The Blues

Rain in Our Door (Duets With Robert Johnson), poems by Diann Blakely

Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, by Elijah Wald

"I Believe I'll Dust My Broom," Robert Johnson (recorded in 1936)

He was a natty dresser, a ladies man,  he always had pocket change, was "a strange dude, a loner and a drifter." He had the kind of long "spidery" fingers that made it easier to reach for a note; he drank, but he was seldom drunk. Johnny Shines, himself a fine bluesman, spent a lot of time on the road with Johnson, and noted that Johnson "was about the greatest guitar player [he'd] ever heard," an innovator as a slide player and adept at taking old songs, adding verses and sprucing up the guitar parts in ways no one had ever heard before (check out "Terraplane Blues" for a sampling of Johnson's remarkable, innovative style).  "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom," based on a blues of Leroy Carr, uses "floating verses"--stock lines that Johnson, like any oral-formulaic poet, popped into his longer tunes to fill out the song. Elijah Wald's reading of this and other great Johnson tunes emphasizes the way in which Johnson used triplets and a boogie-woogie beat to drive the song forward, to give it an urgency that doesn't show up in any early versions. Most listeners know this tune from the Elmore James recording of 1951--it's a remarkable performance and contains what one critic has called the "most famous blues riff" ever recorded.  I prefer Johnson's scalding acoustic to James's electric slide, but both songs are the real thing. Johnson wasn't a poet, but listening through the entire body of his recorded work demonstrates his genius for merging standard blues sentiments to stunningly original guitar riffs.

***

Diann Blakely, like Robert Johnson, died too young.  I have admired her poetry since reading her first collection, Hurricane Walk, in 1993.  Here's the title poem from that collection, typical of Blakely's intense and lyric style:

Hurricane Walk

It was better than sex, the way it relaxed me.
My thighs throbbed for ours, each finger
seemed limp. I lighted
a cigarette, then found it too heavy to lift.

A more comfortable lust would have kept me
inside. Yet I wanted
the wind’s touch, to feel its whorled force.
I stood on a bridge, there were no trees

to stop it — I saw thin sheets of water
spin like ghosts from the Charles.
And now, damp from a bath, I feel
honed, quite essential.

This robe seems too big, it abrades
my cleansed skin. The room’s warmth
stings my lips; they were left raw and chapped,
almost bruised. It will take days

to heal them, the slightest good-night kiss
is out of the question for weeks.

At the time of her death in 2014, Blakely was working on Rain in Our Door, duets that honor, and, in the style of the blues, riff on the songs of Robert Johnson. The blues are stacked deep with meaning: a tag line from a song might reach back to a call and response shouted by a tired field worker on a Saturday afternoon, a man or a woman waiting for the pay envelop and a night at the juke or on the front porch.  Johnson and so many other blues players learned their craft from older practitioners; the songs they played were based on "traditional" tunes, meaning songs whose origins cannot be traced to any composer but are so deeply embedded in the culture as to be the culture. The instruments--beat-up guitars, fiddles, harmonicas, drums--were often found in pawn shops, and the blues voice, more often than not, was honed in a church choir ("devil's music" the preachers called it).  Blakely was deeply immersed in this rich tradition of making music out of pain. Her poems, virtually all of them, are full of yearning, and in this collection she brilliantly captures Johnson's moods--not just the words he sang, but the guitar voicings that are often the real attraction.

Here's part of Blakely's syncopated "Stop Breaking Down"

O can I get a witness for this wreckage?

             You asked when sweet black angels beckoned

And you kicked off the sheets, sweating fresh blues

               And dreaming of Friars Point, Memphis, 

Dreaming of Rosedale and Mound Bayou. The stuff

               I get--o sing it now--gon' bust

Your brains out baby, gon' make you lose your mind.

               Lost him like smoke, said Johnny Shines.... 

Robert Johnson was always dreaming of someplace else. He lived no where in particular. Robert Lockwood shares stories of traveling with Johnson, of splitting the kitty, playing "both sides of the bridge" to make more money for moonshine and smokes, and especially for the women who loved Johnson's look ("he was part Indian" with smooth skin and a quick smile, according to Shines).  

Blakely replicates the restlessness of Johnson in her poems--they move from blues verses, to fragments of Johnson's life ("Mr. Downchild"), to sad reflections on how race still haunts America ("Rambling on My Mind").  

"Truth sides / With history's open veins..." Blakely seamlessly weaves Johnson's lyrics into her poems, or she writes her own blues, following Johnson across his brief, wild life to his dying in agony of poisoned whiskey (or a stabbing, or syphilis, depending on who is telling the story--Wald quotes "Honeyboy" Edwards to support the poisoning story, which is the most credible).  

"And soon you're brokedown on your knees, mouth full of foam

   And blood and curses hurled at God. 

Please Mr. HIghwayman. please don't block the road.

   Three days. Three nights. A borrowed bed

With shrieking metal springs. But first musky confusion;

   Your gut becomes a gallows-rope [!]

O play me. Play me. O play me Terraplane Blues...

   Strings fray. You're booked and got to go.

--from "Terraplane Blues"

Blakely's chronology of Johnson's life and her remarkable notes to her poems--not snippets of explanation, but short essays on the life and afterlife of Johnson and the blues--make Rain in Our Door more than just an extraordinary collection of poems; the book is a homage to the greatest of the early bluesmen. 

I recommend that you read Rain in Our Door with Elijah Wald's wonderful account of the Delta blues at hand. Taken together, and with the definitive recordings of Johnson's songs on the stereo, the books provide both poetic and historical insights into America's most important cultural creation. 

 Here's a link to Johnson's version of "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBHHFIyRxw0

Rain in Our Door is published by White Pine Press

http://www.whitepine.org/catalog.php

George Ovitt (3/4/18)