. One reads, this image is copyrighted. The other, unauthorized use is prohibited by law. The next is that the faces peering back at me beneath wide-brim hats appear remarkably young, but the figure holding the guitar does resemble Johnson, and his fingers are long. I remember a description of the blues artist as looking younger than his years.
Schein peers at me from beneath his own hat—a retro-looking stingy-brim that rides low on his head. Lanky, appropriately pale, and dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans, with a strand of Tibetan sandalwood mala beads wrapped several times around his left wrist, he looks as though he could be a rock band’s roadie or a member of Jack Kerouac’s entourage. He recounts how he came to acquire the photo, then points at it and says, “What I can confirm is that the guitar itself—and I feel very comfortable saying this—is a Chicago-made guitar from the mid-30s.”
I study the picture. The instrument is shrouded in darkness. It is possible to make out a fancy tailpiece down by the bridge and the dots on the fretboard, but the insignia on the headstock is blurred, and the arm of the man who’s supposed to be Johnson is covering the sound hole. Plus, my gaze keeps being drawn to those long, long fingers.
“You can tell that?” I ask him.
“I’ve looked at thousands of these,” he says, and explains that, actually, the guitar was probably a prop. There are no strings on it, and it is missing all but one of its tuning pegs. But, he tells me, it is probably a guitar made in the mid-1930s by the Chicago-based Harmony Company. “That guitar, with 12 frets to a body like that, with that specific tailpiece, it’s screaming 1935 to me,” he says. “I just can’t find out more about it. It’s driving me crazy. The decal on the headstock is slightly blurred.” And then he adds with a laconic smile, “It fits in perfectly with the Robert Johnson enigma.”
In the two years since he acquired the image, Schein explains, he has quietly been trying to research it and, if possible, find someone who can tell him definitively that he has a photo of Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines. “I don’t want to put it out there and have people be disappointed that it’s not real,” he says.
So far, he has come up with one good lead. While scouring the Internet for anything he could find on Johnson, Schein ran across a Web site that the filmmaker Peter Meyer had set up in conjunction with his Johnson documentary, Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? On the site, Schein learned a bit of heartening trivia: according to an interview Johnny Shines gave before his death, a photo of him and Robert Johnson had been taken by a woman named Johnnie Mae Crowder in Hughes, Arkansas, in 1937 and later published in a local newspaper.
Schein tells me that after acquiring the photo he began showing it to a small number of trusted friends and clients, seeking their opinion—John Hammond is “sure” the photo depicts Johnson—and advice on how to go about getting the image authenticated.
Schein also showed the image to a collector of blues records and memorabilia named John Tefteller, who has scored a number of significant finds in recent years. In 2005, Tefteller, who’s based in Grants Pass, Oregon, had purchased a large cache of original advertising materials produced for the long-defunct jazz-and-blues label Paramount Records, and it had yielded the first full body shot of Charley Patton, who is considered the father of the Delta blues. Tefteller says he saw Schein’s photo for only a few minutes, “at a diner” during a stopover in New York, but what he saw was enough to persuade him to make a trip down to Hughes, Arkansas, in search of Johnnie Mae Crowder, the woman who Shines said had taken the photo of him and Johnson. Tefteller found a 1918 birth certificate for someone with that name, but he also found a death record. Johnnie Mae Crowder had died in 1940, not long after Robert Johnson, and, Tefteller says, though he looked he could find no evidence that Crowder had left behind any family. He had hit a dead end.
Schein wasn’t having any better luck. In May 2006, he learned that two veteran Delta bluesmen, David “Honeyboy” Edwards and Robert Lockwood Jr., were playing at B. B. King’s Blues Club in Times Square. For a guy trying to establish the bona fides of a Robert Johnson picture, the show was a real opportunity. In his memoir, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, Edwards writes about witnessing a clearly ill Johnson trying to play at what would be his last show, and later, seeing him suffer greatly from what he asserts were the effects of poisoned whiskey. Lockwood, meanwhile, had learned how to play guitar from Johnson during the years that the itinerant artist lived on and off with Lockwood and his mother in Helena, Arkansas. But when Edwards’s manager allowed Schein to show his picture to the musicians—on the condition that he not prompt them with Johnson’s and Shine’s names—neither identified the men in the photo. Still, Schein wasn’t ready to give up. The bluesmen hadn’t said it wasn’t Johnson, and there was another man who might be able to help.
About four months after our first meeting, Schein agrees to let me take a copy of the picture to Mississippi to see if I can make any progress in determining whether it’s authentic or fake. I fly to Memphis and drive to Crystal Springs, Mississippi, the town a man named Claud Johnson calls home.
In 1989, a protracted and, at times, strange legal battle to determine Robert Johnson’s heir had begun in Mississippi. The proceeding was set into motion by two heirs of the bluesman’s half-sister Carrie Thompson. In 1980, she had attempted to rescind the 1974 agreement she had signed permitting Steve LaVere to make copies of the Hooks Bros. and photo-booth portraits and to profit from them. She died in 1983, but her will transferred any rights she still had to those pictures—and any money she was due from them—to her heirs, who turned to the Mississippi judicial system in hopes of gaining control of the estate and eventually recovering the Johnson photos. But after a nine-year legal scrum during which at least two other potential Johnson heirs joined the fray, and the case bounced between the Mississippi Chancery Court, the Mississippi Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court (which twice refused to hear the case), the Chancery Court ruled on October 15, 1998, that a truckdriver named Claud Johnson, who, according to his lawyer, had long heard that the blues legend was his father, was “the biological son and sole heir” of Robert Johnson; he was thus entitled to an initial inheritance of more than $1.3 million with future revenues. The court’s decision, which is irreversible because it was appealed and reaffirmed, was based not on DNA evidence but on an unusual bit of sworn testimony by the elderly Eula Mae Williams, a childhood friend of Claud Johnson’s mother, Virgie Jane Smith Cain. In what sounds more like a scene from Boston Legal than an actual court case, Williams testified that she had watched Cain and Robert Johnson having sex in a wooded area in the spring of 1931, which, nine months later, led to the birth of Claud.
