The Curmudgeon: What If Robert Johnson Hadn’t Swallowed That Poison Whiskey?

Editor’s note: In the final paragraph of his August 25 story in Paste on the troubled folklorist Mack McCormick and his book about Robert Johnson, Geoffrey Himes wrote: “Now that the book and the field recordings have been released, we know more about Johnson and Texas blues, but we are still left with burning questions. The biggest question of all is what might have happened if Johnson’s life had not been cut so short and he had lived to become a crucial figure in the tumultuous changes in American music during the 1940s and ’50s. In a forthcoming Curmudgeon Column, we will try to provide an answer.” Himes makes good on that promise in the following piece of alternative history.

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In 1938, many sources allege, the blues singer Robert Johnson was playing in a juke joint near Greenwood, Mississippi, when a jealous husband handed the musician a flask of tainted brown liquid. Within hours, Johnson was doubled over with stomach cramps. By dawn, he was dead. But what if Robert Johnson had never swallowed that poisoned whiskey? What if this had happened instead? Robert Johnson lifted the unlabeled glass bottle to his lips, but Rice Miller knocked the drink out of his partner’s hand. “Don’t ever take a drink if you don’t know where it comes from,” Miller barked.

“Don’t ever knock a bottle out of my hand,” Johnson retorted. Soon, the two musicians were pushing each other around the cramped juke joint, about 15 miles from Greenwood. It was August 15, 1938, a dangerous time to be Black in Mississippi. If Joe Turner (aka Joe Turley), the Tennessee prison warden, didn’t get you, a jealous husband would. A heavyset young woman jumped on Miller’s back to pull him off Johnson. The woman’s husband yanked her arm and pulled her off. An orange-and-gray cat was licking up the spilled whiskey.

The juke joint owner came up with a baseball bat in his hand and growled at the fighters, “Your break is over. Get over there and play some music.” Still seething, his pinstripe suit rumpled by the tussle, Johnson was in no mood for the Ink Spots, Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers songs he’d sung in the previous set. Now, he wanted to play songs of anger and dread, desire and frustration, songs he had written himself: “Hellhounds on My Trail,” “Stones in My Passway” and “Crossroads.” His voice sounded as if he were ready to kill or be killed. His guitar and Miller’s harmonica seemed to be continuing their battle with different weapons.

From his chair by the potbelly stove, Johnson could see everyone in the jammed-pack room. He could see that woman, the one in the red dress who had taken him out in the cotton fields earlier that evening. He could see her husband in overalls thrusting another bottle toward him with a glare in his eyes. He could see that cat vomiting in the corner. He could see Miller shaking his head furiously as the bottle came nearer.

Johnson raised the palm of his left hand and pushed the bottle away. The man protested. Miller rose up out of his chair in response, and the owner reappeared with his baseball bat. “These days keep on worryin’ me,” Johnson sang icily, “there’s a hellhound on my trail.” Once the set was over, Johnson turned to Miller and said, “You were right, Rice; that man is out to get me. Let’s split.”

“Go get our money and I’ll stand guard till we can get away,” Miller replied. Johnson asked if they could bring the girl along, and Miller said, “Are you out of your fucking mind? It’s a wonder you ain’t dead already. Don’t you know you’re supposed to fool around with a married woman behind her husband’s back—not right in front of him?”

The two men made their way into the nearby piney woods and found a bed of needles where they could sleep. When they woke, as the first glimmer appeared in the East, Miller said, “We need to get going. Mississippi won’t be safe for a while.” Johnson asked if they should go to Memphis. “Naw, that’s too close,” Miller replied. “Too many of these Black folk got kin up there. Let’s go to Chicago.” They bushwhacked to Grenada Junction, where the trains slowed down at the switching yard. The two men hid in the weeds till a northbound freight braked enough for them to grab hold of a box car and swing inside.

Two days later, they were on Chicago’s South Side, a landscape as vertical as the Mississippi Delta had been horizontal. Disoriented by the tall walls on each side of the street, they tried to fill their empty stomachs with the money from their last gig. A diner waitress pointed the way to Maxwell Street, an open-air market where many street singers were trying to attract attention. The two newcomers found a gap between two competitors and started playing. No one paid them much mind until Johnson played the closest thing to a hit he’d ever had, the double-entendre car song, “Terraplane Blues.”

