Tommy Johnson

The other Johnson

Long before anyone said it about Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson was telling people he had sold his soul at a crossroads. He was the star of the blues scene around Crystal Springs and Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1920s: a showman who played the guitar behind his head and between his legs, a heavy drinker, and a singer whose voice could drop to a growl and then leap into an eerie, swooping falsetto.

He recorded for only about two years, in 1928 and 1929, cutting about twenty sides for Victor and Paramount. But almost every one of them became a standard in Mississippi. "Big Road Blues" passed through the Mississippi Sheiks to Howlin' Wolf and through Floyd Jones to Canned Heat. "Cool Drink of Water Blues" became Wolf's "I Asked for Water". And "Canned Heat Blues", his confession of drinking cooking fuel when nothing else was available, gave its name to a California blues-rock band forty years later.

Johnson was no relation to Robert Johnson, but the two are tied together forever. The story of a young man meeting a stranger at a crossroads at midnight was Tommy's story first, as his brother LeDell told the folklorist David Evans in 1966. In the decades that followed, it was grafted onto the more famous Johnson. The full history is in The Crossroads.

Worth knowing

Ten things about Tommy Johnson

1. He told the crossroads story about himself.

   Tommy Johnson started and spread the rumour that he had made a deal at a crossroads, decades before it was attached to Robert Johnson.

2. His brother taught him to play.

   LeDell Johnson, a few years older, showed him the guitar after the family moved to Crystal Springs around 1910. LeDell later became a preacher, and the source of the crossroads account.

3. "Canned heat" was Sterno.

   The jellied, denatured alcohol sold as cooking fuel could be strained and drunk when liquor was too expensive or hard to find. Johnson made it the subject of a song.

4. A rock band named itself after that song.

   Alan Wilson and Bob Hite, two blues record collectors in Los Angeles, called their band Canned Heat after his 1928 record.

5. He wrote about jake, too.

   His 1929 "Alcohol and Jake Blues" is about Jamaica ginger, a patent-medicine extract drunk for its alcohol, which was soon to cripple thousands of Americans with the paralysis known as "jake leg".

6. One copy of that record sold for $37,100.

   In 2013 a collector paid that for a copy of Paramount 12950, "Alcohol and Jake Blues" backed with "Ridin' Horse", one of the highest prices ever paid for a blues 78. Only one other copy was known, in poor condition.

7. He learned in Charley Patton's orbit.

   In 1916 he moved north to a plantation near Drew, close to Dockery Farms, and played with Charley Patton, Willie Brown and Dick Bankston.

8. His melody was the subject of a settlement.

   The Mississippi Sheiks built their 1930 hit "Stop and Listen Blues" on the melody of his "Big Road Blues", and a copyright settlement followed. The story goes that Johnson was too drunk to understand what he signed.

9. A scholar's book is named after his song.

   David Evans built his graduate research around Johnson's musical circle, and titled his 1982 study of folk blues Big Road Blues.

10. Bonnie Raitt helped mark his grave.

    A granite headstone was unveiled at his grave near Crystal Springs on October 20, 2001, with her support. It was damaged in 2013.

Life in brief

From Terry to Crystal Springs

1. 1896Born on George Miller's plantation near Terry, Mississippi, between Jackson and Crystal Springs, into a large musical family. His brothers LeDell and Mager also play guitar.
2. c. 1910The family moves to Crystal Springs. LeDell teaches him the guitar, and by eighteen he and his brothers are playing parties across Copiah County.
3. 1916North to the Delta. He moves near Drew with his first wife, Maggie Bidwell Johnson, and falls in with Charley Patton and Willie Brown.
4. 1920Back to Crystal Springs, sharecropping by season and travelling to play, with a growing reputation for drink, gambling and women.
5. 1928Victor sessions in Memphis. In February, with Charlie McCoy on second guitar, he records "Cool Drink of Water Blues" and "Big Road Blues"; another session follows in August.
6. 1929Paramount, Grafton, Wisconsin. A last session (dated 1930 in some sources) produces "Alcohol and Jake Blues", "Ridin' Horse" and "Slidin' Delta".
7. 1930s–50sA local star. The Depression ends his recording career, but he keeps playing dances, jukes and fish fries around Crystal Springs and Jackson.
8. 1956Dies November 1 in Crystal Springs of a heart attack, after playing at a party. He is buried at the Warm Springs Methodist Church cemetery north of town.
9. 1966David Evans interviews LeDell Johnson, recording the crossroads account.
10. 2000O Brother, Where Art Thou? brings a fictional Tommy Johnson to the screen.
11. 2007A Mississippi Blues Trail marker goes up in Crystal Springs.