In June 2000, a few days after the Mississippi Supreme Court had reaffirmed the Chancery Court’s decision, Claud gave an interview to The New York Times in which he talked about glimpsing Robert Johnson from the doorway of his grandparents’ house one day in 1937 when the blues artist showed up to visit his mother and the child he had purportedly sired. But a father-and-son reunion did not take place—Claud’s grandparents would not allow it. “They said he was working for the devil, and they wouldn’t even let me go out and touch him,” Claud told the Times. “I stood in the door, and he stood on the ground, and that is as close as I ever got to him.… I never saw him again.”
I was aware that the court’s ruling hadn’t exactly quelled skepticism in the blues world about Claud’s legitimacy, and that if Claud had indeed seen Robert Johnson at least 69 years had passed since then, but I thought that if I could get Claud to see the photo without involving his lawyers, though it might not lead to any definitive answers, it could lead somewhere interesting.
Schein, too, was curious to know what Johnson’s legal heir would make of the photo, and, after consulting with his attorney, he gave me permission to show Claud the photo, even though it carried a potential risk. According to copyright law, because Robert Johnson is no longer alive, his estate controls the right to use his image in a commercial context, which meant that although Schein owned the photograph outright he would have to seek the estate’s permission if he wanted to use the photo in such a manner. Schein had no intention of angering the estate, but there was a chance that, when I showed up on Claud Johnson’s doorstep, he would be more litigious than curious and initiate a legal tug-of-war for the photo.
Just such a skirmish is being waged over the two well-known Johnson photos that LaVere found in the 70s via a pending suit that Carrie Thompson’s heirs have filed in Mississippi Circuit Court against LaVere and Claud Johnson. In the meantime, there are indications that LaVere continues to make money off of Robert Johnson: legal documents indicate that, although LaVere’s deal as exclusive agent has been terminated, he is still splitting royalties with the Johnson estate on at least a couple of licensing deals. He’s quick to label his controversial status in the Johnson world “just so much hogwash” when I contact him. “People aren’t supposed to make money in the music business?” he asks. “Or is it just the blues that they’re not supposed to make money on?”
When I arrive at the 49-acre property where Claud Johnson lives (and where he keeps his gravel truck parked on his lawn), he isn’t home, and his son Michael, who lives next door, has to get on the phone and persuade him to come back so that I can show him the photo. He arrives sheathed in sunglasses and a straw cowboy hat, looking more like Muddy Waters than Robert Johnson. He is stockier and wider-faced than I would expect the son of lithe Robert Johnson to be, but then again, Robert Johnson never drove a gravel truck, and my mental image of him comes from a couple of photos taken long before the thickening of middle age had a chance to encroach. Though Claud is clearly uncomfortable when he shakes my hand, his grip is strong, and the gray in his sideburns and mustache is the only sign that he is a man in his 70s.
I pull the photo out of the envelope I’ve been carrying and hand it to Claud. “Well, no doubt about it,” he says after studying it for a few long seconds. “This look like before he was grown.”
Claud hands the photo back to me and walks away. When I attempt to get him to elaborate upon what he has just said, he explains that he has signed an agreement with HBO (for what I will later learn is a movie that the cable network is developing about Robert and Claud Johnson, which is being written by James L. White, the screenwriter of Ray). “If you cross a company like that, you could get yourself in a problem. And I really don’t need to get in a problem with HBO,” Johnson tells me, adding that as a result he can’t give me any further “insight” into the picture. “It may be a picture of him, but I really, I can’t really—I’m afraid, you know?” he says, sounding genuinely anguished. “Because, man, I’ll tell you—they’re still after me any way they can get at me, right now.”
I realize that Johnson is talking about the court battle that determined he was Robert Johnson’s heir, and perhaps the current legal skirmish being waged over Carrie Thompson’s photos. On the way back to my car, Michael Johnson apologizes for not being more helpful. He is wearing a T-shirt advertising the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the music and the memory of the artist, which is run by another of Claud’s sons, Steve Johnson.
“My dad just got shell-shocked by that case,” Michael tells me. “They put him through a lot of stuff. To actually prove who you is”—he switches to the second person, though he is clearly talking about his dad—“they ask you a thousand questions. Hell, they tried to scrutinize him like he wasn’t nothing, you know, man?”
“The Face Doesn’t Lie”
In late summer 2007, Schein’s attorney, John Pelosi, submitted the photograph to John Kitchens, the lawyer for the Johnson estate, to see if there was any way of authenticating it. Kitchens’s father, Jim Kitchens, had been the lead attorney in Claud Johnson’s fight to be named heir of the Johnson estate, but he had since turned the day-to-day handling of the estate over to his son, who turned 30 this year and was all of 12 when the Johnson boxed set was released. Not surprisingly, when John Kitchens saw a copy of the photo, he wasn’t exactly floored. “I didn’t know who it was,” he says. But Kitchens remembered reading about a forensic artist who, that August, had reportedly determined the identity of the sailor kissing the nurse in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous Life-magazine photo of Times Square on the day World War II ended. The artist’s name is Lois Gibson and she works for the Houston Police Department. She is also a graduate of the F.B.I. Academy Forensic Artist Course and was deemed “The World’s Most Successful Forensic Artist” in The 2005 Guinness Book of World Records because, at the time, her sketches and facial reconstructions had helped net more than 1,062 criminals.
Kitchens sent Gibson a copy of Schein’s photo, along with reproductions of the Hooks Bros. portrait and the photo-booth shot. Gibson compared the facial features in each of the three photos and reported back with a pretty startling conclusion: “My only problem with this determination is the lack of certainty about the date of the questioned photo,” she wrote in her report to Kitchens. But, she continued, if Schein’s photo “was taken about the same time as, or a little earlier than,” the photo-booth self-portrait, “it appears the individual in [Schein’s photo] is Robert Johnson. All the features are consistent if not identical.”
“If the time frame is right, it’s him,” Gibson tells me when I call her up in Houston. “The face doesn’t lie.” She also points out that if Schein’s photo does depict Johnson, he’s probably younger—possibly two to four years younger—than he appears in the photo-booth self-portrait (which would mean that Schein’s photo had been taken years before the picture Johnny Shines remembered from 1937).