Some women came up and said, “I remember that song from down in ol’ Miss; a fella named Robert Something made a record of it.” “That’s me! That’s me!” Johnson cried.

“Ah, c’mon,” the woman said skeptically. “You don’t sound like that record.” “That was me,” Johnson repeated. “Tell her, Rice.”

“I tell you what,” she said. “I’ll give you two bits if you play it again.” They did, with increased enthusiasm. The woman’s friend said, “I’ll give you a quarter if you play it one more time.”

Before long, a small crowd had gathered around Johnson and Miller, who played “Terraplane Blues” five times in a row. The women were dancing with each other, and the men were chuckling. Big Bill Broonzy happened by and said, “Boy, where’d you learn that song?” “I wrote it,” Johnson said. It took some convincing, but Broonzy eventually accepted the claim and asked if he could join in. That evening, the new friends repaired to Broonzy’s rooming house. “Y’all can sleep and eat here,” Broonzy said, “if you let me handle the money from our gigs.”

The trio of Johnson, Miller and Broonzy soon became fixtures on Maxwell Street and any hole-in-the-wall eatery that might allow them to play for a meal and whatever tips they could collect. So many people asked Miller if he were Sonny Boy Williamson, the popular Chicago singer and harmonica blower, that Miller stopped saying no and started saying yes. This ticked off the original Sonny Boy but brought more work to the trio. Two weeks after Johnson and Miller landed in the Windy City, there was a knocking at Broonzy’s door. Johnson opened it, and on the stoop was a tall, wiry white man with a flat-top haircut and an ingratiating smile. “Hi, I’m John Hammond from Columbia Records in New York,” he said, “and I’m looking for Big Bill Broonzy.”

“Bill’s not here right now,” Johnson replied. “Can I take a message?” “And what is your name?” Hammond asked. “Robert Johnson.” “Robert Johnson, the singer from Mississippi?” “That’s me.”

Hammond’s smile vanished and he stared in astonishment. “B-b-but, you’re supposed to be dead. I was looking for you in Mississippi, and everyone said you’d been poisoned.” Johnson grinned and said, “But here I am, as alive as you.”

“The Robert Johnson who made that ‘Terraplane Blues’ record?” “How would you know about that record?” “I’m in the record business. In fact, I wanted to hire you for a concert in New York, but when they said you had passed, I went looking for Big Bill instead.”

“Come inside,” Johnson said, “and I’ll show you.” Hammond stepped into the cramped apartment, which had the disheveled look of a bachelor pad. A woman with a blanket wrapped around her torso, peeked out of a bedroom door and promptly disappeared.

Johnson picked up a guitar that had been leaning against a chair, sat in the chair and played “Terraplane Blues” with a propulsion the record had only hinted at. Hammond was soon convinced, and when Johnson followed with “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day,” the gregarious Hammond was momentarily silenced. Negotiations quickly ensued, and Hammond agreed to book all three of them—Johnson, Broonzy and Miller—for a concert called “From Spirituals to Swing” at Carnegie Hall on December 23, 1938.

If Chicago seemed like another planet, New York was a planet even further removed from Greenwood. Broonzy and Miller were awed by Carnegie Hall: the ornate building, the mostly white audience, and the star-studded line-up that included Count Basie, Pete Johnson, Rosetta Tharpe and the Golden Gate Quartet. But Johnson was having none of that. “It’s not enough for us to be here,” he told his bandmates; “we’ve gotta kill them. We gotta make sure we’re the ones everyone remembers.” The trio’s five-song set began with a vocal showcase each for Broonzy and Miller, but then Johnson took over.

When Johnson followed “Come on in My Kitchen” with “Hellhounds on My Trail,” the usual rustling and whispering went silent in the audience—and in the wings too. Neither the white listeners out front nor the Black musicians in the back had ever heard anything quite like these coiling-and-uncoiling guitar parts, these ghost-story lyrics. After the show, Basie himself came up to Johnson and said, “Son, you got something there. I don’t know what it is, but you’ve got it.”

