Ted Gioia has big news for Blues fans.

A scandal is taking place in American music this week. And it’s all about a book written 50 years ago—and finally published on Tuesday.

The release of this work has set off arguments that, I suspect, will continue for decades to come.

The book is the long awaited biography of blues legend Robert Johnson by the late Robert ‘Mack’ McCormick (1930-2015). Ever since it was announced a half century ago, this work has been eagerly anticipated by blues fans and music scholars—who hoped it would solve all the mysteries surrounding the most enigmatic figure in twentieth century American music.

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) profoundly influenced later generations of blues, rock, and folk performers—impacting everybody from Bob Dylan to the Rolling Stones. But what little we knew about his own life was more legend than reality. We heard crazy stories about him selling his soul to the devil, or showing up in unlikely cities under assumed names, or finally getting poisoned by a jealous husband who literally got away with murder in the racist South.

But it was hard to know what was true and what merely rumor or conjecture—until McCormick started making lengthy field trips into Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and elsewhere, going anywhere or everywhere even a speck of information might be found. While others speculated about Robert Johnson, McCormick was determined to uncover the truth—at whatever the cost.

He did most of this work in the 1960s and early 1970s—starting at a time when professors and career musicologists had little interest in undertaking this kind of laborious research into the origins of the Delta blues. The people doing the work were mostly blues fans like McCormick, and there weren’t many of them. But he was on a mission—almost like those ludicrous Blues Brothers in the movie of the same name—and through sheer bloody persistence eventually tracked down numerous people who knew the legendary musician back in the 1920s and 1930s.

By the time Mack was done, he had collected a whole archive of information from musicians, family, friends, and more than a dozen people who had witnessed or known of that fateful night when the famous guitarist stood up at his last gig, and announced “I’ve been poisoned”—and then fell to the ground.

McCormick began work on his definitive book, which he called Biography of a Phantom. It was a suitable name—because Robert Johnson was a phantom to almost everybody except McCormick himself, who had finally put together all the pieces of an amazing life story.

But the book didn’t appear in the 1970s, despite the author’s grand claims. Nor did it get published in the 1980s or 1990s or at any point in McCormick’s lifetime.
I never thought this book was show up my shelf—but here it is.

Finally, after the author’s death, his huge personal archive—known as “The Monster” because of its massive size—got acquired by the Smithsonian. This stash, which had previously filled the nooks and crannies of McCormick’s Houston home, included recordings, photographs, field notes, and various manuscripts, including different versions of the unpublished Robert Johnson bio.

In the aftermath, the decision was made to publish an early draft of the manuscript. And when it came out on Tuesday, all hell broke loose—at least in the world of blues research and American music history.

RTWT

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