Kitchens is cautiously optimistic about Gibson’s assessment. “Based on the findings, we’re going to get behind it,” he says. “It is impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that this is Robert Johnson,” he adds, pointing out that the few living souls who knew Johnson when he was alive haven’t seen him in 69 years. “But we strongly believe that it is.”
When I meet Schein at a Greenwich Village restaurant to discuss Gibson’s findings, I expect him to be ecstatic. But, actually, he seems slightly conflicted, and I soon realize why. Schein has enjoyed his long strange trip through Robert Johnson’s past and isn’t ready to let go. Although he tells me he thinks Gibson “did a wonderful job” with her analysis, he says he doesn’t agree with her findings that his photo depicts a Johnson who is younger than the man in the photo-booth shot. “I’ve been delving deep,” Schein tells me, and though he still hasn’t been able to crack the make and model of the guitar in his photo, he has come up with a theory about the chronology of the three pictures: They were, he says, all taken within a year of one another. The Hooks Bros. photo was taken first, the self-portrait second, and his photo third, which would make it the latest photo of Johnson, instead of the earliest. His reasoning for this, he explains, is that his photo comes after Johnson has recorded his 29 songs and come away with several hundred dollars, probably the most money he’d ever made. As a result, he doesn’t need to borrow a suit from his nephew, as he did in the Hooks Bros. photo. He can afford his own duds and more. “You got the money from the record deal. People recognize you. You got your own suit,” Schein says. “You’re traveling around. You’re drinking better whiskey. You’re eating better food. Guess what? You’re going to look a little better.”
It is just a theory from a man who plays guitar and works with musicians, a man who respects Robert Johnson, who knows his music, and, after studying his life, feels like he knows Johnson a bit, too—a man who wants to believe that Robert Johnson was singing the blues, but that he wasn't always living them.
With the eBay photo still on his computer monitor, Schein dug up his copy of the Johnson boxed set and took another look. Not only was he more confident than ever that he had found a photo of Robert Johnson, he had a hunch who the other man in the photo was, too: Johnny Shines, a respected Delta-blues artist in his own right, and one of the handful of musicians who, in the early 1930s and again in the months before Johnson’s death, had traveled with him from town to town to look for gigs or stand on busy street corners and engage in a competitive practice known as “cuttin’ heads,” whereby one blues musician tries to draw away the crowd (and their money) gathered around another musician by standing on a nearby corner and outplaying him.
Steven “Zeke” Schein at Matt Umanov Guitars in New York City.Photograph by Gasper Tringale.
Shines had died in 1992. His picture was included in the boxed-set booklet, and Schein saw a resemblance; if both of his hunches were right, then the photo was even more of a find. At that point, Schein became possessed of two thoughts: One was “to hold the photo in my hands,” he says. The other was “to protect it.”
Because the image had just recently been listed, by a New York–based antiques dealer, bidding was still at a reasonable $25, but Schein guessed that the ending bid was going to be many times that initial figure. He had just sold a beautiful 1920s Stella acoustic guitar—a favorite among the old country-blues musicians—and when he added together the money he’d gotten for that and some extra cash on hand, he came up with a budget of $3,100. If someone spends more than that, he figured, the bidder will also know it’s a photo of Robert Johnson, so it will be protected.
A co-worker of Schein’s set up a computer “snipe” program that automatically bid on the picture up to the specified limit, and Schein held his breath. Approximately $2,200 later, he held the photo in his hands. What had he gotten for his money? An extremely fragile, three-inch-by-four-inch photo that bore no identifying marks that could be traced to a photographer’s studio, no date stamp that could establish when the picture had been taken, no provenance whatsoever save for a note from the seller saying he’d purchased the photo in Atlanta. Schein was still convinced that he had found and purchased a photo of Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines. The question was, could he convince anyone else? And, if he could, would he then be able to navigate the complicated and treacherous legal minefield surrounding Johnson’s lucrative and much disputed estate?
The Right to Play the Blues
The story of Robert Johnson is usually presented as a Faustian bargain, but it is really a tale of possession. Johnson was the product of an affair his mother, Julia Dodds, had with a plantation worker. Johnson had unusually long fingers and a bad left eye (that has been attributed to a cataract), and by the time he had recorded his canon, he had earned the right to sing and play the blues.
His youth was spent moving between homes in Memphis and Robinsonville, Mississippi, 30 miles south of Memphis, where he lived with his mother and her second husband on a plantation. There he was known for his interest in guitar and his reluctance to work the fields.
It was in the aftermath of his wife’s and child’s deaths—Johnson was approximately 19 at the time—that his musical education is believed to have begun in earnest. In 1930 the ferocious blues singer Son House had moved to Robinsonville to begin a fruitful musical partnership with the guitar ace Willie Brown, and Johnson became a regular presence at their performances, although the two elder bluesmen perceived him as a nuisance. House’s recollection of Johnson—as told to folklorist Julius Lester in 1965—was of a “little boy” who would commandeer either his or Brown’s guitar during their breaks and irritate the audience with his marginal skills. Perhaps Johnson sensed, too, that he was not ready for the stage, because around this time he moved back to the Hazlehurst area, his birthplace, where he began an apprenticeship with a blues guitarist named Ike Zimmerman (the spelling of his name is disputed) which would transform Johnson into the virtuoso he is known as today.
That Robert Johnson is remembered as a guitarist who could play almost any song after hearing it just once on the radio; a singer whose repertoire, like those of most itinerant bluesmen, included numbers made famous by Bing Crosby, Irish standards, and even polkas, in addition to his own songs; a performer whose travels took him as far north as New York City and even Canada in search of an audience; and an artist who could move an audience to tears and then disappear into the crowd as if he had never played at all.