Three months later, Johnson found himself in Columbia Records’ Studio A at 799 Seventh Avenue in New York City. Hammond, the label’s newly hired A&R director, brought the young singer up to a rehearsal room to talk about what they might record. For two hours, Johnson ran through the repertoire he played at rent parties and taverns in both the Delta and Chicago, everything from hillbilly and blues tunes to show tunes and original compositions. Hammond was pleased with most of it but puzzled about how to focus such a surprising range of styles. “Let’s hook you up with some different musicians,” Hammond suggested, “and see what clicks.”

So the next morning, Johnson returned to find the studio populated by the Kansas City Six, the jazz all-star band from the Carnegie Hall show. Four members of the Basie Band (Lester Young, Freddie Green, Walter Page and Jo Jones) were joined by Buck Clayton and Charlie Christian, the latter replacing Leonard Ware, who’d played the “From Spirituals to Swing” event. Green and Christian were both guitarists, and Hammond suggested that Johnson focus on just singing.

Hammond wanted them to start with Johnson’s jumping arrangement of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)” and Johnson’s own composition, “Come and Get It,” a song that was a tribute to Southern cooking or cunnilingus, depending on how you heard it. Johnson demonstrated how he played the two songs, and the jazzers quickly worked up a head arrangement. Johnson wasn’t used to singing without his guitar, nor to the big sound of the band, and it took several run-throughs to get acceptable takes. There was a general feeling that they hadn’t captured what they were after, but Johnson was clearly fascinated by Christian’s electric guitar and amplifier.

Recently hired by Benny Goodman, Christian explained to the eager Mississippian that the instrument didn’t merely make the music louder; it created a whole new sound, a metallic sizzle that made the guitar sound more like a lead singer than a background vocalist. Johnson followed his new friend to the latter’s Harlem apartment and begged for a chance to play the plugged-in archtop. He bombarded its owner with questions not only about the equipment but also about the strange chords he’d been playing that afternoon.

“It’s not that easy to switch from acoustic to electric,” Christian cautioned, but as fast as he absorbed new information, Johnson was applying it to the guitar. Christian finally went to bed, leaving Johnson in the apartment’s armchair, playing chords and single-note runs through the turned-down amp. When Christian woke in the morning, his guest was still in the armchair, snoring with his head thrown back and the Gibson ES-150 still in his lap. Christian gently pulled the instrument to safety and went to make some coffee.

That afternoon, Johnson met with Hammond and explained that he didn’t want to do any more singing without his guitar. “That’s like playing baseball with only one arm,” Johnson complained. “And I want to play an electric guitar.” “When did you start playing electric?” Hammond asked. “Well, just last night,” Johnson said sheepishly, “but it’s everything I’ve been hearing in my head.” Hammond rubbed his cheek doubtfully, and finally offered a compromise. “Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll rent one and we can try a session with both an electric and an acoustic and hear how it turns out.”

The next day, Johnson was back in the studio with Young, Page and Jones but without any guitarists to usurp his duties. They ran through several numbers with Johnson on acoustic guitar and then electric, and it was quickly obvious that the plugged-in instrument was more exciting. They re-recorded “Blue Yodel No. 1” and “Come and Get It” from the last session as well as a new song, “Snake Eyes Blues,” as well as two of his older songs, “Rambling on My Mind” and “Dust My Broom.”

Here was a sound unlike the urban blues singing of Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, and unlike Johnson’s earlier recordings in Texas. Johnson’s bottleneck guitar breaks slashed across Young’s tenor sax and pushed along the rhythm section. Here was a strange mix of cottonfield twang and uptown swing that was as thrilling as it was unprecedented.

Miller and Broonzy were already packed to go back to Chicago, but Johnson said, “I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to stay put for a while; there’s a lot I can learn here.” An angry argument was followed by bear hugs and regrets. Johnson rode the subway down to Port Authority and saw his friends off on the Greyhound.

Johnson wasn’t making much money, but Hammond doled out small loans that kept the guitarist afloat. He’d spend hours practicing on his new electric, either alone in his apartment or with his neighbor Charlie Christian. Sometimes the two guitarists would hoof it over to the recently opened Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem for the jazz jam sessions. Back in Mississippi, Johnson had never been much of a reader, but once he discovered Manhattan’s used-book stores, he devoured the second-hand paperbacks.

