LEAD BELLY ROBERT JOHNSON
Cotton-picker, blues pioneer, womaniser, convicted murderer, forefather of rock’n’roll. Walter Trout on the impact of the Delta blues king and ‘crossroads’ legend.
Lead Belly was born Huddie Ledbetter in 1885 in Mooringsport, Louisiana, close to Caddo lake, a tranquil spot far removed from the bright city lights of Shreveport, the nearest big town. His parents were farmers, and by all accounts Huddie was a tough kid who was able to pick more cotton than anyone else.
He quickly came to like women, corn liquor and trouble in about equal proportions. He liked hanging out in Shreveport’s red-light area, and by the age of 16 he had not only gained an enviable reputation for his sexual prowess, but also heard the barrel-house piano players whose ‘walking bass’ figures would later become a trademark of his own powerful rhythmic style.
By the age of 33, Lead Belly had mastered the 12-string guitar, met up with Blind Lemon Jefferson and was becoming a regular performer at dances and fish fries in the region. But he soon ran into serious trouble. After an assault conviction, he spent a year on the chain gang, from which he escaped. He subsequently adopted the name Walter Boyd.
At about the same time that the USA entered the First World War, Walter Boyd was with two friends on his way to a dance. After an altercation about a girl, one of the men drew a pistol, but before he could use it Boyd shot him in the head. Six months later, in 1918, he was sent to Shaw State Prison with a 30-year sentence.
In a remarkable streak of luck – something that seemed to characterise his whole life – after serving only seven years, Boyd (who by now had the nickname Lead Belly) charmed his way out of prison by making up a song about the prison governor, Pat Neff.
But Lead Belly’s temper soon got the better of him again, and by 1930 he was behind bars again, this time Angola prison in Louisiana, for attempted murder. Incredibly, history would quickly repeat itself. In 1933 John Lomax arrived at Angola Prison, looking to record the songs of the inmates for the Library Of Congress. Once again Lead Belly sang a suitably ingratiating song about the governor, and the next year he was released.
A colourful life, then, but Lead Belly’s real claim to a place in rock history is his incredible repertoire of songs – from cowboy ballads like Out On The Western Plain (covered by Rory Gallagher) to his takes on the old English ballad Gallows Pole (immortalised by Led Zeppelin), Where Did You Sleep Last Night (covered by Kurt Cobain) and Black Betty (effectively adopted by Ram Jam).
His final performance was a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1949. He died that year, aged 61.
Killer Track: In The Pines
Robert Johnson’s masterful guitar technique is the stuff of legend, and his haunting vocal delivery was once described by Eric Clapton as “the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice”. I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom, Sweet Home Chicago, Terraplane Blues, Love In Vain Blues, Hellhound On My Trail and Traveling Riverside Blues are just a few of his songs that have become classic rock standards, covered by Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Lucinda Williams and Larkin Poe to name a few. Such covers would receive far more attention than their creator did in his short lifetime – he was born in 1911 and dead at 27 – but Johnson’s originals are conserved in the seminal 1990 compilation The Complete Recordings, the ‘ground zero’ of recorded Delta blues.
“Robert Johnson was an incredible guitar player and singer,” says Walter Trout. “On these songs he sounds like three guys, because he’s playing a bass line, a rhythm and slide leads, all at the same time. There are guys who can nail it note-for-note, but it’s lacking the spark of creativity.
“But to me, the reason he’s considered in a league of his own – among all those other guys like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, Charley Patton and Blind Willie
Johnson – is because of his songs. They’re universal and they’re lasting and they’re classic. In the canon of the blues, his songs are really top of the heap. My favourite is Love In Vain Blues. That one makes me weep. It tears me up. Cross Road Blues is incredible too, the guitar playing and the singing. That whole thing about going to the crossroads and selling your soul to the devil… If you ever talked to BB King, he’d say: ‘No, that’s bullshit. The blues is beautiful. And beauty doesn’t come from the devil.’
“These songs were unknowingly instrumental in the creation of rock’n’roll. But one thing that’s kinda mind blowing, when you hear Clapton and the Stones and all these people doing these unbelievable songs, is that the guy never made a dime. He was paid a total of thirtyeight dollars. That’s what he made off these songs. Hopefully his family is receiving royalties. He’s another in a long line of originators of blues music who died basically penniless [allegedly poisoned by the husband of one of his sexual conquests].
“So that’s a real travesty about this music. Its impact worldwide is monumental, but the guys who originated it never, ever received what they were due. And they died having no idea that their music was going to become immortal.”