Clearly, Johnson was a man of some ambition, and in November of 1936 he traveled to San Antonio, Texas, for the first of two recording sessions for the American Record Corporation. Once in the makeshift studio, he played facing a corner, with his back to the technicians and other musicians who had come to record, a move that has been variously interpreted as shyness, an attempt to prevent other guitarists from seeing his unusual playing style, or a street-savvy technique for getting the most sound out of his acoustic guitar. Whatever the case, Johnson recorded approximately 16 songs over three days, most of them in two or three takes. One of those tunes, “Terraplane Blues,” a double-entendre-laden number, was issued as a 78-r.p.m. single on the Vocalion label and became a modest regional hit, selling approximately 5,000 copies. As a result, Johnson was invited back to Texas, this time, in June 1937, to Dallas, where he recorded another 13 tracks, but no more hits.
A little more than a year later, Johnson would be dead—and probably destined for obscurity had his music not already gotten the attention of a record producer who would exert a huge impact on popular music in the 20th century. By the time John H. Hammond Jr. came across Johnson’s records, he had persuaded Benny Goodman to integrate his band, discovered a young Billie Holiday in Harlem, and recorded Count Basie, but he was just getting started. As a talent scout for Columbia Records in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Hammond would discover Aretha Franklin and sign Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan to the label.
Hammond’s role in Johnson’s legacy is pivotal. He first championed Johnson in print in 1937 when, writing under a pseudonym for the left-wing publication New Masses, he asserted that “Johnson makes Leadbelly look like an accomplished poseur.” Then, in 1938, Hammond sought to feature Johnson in a concert he was producing at Carnegie Hall that December called “From Spirituals to Swing.” He sent an emissary into the South to track down Johnson and bring him back to New York. But as the day of the show approached, Hammond learned that Johnson was dead—possibly murdered. On the night of the concert, Big Bill Broonzy took Johnson’s place, but Hammond memorialized the late Delta artist by playing two recordings of his songs for the Carnegie Hall audience.
More than 20 years later, Hammond would expose Johnson’s music to a whole new generation of listeners. Columbia now controlled Johnson’s recordings, and in 1961, Hammond oversaw the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers, the first album-length collection of Johnson’s music, which helped spark a blues revival in America. According to the album’s producer, Frank Driggs, it sold approximately 10,000 copies upon its initial release—impressive for an obscure, dead, vernacular performer.
“The Music Almost Repelled Me”
Not long before the album became available to the public, Hammond had given a young Bob Dylan an early acetate copy of the LP. Near the end of his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan recounts the rather intense effect King of the Delta Blues Singers had on him. If he hadn’t heard the album at such an early, formative stage in his career, Dylan writes, “there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn’t have felt free or upraised enough to write.”
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King of the Delta Blues Singers had an arguably larger impact across the Atlantic in Britain, where a new generation of rock ’n’ rollers were learning their chops and finding their influences. One of them was a shy, alienated teenager named Eric Clapton, who was given the Johnson album by one of his early bandmates. “At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play,” Clapton writes in his recently published memoir, Clapton: The Autobiography.
The chance of this music’s having such an immediate and visceral effect on an aspiring rock star today is, frankly, pretty slim. To ears accustomed to modern, computer-generated effects that can make almost anyone sound like a guitar god or a vocal powerhouse, Johnson’s music can sound thin and primitive at first spin, even though it’s remarkably complex and polished for its time. As Clapton explains in his autobiography, Johnson employed a fingerpicking style that had him “simultaneously playing a disjointed bass line on the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings, and lead on the treble strings while singing at the same time.” Occasionally, Johnson worked in some bottle-slide playing, too, which involves placing a small glass bottle or sleeve over the left pinkie, then sliding it up and down the guitar’s neck to create the pitch-bending wail that is a signature of the blues. Even accomplished guitarists can have a hard time re-creating Johnson’s sound, let alone mastering it. Says Dave Rubin, an author for the music publisher Hal Leonard Corporation who led the team of musicians who transcribed Johnson’s songs for the guitar instructional Robert Johnson: The New Transcriptions, “When you get to ‘Crossroads’ and ‘Preachin’ Blues’—oh my God, forget it. It sounds like three guys playing.”
Johnson’s guitar chops were just one part of the equation, however. For a blues singer, he was more of a crooner than a croaker, and his voice sometimes had a quaver that could sound haunted or seductive. There was also an urgency to Johnson’s singing that made him sound “like he’s about five minutes away from the electric chair,” Driggs says. Lyrics such as “She got a mortgage on my body now, a lien on my soul,” from “Traveling Riverside Blues,” could also have a devastating poetic economy. In Chronicles, Dylan recounts writing Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper to examine their structure and finding “big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction—themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease.” (Dylan could have been talking about himself.) He doesn’t put much stock in criticism that is often leveled at the blues artist: that Johnson’s work is derivative. In Chronicles, Dylan plays King of the Delta Blues Singers for his friend Dave Van Ronk, the respected folksinger known as the Mayor of MacDougal Street, but Van Ronk mostly hears a musician mimicking his predecessors. “He didn’t think Johnson was very original. I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite. I thought Johnson was as original as could be, didn’t think him or his songs could be compared to anything.”
The “photo-booth self-portrait” of Johnson, believed to have been taken in the early 1930s. It is one of only two known photos of Johnson that have been made public. From the Granger Collection, New York.
What Dylan understands about Johnson is that, while his influences are easily divined, in all but a few cases, every guitar lick, vocal technique, or lyrical flourish that he borrows or steals he makes his own. For example, Rubin explains, while Johnnie Temple’s “Lead Pencil Blues” was the first recorded example of the “cut boogie pattern”—the chugging, trainlike guitar line that’s a staple of basic rock ’n’ roll—it’s Johnson’s harder, more propulsive version, found, for example, on “Sweet Home Chicago,” that other guitarists began to adopt, from Elmore James to Chuck Berry and beyond.
