Free Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald Page B

other thing worth noting about “Phonograph Blues” is that, on both takes, Johnson’s vocals and guitar work sound surer than they had on “Kind Hearted Woman” or “Dust My Broom.” Finishing his first session, he had relaxed into the process. Any microphone fright was gone, and by now he could be confident that the producers were happy and that he really was going to see his name on a record label and hear his voice wailing from the jukeboxes back home.

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FIRST SESSIONS, PART TWO: REACHING BACK
    A FTER TWO DAYS OFF , J OHNSON RETURNED TO THE HOTEL ROOM studio on Thursday, November 26, but recorded only one song. Perhaps this is because the group before him, the Chuck Wagon Gang, took up more time than expected, or because the Mexican duo that recorded right after him needed to get in and finish their recordings. 1 In any case, he made up for it by cutting another seven songs on Friday, and these two sessions would be quite different from Monday’s, or from the further recordings he made seven months later. Apparently, Monday’s session had used up most of the material he had prepared for his recording debut, and he was now cast back on his more general repertoire. Thus, while on Monday he had stuck to the current commercial trends, Thursday and Friday found him playing a more varied range of material, and reaching back to the countrified styles he had heard growing up in Memphis and the Delta.
    The song he recorded on Thursday, “ 32-20 Blues ,” was the closest thing he had yet done to a straight cover of a previous record. While one can trace the roots of the songs he had played on Monday, he had made significant changes to all of them and they can rightly be considered original compositions. “32-20,” though, is simply a guitar version of Skip James’s piano-accompanied “22-20 Blues,” and even the difference in caliber does not count as an alteration, since James actually sang “32-20” in his early verses. Just as James had revealed his debt to Roosevelt Sykes’s “44 Blues” by slipping back to the .44 caliberin his last verse, Johnson makes a similar slipup: James sang that, if his baby did not come when he sent for her, “all the doctors in Wisconsin” would not be able to help her, and though Johnson changes the doctors’ location to Hot Springs, he messes up in the eighth verse and sings “Wisconsin.” 2 Obviously, he was still hearing the James version in his head and had not completely assimilated his changes to it.
    Johnson’s appreciation for James’s work was unusual, to say the least. James was the ultimate prophet without honor in his country, a unique genius whose work bore little resemblance to that of the players around him, and whose records made few concessions to any taste but his own. His singing was the eeriest, most haunting sound in early blues, his guitar accompaniments used a rare minor-key tuning and followed few standard blues patterns, and his piano playing verged on anarchy, while brilliantly fitting whatever he chose to sing. He seems to have confined his public performances almost entirely to local joints around Bentonia, a small town just south of the Delta, and his records hardly sold at all. They are among the rarest prewar 78s, and Gayle Dean Wardlow, a Mississippian who spent years going door to door in search of such records, writes that of six he finally managed to dig up, none were found in Mississippi. 3
    While Johnson played a few other pieces adapted from Mississippi artists who had made recordings, most notably Son House, in general these seem to have been songs he learned in his youth and picked up at live performances. Aside from James’s work, almost all the records he emulated were by top hit makers. Because of this, I would read a good deal into his attraction to James. There are two ways to interpret this attraction, and they are by no means mutually