Hammond took Johnson for an audition at the Café Society, New York’s first integrated nightclub, on Greenwich Village’s Sheridan Square. Johnson not only secured a monthly gig, but also started hanging out there when he wasn’t playing. It was there he met the Louisiana songster Huddie Ledbetter. It was there he met the midwestern poet Langston Hughes, who was so impressed by Johnson’s lyrics that he invited the singer to collaborate on a musical.

Hughes’ Harlem apartment was the most lavish Black residence Johnson had ever seen, its eight rooms filled with potted plants, chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and African masks. Over a lunch of chicken-salad sandwiches and bloody marys, Hughes explained that he wanted to write a show called Big Hitler, Little Hitler, about a Black volunteer in the All-American Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. The main character would be torn between his desire to fight fascism in Europe and his desire to battle it at home. Hughes had even written part of the theme song:

Big Hitler in Berlin,
Little Hitler in Rome,
Down in Mississippi,
All around my home.

Hughes read it out loud three times, and Johnson came up with a driving blues tune with an unusual minor seventh chord as the pivot. The second time he played it, he added his own stanza:

Big Hitler very far.
Little Hitler very near.
We’ve got to fight him there.
We’ve got to fight him here.

“That’s it! That’s it,” cried Hughes. “You have a real way with words. Why don’t you put down the guitar, buy a typewriter and become a real writer?”

“No, no,” Johnson replied. “You got it all wrong. You should pick up a guitar. Your little poems are just waiting to become songs, like caterpillars waiting to become butterflies.”

Johnson’s versions of “Big Hitler” and “Come and Get It” became favorites among the left-wing crowd at the Café Society. Hammond was especially fond of them, but he told Johnson that Columbia Records would never release songs about killing Southern segregationists and oral sex. Maybe Johnson should release them under a pseudonym with Moe Asch’s new independent label, Folkways Records. That’s how the two songs appeared under the name of Blind Boy Gravy on the 1940 anthology, These Machines Kill Fascists.

Before that album was released, however, Johnson’s time in New York was running short. He had released four 78s on Columbia’s Okeh imprint: “Blue Yodel No. 1” b/w “Dust My Broom”; “Snake Eyes Blues” b/w “Rambling on My Mind” and “Joe Turner Blues” b/w “Burning the Cane Field Down.”

Each release had sold more poorly than the last, even though the last record, two autobiographical songs performed with just electric guitar and voice, would become the most famous of Johnson’s career. Even today it’s hard to confront the sheer intensity of Johnson sliding the strings and hollering, “Joe Turner tried to murder me with a big Colt forty-five. Joe Turner tried to murder me, but first I took a dive. Joe Turner tried to murder me, but, look, I’m still alive.”

Johnson played the second annual “From Spirituals to Swing” concert on Christmas Eve at Carnegie Hall. But after New Year’s Eve celebrations ushering in the new decade of the ‘40s, Johnson was itching to hit the road again. There was a tearful last night with his girlfriend Zora Neale Hurston, and a more sober farewell breakfast with Hammond.

“I’m sorry, Robert,” the producer said, “but we just can’t figure out how to sell this kind of modern-slash-ancient blues. I think you’d be better off giving someone else a chance.”

“That’s OK, Mr. Hammond,” Johnson said consolingly. “You gave it your best shot. And I learned things this year that I couldn’t have learned anywhere else. But it’s time for me to move on.”

Johnson called the number of the phone at the bottom of the stairs in Broonzy’s boarding house in Chicago and asked the girl who answered if Big Bill or Sonny Boy were there. Miller got on the line and excitedly peppered his Delta friend with questions. “Everything’s dynamite,” Johnson replied. “I’ve got a new guitar and a new crop of songs, and I’m coming back to Chicago. See if you can line up some work for us.”

“That’s great,” Miller said. “By the way, that Jewish guy who owns the Macomba Lounge has been asking about you. He’s thinking of starting a record company.” “What’s his name?” Johnson responded.

“Leonard,” Miller answered. “Leonard Chess.”