“To me, he was the synthesis of his generation,” says blues guitarist and singer-songwriter John P. Hammond, whose father was the John Hammond who signed Dylan and oversaw the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers. Hammond fils discovered Robert Johnson independently of his father, in the late 1950s, when he heard one of the bluesman’s songs on a Folkways album compilation. “He was my inspiration to want to play,” Hammond says of Johnson. Hammond joined a number of artists in the 60s who were influenced by Johnson, covering his music on their albums or in their concerts, or both. The Rolling Stones reworked Johnson’s “Love in Vain” for their now classic 1969 album Let It Bleed (although they credited the writer as “Woody Payne,” presumably to avoid copyright problems), and that same year Led Zeppelin’s second album included “The Lemon Song,” a track that owed much to Howlin’ Wolf but also took part of its lyrics—“You can squeeze my lemon ’til the juice run down my leg”—from Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues.”
And then there was Clapton. Initially taken aback by the intensity of Johnson’s work, he writes in his autobiography that, after letting the record get under his skin, “I realized that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man’s example would be my life’s work.” In 1966, with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, he recorded Johnson’s “Ramblin’ on My Mind,” and then, in 1968, with the band Cream, he worked up an electrified and modified take on Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” called “Crossroads” that became one of his signature hits. But only after recording his 2004 homage to the blues musician, Me and Mr. Johnson, and filming a companion DVD, Sessions for Robert J, was Clapton left with the sense that “my debt to Robert was paid.”
As interest in Johnson’s music was rekindled, curiosity about the man grew. When King of the Delta Blues Singers was released, in 1961, Johnson’s life was almost a complete mystery, save for the lurid bit of information included in the album’s liner notes that he had been murdered, “poisoned by a jealous woman.” But as Columbia’s Johnson release helped spark new interest in the blues artists of the 20s and 30s, field researchers and journalists began to comb the South in search of clues to the lives musicians led. Johnson “was the toughest case to crack,” says blues researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow, author of Chasin’ That Devil Music and the first person to track down an actual document pertaining to the blues musician: Johnson’s death certificate, which Wardlow found in 1968. The record indicated that Johnson died at the age of 26 on August 16, 1938—the same month and day that would claim Elvis Presley in 1977—although it is believed today that Johnson was actually 27. The document lists no cause of death, but years later someone checked the back of Johnson’s death certificate and discovered notes that suggest the owner of the plantation where Johnson died believed syphilis was the cause. It is one of the niggling details that fly in the face of what has become the generally accepted story of Johnson’s death: that he was somehow slipped poisoned whiskey after a juke-joint owner who had hired Johnson to play at his establishment discovered that the blues musician was keeping time with the owner’s wife. Some researchers suspect that Johnson may have survived the poisoning, only to succumb to pneumonia that attacked his weakened immune system.
But one aspect of Johnson’s life remained stubbornly concealed. In 1971, Columbia released a second volume of King of the Delta Blues Singers, and its cover featured an artist’s rendering of Johnson at his first recording session, playing his guitar while facing the corner of a room. As on the first album, the features of his face were barely discernible for good reason: no one yet knew what Johnson looked like. But that was about to change. And with it would begin a new and disputed chapter in Johnson’s story.
In 1972 a Smithsonian field researcher named Robert “Mack” McCormick, who had been on the blues musician’s trail for more than a decade, located Johnson’s two half-sisters and came away with not only photos of Johnson and members of his family but, reportedly, first publication rights as well. McCormick, who had a reputation as an inspired researcher and an excellent writer, had gone as far as to travel to Mississippi on the Rolling Store, a bus that had been converted into a canteen for sharecroppers—and, in a 1976 Rolling Stone piece, he told writer Peter Guralnick that he had even tracked down and interviewed Johnson’s killer.
Continued (page 4 of 6)
McCormick intended to write about this and other revelations in a book about Johnson that he had tentatively titled Biography of a Phantom. Presumably, it was where the first published picture of Johnson would appear as well. But Guralnick’s Rolling Stone piece reported on another man on Johnson’s trail who had come up with his own trove of historical gold and would use it to steal McCormick’s thunder and essentially take control of Robert Johnson’s image and music. A year or so after McCormick had located Johnson’s kin, a record collector and researcher named Steve LaVere, the son of the late jazz pianist and vocalist Charles LaVere, tracked down one of the half-sisters, Carrie Thompson, in Maryland, and hit the jackpot. (Thompson and Johnson were both the children of Julia Dodds but by different fathers.) Since McCormick had come and gone, Thompson had found two more photos of Johnson, the Hooks Bros. photo and the photo-booth self-portrait, and in 1974 she permitted LaVere to make copies of them. Under the assumption that she was Johnson’s next of kin—the second half-sister had reportedly died by then, though Johnson’s mother and other half-siblings were still alive—she also signed an agreement that transferred to LaVere “her right, title and interest, including all common law and statutory copyrights” to the two photographs, as well as a handwritten note Johnson had purportedly composed on his deathbed and, most important, all musical works and recordings of Robert Johnson.
The deal also gave LaVere first right of refusal for any subsequent Johnson-related photos or documents that might be found, and, more crucially, appointed him as Thompson’s agent “for the purpose of collecting royalties in connection with any and all works of Robert L. Johnson” and authorized him “to use whatever means at his disposal to make such collections.” In return, he would split any royalties generated 50-50 with Thompson.
Contract in hand, LaVere went to Columbia Records with an idea to produce an anthology of Robert Johnson’s complete recordings. According to a 1991 piece by Robert Gordon in L.A. Weekly, Frank Driggs, the producer who had worked on both of the King of the Delta Blues Singers releases, was already planning just such a project for Columbia, but John Hammond père added Steve LaVere as a co-producer. In addition, Gordon reported, Hammond, a friend of Charles LaVere’s, signed away the copyrights to Johnson’s music, which Columbia Records may not have even owned. (If Johnson ever signed a contract with American Record Corporation, it has yet to be located, but chances are that, by the 70s, the copyrights to his recordings had expired and his music had entered the public domain.) Driggs told Gordon, “LaVere got a deal such as nobody I’ve ever heard of getting in the history of the business.”
It appeared that all rights to the blues artist who had possessed the Hammonds, Clapton, Jagger, Richards, Plant, Page, and Dylan were now in the possession of Steve LaVere.