The first telling

What LeDell told David Evans

In 1966 David Evans, a young folklorist from UCLA researching Tommy Johnson's music, was directed by the street singer Babe Stovall to LeDell Johnson, then living in Jackson. LeDell had given up the blues for the pulpit, but he remembered his brother clearly, including what Tommy said about how he had learned.

As LeDell told it, Tommy said that if you want to learn to play anything you like, you take your guitar to a place where a road crosses, and get there a little before midnight. You sit and play by yourself. A big Black man comes walking up, takes your guitar, tunes it, plays a piece on it and hands it back. After that, you can play whatever you want.

Evans published the account in his 1971 book Tommy Johnson. It fits almost exactly the hoodoo rituals that folklorists such as Newbell Niles Puckett and Harry Middleton Hyatt had collected across the South decades earlier, which suggests Tommy did not invent the story. He borrowed a well-known folk belief and made it his own advertising.

• The story

  Tommy Johnson met the devil at a crossroads at midnight, and traded his soul for the ability to play. Decades later the same story was told of Robert Johnson.

• The record

  The only source is LeDell's memory of what Tommy said, recorded nearly half a century later. Tommy was a showman who liked to be thought dangerous, and the crossroads ritual was common folklore. The Mississippi Encyclopedia describes him as having started and publicised the rumour himself.

On stage

The falsetto, the guitar and the show

What made Tommy Johnson's records travel was his voice. He sang low and rough, then flipped without warning into a high, keening falsetto, a moan halfway between a yodel and a cry. The Mississippi Blues Trail notes that his songs and his falsetto moan were adopted by many of his contemporaries and followers, and among those who absorbed his music was the young Chester Burnett, later known as Howlin' Wolf, who recorded his own versions of Johnson's material in the 1950s.

His guitar playing was lighter and more syncopated than Patton's, with a busy, bouncing bass line, and his best accompaniments became set pieces that other guitarists learned note for note. In person he was a full entertainer, playing the instrument behind his head and between his legs, decades before Jimi Hendrix made such tricks famous.

Start here

Songs to hear, and where they went

• 1928 Big Road Blues A walking blues about travelling alone, over a rolling guitar figure that became one of the most borrowed in Mississippi. The Mississippi Sheiks turned it into "Stop and Listen Blues", which in turn fed Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning"; Floyd Jones reshaped it as "Dark Road", the basis of Canned Heat's 1968 hit "On the Road Again". Elijah Wald also hears it in Arthur Crudup's "Dirt Road Blues". Mississippi Sheiks 1930Floyd Jones 1951Howlin' Wolf 1956Canned Heat 1967Canned Heat 1968
• 1928 Cool Drink of Water Blues The falsetto at its most startling. Howlin' Wolf reworked its opening into his 1956 Chess single "I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)". Howlin' Wolf 1956
• 1928 Canned Heat Blues A grim, beautiful Prohibition-era song about drinking Sterno, and the record that named a band.
• 1928 Maggie Campbell Blues Named for a woman, and built on one of his most admired and most copied guitar parts.
• 1929 Alcohol and Jake Blues From the Paramount session in Grafton, and for decades one of the rarest blues records in existence.

Why he matters

A band, a film and a legend

Johnson's influence in Mississippi was enormous. The Mississippi Blues Trail lists among those who absorbed his songs Kokomo Arnold, Howlin' Wolf and the Mississippi Sheiks, and a whole school of Jackson-area musicians that David Evans documented in the 1960s, many of whom still played his pieces almost exactly as he had. The Mississippi Encyclopedia adds Robert Nighthawk, Houston Stackhouse, Floyd Jones and Otis Spann.

The 1960s blues revival brought his name to a new audience. In Los Angeles, Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson and Bob "The Bear" Hite named their band Canned Heat after his record, and put "Big Road Blues" on their first album in 1967. Their 1968 hit "On the Road Again", built on Floyd Jones's reworking of the same song, reached number 16 in the United States and the top ten in Britain.

In 2000 Joel and Ethan Coen's O Brother, Where Art Thou? gave him his strangest afterlife. The bluesman Chris Thomas King plays a guitarist named Tommy Johnson, picked up at a crossroads after selling his soul, who accompanies the Soggy Bottom Boys. King's performance of Skip James's "Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues" ended up on the film's multi-million-selling soundtrack. For many listeners it was the first time they had heard the name Tommy Johnson, attached, fittingly, to the story he had told about himself all along.