So far, I have resisted writing about Robert Johnson on this blog. I love Robert Johnson, but it feels so corny to be yet another a white dude rhapsodizing about him. However, Robert Johnson is so sublimely great that he leaves me no choice.
Robert Johnson’s life is famously not well documented, and his fans have filled the vacuum with endless mythologizing. I find it distasteful to read about him selling his soul to the devil to get good at guitar. It’s patronizing. Doesn’t it seem more likely that he got so good by just practicing a lot? Rather than engaging with all of that nonsense, I would prefer to focus on his music. Here’s the first song Robert Johnson ever recorded.
The recording is pitched 30 cents above standard A440 tuning. It sounds like it’s closest to the key of B-flat. However, Johnson is pretty clearly playing in the key of A in standard tuning, so maybe he had a capo on the first fret. It’s also possible that the recording was made (or mastered) at too high a speed, and that the pitch should really be lower. John Gibbens argues that Johnson’s recordings were mastered 12% too fast, perhaps to make them more “exciting.” This guy on YouTube slowed down “Kind Hearted Woman Blues” so that the guitar would be in the key of A, and I agree with him that this sounds better and more believable:
This is not just an abstruse musicological debate. The music takes on a very different quality slowed down. The official releases are anxious and intense, with Johnson’s voice sounding strained in its upper register. Slowed down, the groove becomes more mellow, and the vocals are calmer and more authoritative. I prefer the slower version, but I recognize that the official releases have a cultural life of their own, and for better or worse, are the recordings that are available to most people. I’m going to analyze as if the tune is in A, and if you want it to sound like the recording, put a capo on the first fret (and, I guess, tune 30 cents sharp.) Here’s my Ableton Live visualization.
“Kind Hearted Woman Blues” is seemingly a standard twelve-bar blues in A. But Johnson stretches the form significantly, adding and dropping beats at will. He also displaces the chords early and late in various places. When I was young and ignorant, I thought this was a sign of casualness, or even sloppiness. Now I realize that this improvisational stretching of the form was deliberate, and musically well motivated. For example, Johnson adds an extra beat to the ninth bar of the form every time he plays it except for the last one.
I transcribed the recording below. As with all of my transcriptions of Black American music, this chart necessarily simplifies the pitches and rhythms, so let your ears be the true guide to what’s happening. All the notes I colored blue are blue notes between C and C-sharp. Johnson hits these remarkably consistently. I don’t think he sings a single uninflected C natural the whole tune (though he does sing occasional C-sharps). He also plays some neutral thirds in the guitar via string bending.
If you want to play this on guitar, here’s a good tutorial, and here’s an even better one. As with John Lee Hooker‘s playing, the left hand part of this is not extremely difficult, but the right hand groove is subtle indeed, and it will take you many years of practice to get it to sound right.
There are a couple of distinctive “Robert Johnson-isms” in the guitar. He dresses up his tonic chords by alternating between the tonic A7 and the tonic diminished chord, Adim7. This is a very bluesy chord! It includes the minor third and flat fifth from the A blues scale. It also includes three of the four notes in D7. Johnson loves the sound of that flat fifth rubbing against the natural fifth, played on the open sixth string.
The other most obvious Robert Johnson-ism is the descending turnaround that ends the intro and each verse:
| A | A7/G | D/F# | Dm/F | E ...
The descending chromatic line has its own intrinsic pathos, but having the tonic ringing way up above it in the higher octave is what really makes this grab my heart.
The third verse, the one before the guitar solo, is especially striking. It starts at 1:17 with a break in the groove: “Now there ain’t but the one thing makes Mr Johnson drink.” There’s a measure each of A7 and Adim7, then two beats of each chord, then one beat of each chord. Then at 1:28, you expect Johnson to go to D7 for “Oh babe, my life won’t be the same.” But he doesn’t. Instead he plays a spidery riff on the minor pentatonic, and the only chord underneath it is a momentary A. Then he sings, “You break my heart” on something close to an E augmented triad with a strange displacement of the downbeat. You won’t hear Eric Clapton do any of that!
Robert Johnson also recorded an alternate take of “Kind Hearted Woman Blues.” It’s a minor third lower than the master take, which I guess means that he played it in open D with a capo on the fourth fret. There’s no solo, but there is an additional verse. It’s noteworthy that several of the odd phrase lengths are the same as in the master take, as is the strange soloing under the second phrase in the third verse.
When I was younger and less self-reflective, I performed this song onstage a few times, alone and with some bands. I thought I connected to its heartbroken lyrics. (I was hilariously mistaken.) I regularized the form, because even if I had wanted to follow Robert Johnson’s odd phrase lengths, I wouldn’t have been able to keep track of them. I’ve heard many people play this tune, and they all regularize the phrase lengths too. Part of me thinks that we should be trying harder, that we should respect Johnson’s choices for his own song, especially the ones that stayed consistent across takes. But then I think, why should we try to replicate his performance exactly? Shouldn’t we all be trying to sound like ourselves when we play the blues? And then another part of me thinks, yes, we should, and that means we shouldn’t be playing Robert Johnson songs at all. We should be writing our own songs, speaking to our own experiences. We could certainly be quoting and referring to Robert Johnson – those riffs are too good not to want to try out. But maybe we should let his recordings speak for themselves.