When Mack McCormick heard about LaVere’s deal, he contacted Columbia and notified the label that his agreement with Johnson’s half-sisters preceded LaVere’s. Columbia put the anthology on hold for 15 years, during which time vinyl LPs gave way to plastic CDs. In 1990, Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings was finally released. LaVere was listed as a producer, and the biographical essay published in the boxed set’s accompanying booklet carried his byline. Mack McCormick was not involved at all. The Complete Recordings went gold, rekindling interest in Johnson yet again. It put a nice chunk of change in LaVere’s pocket, and it also cemented his status as the gatekeeper to all things Robert Johnson. In that role he soon became known for litigious ways. He sued or threatened to sue bands and artists, and their representatives—including, successfully, ABKO Music, former record label of the Rolling Stones—who had covered Robert Johnson songs and, he alleged, not paid proper royalties. When the cartoonist Robert Crumb drew a vivid homage to Johnson, based on the photo-booth self-portrait, and then had it reproduced on T-shirts and, later, silkscreen prints, LaVere threatened legal action. Initially, Crumb says, “I wrote back a letter that said, ‘Fuck you. It’s my drawing and I’ll do what I want with it.’ ” But faced with the prospect of an expensive legal battle, he eventually settled with LaVere. “If I ever want to use that drawing commercially again,” Crumb says, “he gets part of the action.”
In the late 90s, LaVere also sued McCormick—unsuccessfully—in an attempt to gain possession of the photographs that the Texas researcher had been given by Carrie Thompson. One of the images is of Johnson. It is believed to be another shot taken during the Hooks Bros. studio session, but has yet to be seen by the public. One of the few people who have seen it is Guralnick, who wrote about it in his 1989 book, Searching for Robert Johnson. In the photo, Johnson is joined by a man in a sailor’s uniform—his nephew, who was in the navy (and, according to a comment attributed to Carrie Thompson, was the owner of the pin-striped suit Johnson is wearing). The whereabouts of this photo are currently unknown, and McCormick’s Biography of a Phantom was never published. McCormick did not respond to my requests for an interview, but in a 2002 profile by Michael Hall in Texas Monthly, McCormick revealed that he suffers from crippling “manic-depressive illness,” and that he had abandoned his Johnson book. “It ain’t happening anymore,” he told Hall. “I lost interest.” But a source who has had contact with Mack McCormick in the last two years told me, “One of the reasons McCormick’s Johnson book has never seen the light of day, I think, is that he seems scared of litigation from a notoriously litigious guy like Steve LaVere.”
Dealing with the legacy of Robert Johnson had become a particularly brutal game of cuttin’ heads, and Steve LaVere seemed to be the man holding the sharpest scythe.
Younger than His Years
When I first encounter Zeke Schein, almost two years have passed since he purchased the photo. I hear about him through a friend, a lawyer who has represented me in business dealings. Schein is also a client, and, one afternoon when he is on break, we meet outside Matt Umanov and head to an Italian espresso joint a few storefronts away. After telling me that his legal name is Steven, but that “no one” ever calls him that, Schein places an 8-by-10 blowup of the photo on the table in front of me. The first thing I notice is the repeating pattern of warning bars that have been superimposed horizontally across the image. One reads, this image is copyrighted. The other, unauthorized use is prohibited by law. The next is that the faces peering back at me beneath wide-brim hats appear remarkably young, but the figure holding the guitar does resemble Johnson, and his fingers are long. I remember a description of the blues artist as looking younger than his years.
Schein peers at me from beneath his own hat—a retro-looking stingy-brim that rides low on his head. Lanky, appropriately pale, and dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans, with a strand of Tibetan sandalwood mala beads wrapped several times around his left wrist, he looks as though he could be a rock band’s roadie or a member of Jack Kerouac’s entourage. He recounts how he came to acquire the photo, then points at it and says, “What I can confirm is that the guitar itself—and I feel very comfortable saying this—is a Chicago-made guitar from the mid-30s.”
I study the picture. The instrument is shrouded in darkness. It is possible to make out a fancy tailpiece down by the bridge and the dots on the fretboard, but the insignia on the headstock is blurred, and the arm of the man who’s supposed to be Johnson is covering the sound hole. Plus, my gaze keeps being drawn to those long, long fingers.
“You can tell that?” I ask him.
“I’ve looked at thousands of these,” he says, and explains that, actually, the guitar was probably a prop. There are no strings on it, and it is missing all but one of its tuning pegs. But, he tells me, it is probably a guitar made in the mid-1930s by the Chicago-based Harmony Company. “That guitar, with 12 frets to a body like that, with that specific tailpiece, it’s screaming 1935 to me,” he says. “I just can’t find out more about it. It’s driving me crazy. The decal on the headstock is slightly blurred.” And then he adds with a laconic smile, “It fits in perfectly with the Robert Johnson enigma.”
Continued (page 5 of 6)
In the two years since he acquired the image, Schein explains, he has quietly been trying to research it and, if possible, find someone who can tell him definitively that he has a photo of Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines. “I don’t want to put it out there and have people be disappointed that it’s not real,” he says.
So far, he has come up with one good lead. While scouring the Internet for anything he could find on Johnson, Schein ran across a Web site that the filmmaker Peter Meyer had set up in conjunction with his Johnson documentary, Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? On the site, Schein learned a bit of heartening trivia: according to an interview Johnny Shines gave before his death, a photo of him and Robert Johnson had been taken by a woman named Johnnie Mae Crowder in Hughes, Arkansas, in 1937 and later published in a local newspaper.
Schein tells me that after acquiring the photo he began showing it to a small number of trusted friends and clients, seeking their opinion—John Hammond is “sure” the photo depicts Johnson—and advice on how to go about getting the image authenticated.
Schein also showed the image to a collector of blues records and memorabilia named John Tefteller, who has scored a number of significant finds in recent years. In 2005, Tefteller, who’s based in Grants Pass, Oregon, had purchased a large cache of original advertising materials produced for the long-defunct jazz-and-blues label Paramount Records, and it had yielded the first full body shot of Charley Patton, who is considered the father of the Delta blues. Tefteller says he saw Schein’s photo for only a few minutes, “at a diner” during a stopover in New York, but what he saw was enough to persuade him to make a trip down to Hughes, Arkansas, in search of Johnnie Mae Crowder, the woman who Shines said had taken the photo of him and Johnson. Tefteller found a 1918 birth certificate for someone with that name, but he also found a death record. Johnnie Mae Crowder had died in 1940, not long after Robert Johnson, and, Tefteller says, though he looked he could find no evidence that Crowder had left behind any family. He had hit a dead end.
Schein wasn’t having any better luck. In May 2006, he learned that two veteran Delta bluesmen, David “Honeyboy” Edwards and Robert Lockwood Jr., were playing at B. B. King’s Blues Club in Times Square. For a guy trying to establish the bona fides of a Robert Johnson picture, the show was a real opportunity. In his memoir, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, Edwards writes about witnessing a clearly ill Johnson trying to play at what would be his last show, and later, seeing him suffer greatly from what he asserts were the effects of poisoned whiskey. Lockwood, meanwhile, had learned how to play guitar from Johnson during the years that the itinerant artist lived on and off with Lockwood and his mother in Helena, Arkansas. But when Edwards’s manager allowed Schein to show his picture to the musicians—on the condition that he not prompt them with Johnson’s and Shine’s names—neither identified the men in the photo. Still, Schein wasn’t ready to give up. The bluesmen hadn’t said it wasn’t Johnson, and there was another man who might be able to help.
About four months after our first meeting, Schein agrees to let me take a copy of the picture to Mississippi to see if I can make any progress in determining whether it’s authentic or fake. I fly to Memphis and drive to Crystal Springs, Mississippi, the town a man named Claud Johnson calls home.
In 1989, a protracted and, at times, strange legal battle to determine Robert Johnson’s heir had begun in Mississippi. The proceeding was set into motion by two heirs of the bluesman’s half-sister Carrie Thompson. In 1980, she had attempted to rescind the 1974 agreement she had signed permitting Steve LaVere to make copies of the Hooks Bros. and photo-booth portraits and to profit from them. She died in 1983, but her will transferred any rights she still had to those pictures—and any money she was due from them—to her heirs, who turned to the Mississippi judicial system in hopes of gaining control of the estate and eventually recovering the Johnson photos. But after a nine-year legal scrum during which at least two other potential Johnson heirs joined the fray, and the case bounced between the Mississippi Chancery Court, the Mississippi Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court (which twice refused to hear the case), the Chancery Court ruled on October 15, 1998, that a truckdriver named Claud Johnson, who, according to his lawyer, had long heard that the blues legend was his father, was “the biological son and sole heir” of Robert Johnson; he was thus entitled to an initial inheritance of more than $1.3 million with future revenues. The court’s decision, which is irreversible because it was appealed and reaffirmed, was based not on DNA evidence but on an unusual bit of sworn testimony by the elderly Eula Mae Williams, a childhood friend of Claud Johnson’s mother, Virgie Jane Smith Cain. In what sounds more like a scene from Boston Legal than an actual court case, Williams testified that she had watched Cain and Robert Johnson having sex in a wooded area in the spring of 1931, which, nine months later, led to the birth of Claud.
In June 2000, a few days after the Mississippi Supreme Court had reaffirmed the Chancery Court’s decision, Claud gave an interview to The New York Times in which he talked about glimpsing Robert Johnson from the doorway of his grandparents’ house one day in 1937 when the blues artist showed up to visit his mother and the child he had purportedly sired. But a father-and-son reunion did not take place—Claud’s grandparents would not allow it. “They said he was working for the devil, and they wouldn’t even let me go out and touch him,” Claud told the Times. “I stood in the door, and he stood on the ground, and that is as close as I ever got to him.… I never saw him again.”
I was aware that the court’s ruling hadn’t exactly quelled skepticism in the blues world about Claud’s legitimacy, and that if Claud had indeed seen Robert Johnson at least 69 years had passed since then, but I thought that if I could get Claud to see the photo without involving his lawyers, though it might not lead to any definitive answers, it could lead somewhere interesting.
Schein, too, was curious to know what Johnson’s legal heir would make of the photo, and, after consulting with his attorney, he gave me permission to show Claud the photo, even though it carried a potential risk. According to copyright law, because Robert Johnson is no longer alive, his estate controls the right to use his image in a commercial context, which meant that although Schein owned the photograph outright he would have to seek the estate’s permission if he wanted to use the photo in such a manner. Schein had no intention of angering the estate, but there was a chance that, when I showed up on Claud Johnson’s doorstep, he would be more litigious than curious and initiate a legal tug-of-war for the photo.
Just such a skirmish is being waged over the two well-known Johnson photos that LaVere found in the 70s via a pending suit that Carrie Thompson’s heirs have filed in Mississippi Circuit Court against LaVere and Claud Johnson. In the meantime, there are indications that LaVere continues to make money off of Robert Johnson: legal documents indicate that, although LaVere’s deal as exclusive agent has been terminated, he is still splitting royalties with the Johnson estate on at least a couple of licensing deals. He’s quick to label his controversial status in the Johnson world “just so much hogwash” when I contact him. “People aren’t supposed to make money in the music business?” he asks. “Or is it just the blues that they’re not supposed to make money on?”
When I arrive at the 49-acre property where Claud Johnson lives (and where he keeps his gravel truck parked on his lawn), he isn’t home, and his son Michael, who lives next door, has to get on the phone and persuade him to come back so that I can show him the photo. He arrives sheathed in sunglasses and a straw cowboy hat, looking more like Muddy Waters than Robert Johnson. He is stockier and wider-faced than I would expect the son of lithe Robert Johnson to be, but then again, Robert Johnson never drove a gravel truck, and my mental image of him comes from a couple of photos taken long before the thickening of middle age had a chance to encroach. Though Claud is clearly uncomfortable when he shakes my hand, his grip is strong, and the gray in his sideburns and mustache is the only sign that he is a man in his 70s.
Continued (page 6 of 6)
I pull the photo out of the envelope I’ve been carrying and hand it to Claud. “Well, no doubt about it,” he says after studying it for a few long seconds. “This look like before he was grown.”
Claud hands the photo back to me and walks away. When I attempt to get him to elaborate upon what he has just said, he explains that he has signed an agreement with HBO (for what I will later learn is a movie that the cable network is developing about Robert and Claud Johnson, which is being written by James L. White, the screenwriter of Ray). “If you cross a company like that, you could get yourself in a problem. And I really don’t need to get in a problem with HBO,” Johnson tells me, adding that as a result he can’t give me any further “insight” into the picture. “It may be a picture of him, but I really, I can’t really—I’m afraid, you know?” he says, sounding genuinely anguished. “Because, man, I’ll tell you—they’re still after me any way they can get at me, right now.”
I realize that Johnson is talking about the court battle that determined he was Robert Johnson’s heir, and perhaps the current legal skirmish being waged over Carrie Thompson’s photos. On the way back to my car, Michael Johnson apologizes for not being more helpful. He is wearing a T-shirt advertising the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the music and the memory of the artist, which is run by another of Claud’s sons, Steve Johnson.
“My dad just got shell-shocked by that case,” Michael tells me. “They put him through a lot of stuff. To actually prove who you is”—he switches to the second person, though he is clearly talking about his dad—“they ask you a thousand questions. Hell, they tried to scrutinize him like he wasn’t nothing, you know, man?”
“The Face Doesn’t Lie”
In late summer 2007, Schein’s attorney, John Pelosi, submitted the photograph to John Kitchens, the lawyer for the Johnson estate, to see if there was any way of authenticating it. Kitchens’s father, Jim Kitchens, had been the lead attorney in Claud Johnson’s fight to be named heir of the Johnson estate, but he had since turned the day-to-day handling of the estate over to his son, who turned 30 this year and was all of 12 when the Johnson boxed set was released. Not surprisingly, when John Kitchens saw a copy of the photo, he wasn’t exactly floored. “I didn’t know who it was,” he says. But Kitchens remembered reading about a forensic artist who, that August, had reportedly determined the identity of the sailor kissing the nurse in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous Life-magazine photo of Times Square on the day World War II ended. The artist’s name is Lois Gibson and she works for the Houston Police Department. She is also a graduate of the F.B.I. Academy Forensic Artist Course and was deemed “The World’s Most Successful Forensic Artist” in The 2005 Guinness Book of World Records because, at the time, her sketches and facial reconstructions had helped net more than 1,062 criminals.
Kitchens sent Gibson a copy of Schein’s photo, along with reproductions of the Hooks Bros. portrait and the photo-booth shot. Gibson compared the facial features in each of the three photos and reported back with a pretty startling conclusion: “My only problem with this determination is the lack of certainty about the date of the questioned photo,” she wrote in her report to Kitchens. But, she continued, if Schein’s photo “was taken about the same time as, or a little earlier than,” the photo-booth self-portrait, “it appears the individual in [Schein’s photo] is Robert Johnson. All the features are consistent if not identical.”
“If the time frame is right, it’s him,” Gibson tells me when I call her up in Houston. “The face doesn’t lie.” She also points out that if Schein’s photo does depict Johnson, he’s probably younger—possibly two to four years younger—than he appears in the photo-booth self-portrait (which would mean that Schein’s photo had been taken years before the picture Johnny Shines remembered from 1937).
Kitchens is cautiously optimistic about Gibson’s assessment. “Based on the findings, we’re going to get behind it,” he says. “It is impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that this is Robert Johnson,” he adds, pointing out that the few living souls who knew Johnson when he was alive haven’t seen him in 69 years. “But we strongly believe that it is.”
When I meet Schein at a Greenwich Village restaurant to discuss Gibson’s findings, I expect him to be ecstatic. But, actually, he seems slightly conflicted, and I soon realize why. Schein has enjoyed his long strange trip through Robert Johnson’s past and isn’t ready to let go. Although he tells me he thinks Gibson “did a wonderful job” with her analysis, he says he doesn’t agree with her findings that his photo depicts a Johnson who is younger than the man in the photo-booth shot. “I’ve been delving deep,” Schein tells me, and though he still hasn’t been able to crack the make and model of the guitar in his photo, he has come up with a theory about the chronology of the three pictures: They were, he says, all taken within a year of one another. The Hooks Bros. photo was taken first, the self-portrait second, and his photo third, which would make it the latest photo of Johnson, instead of the earliest. His reasoning for this, he explains, is that his photo comes after Johnson has recorded his 29 songs and come away with several hundred dollars, probably the most money he’d ever made. As a result, he doesn’t need to borrow a suit from his nephew, as he did in the Hooks Bros. photo. He can afford his own duds and more. “You got the money from the record deal. People recognize you. You got your own suit,” Schein says. “You’re traveling around. You’re drinking better whiskey. You’re eating better food. Guess what? You’re going to look a little better.”
It is just a theory from a man who plays guitar and works with musicians, a man who respects Robert Johnson, who knows his music, and, after studying his life, feels like he knows Johnson a bit, too—a man who wants to believe that Robert Johnson was singing the blues, but that he wasn't always living them.
Getty Acquires, Restores Third Robert Johnson Image
Robert Johnson, the early-twentieth-century blues singer who, as the legend goes, made a deal with the Devil in exchange for his musical talent, is best known for two things: The first being his incredible talent as a blues musician, influencing the likes of Eric Clapton and many others, and the second being the fact that only two verified images of the singer exist anywhere—until now.
Photo by Robert Johnson Estate/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Robert Johnson, the early-twentieth-century blues singer who, as the legend goes, made a deal with the Devil in exchange for his musical talent, is best known for two things: The first being his incredible talent as a blues musician, influencing the likes of Eric Clapton and many others, and the second being the fact that only two verified images of the singer exist anywhere—until now.
The Getty Images Hulton Archive recently restored and published a third image of the infamous blues singer (above). Seen standing next to fellow musician Johnny Shines, the photo was donated to Getty Images by Johnson’s estate.
Follow the link below to see before and after images of the restoration process: Getty Images
Photo by Robert Johnson Estate/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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