As the years pile on, true knowledge about a dead legend often melts irretrievably into the realm of myth. If that legend toiled in relative obscurity while alive, the chance for objectivity gets thinner.
Whatever one can say about the merits or intentions of blues scholar Robert “Mack” McCormick, his posthumous account of the life of Robert Johnson makes this clear, for the author and subject.
In the early 1970s, McCormick set out to find the real Johnson by using the living memories of friends and family. In the process, he wound up creating Rashomons of both subject and himself.
Whether you see Mack as a heroic researcher or a greedy exploiter may depend as much on you as on him.
“Biography Of A Phantom is on the one hand a testament to Mack McCormick’s extraordinary reach and tenacity as a researcher and writer, and on the other it is a disturbing cautionary tale of the profoundly complex, at times harrowing, and sometimes haunting practice of telling (or selling) others’ stories,” writes the book’s editor, John W. Troutman, in his Afterword.
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| Three confirmed photographs, the one on the right uncovered just a few years ago, show Robert Johnson, his long fingers at work on a guitar. They and 29 recorded songs are the surviving output of one of the last century's most influential artists. Image from https://www.cranbrooktownsman.com/opinion/the-third-photograph-of-robert-johnson-5349146 |
In the case of McCormick, caution comes from multiple directions. For the people who entrusted him with their pieces of Johnson’s life story, including photographs, McCormick showed a lack of basic human accountability. For McCormick himself, access into the blues legend’s life became a rabbit hole over time he never dug himself out of.
Meanwhile, readers of this long-delayed, frustratingly incomplete account will be left with more questions than answers.
Robert Johnson is widely credited with inventing rock music as it came to be. He also introduced that institution known as the “27 Club,” being that age when he died. While alive, Johnson created a short but extremely influential catalog of blues records. They include masterworks like “Crossroad Blues,” “Love In Vain,” and “Ramblin’ On My Mind,” covers of which get played on classic rock stations to this day.
Perhaps even more famous than the music is the legend, of a man whose home was the road, was murdered by a jealous husband, and at some point sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the power of song.
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| The record Johnson was best known for in his lifetime, "Terraplane Blues," sold some 10,000 copies when released in 1937. It was named after a popular car model. In Biography Of A Phantom, McCormick finds out the song was written before Terraplane cars were a thing and may have originally been called "Chevrolet Blues." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraplane_Blues |
McCormick’s goal was to cut through the kudzu and get at the granite reality of this man whose distance from us is a matter not only of time but of a grim racist society on which he carved his name. A noble objective, but not exactly accomplished in this thin, meandering account.
What you get here is neither scholarly, objective, or even that chronological. The book starts out (following a lengthy preface by Troutman) by presenting Johnson’s story as something the reader is already familiar with. Rather than detailing what we know, McCormick launches us right away in his own odyssey to learn more:
The search for any answer can become an adventure, and the quest for Robert Johnson’s story offered a true mystery whose end was unpredictable. The much-marked map offered a starting point and a guide, but there was nothing on it to give away the ending. I had no way of knowing where each day’s questions might carry me.
At its best, Biography Of A Phantom reminded me of William Least Heat-Moon’s 1982 travel memoir Blue Highways, which sets out to recapture a lost America. In this book, McCormick details the Mississippi Delta that produced Johnson and his music, specifically its Black communities where there were people who still remembered him.
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| McCormick (at right) with renowned blues drummer Spider Kilpatrick in 1960. McCormick was a longtime music researcher for the Smithsonian Institution when he began his exploration of Johnson in the late 1960s. He died in 2015. Image from https://tidal.com/magazine/article/robert-johnson-phantom/1-90500 |
Some of them kept their distance, not wanting to talk to a white stranger asking questions. Others were more welcoming, sharing what they know. This often proves thin but sometimes yields a bonanza.
McCormick meets a woman named Virgie who knew Johnson and introduces her son, Claud, who bears a striking resemblance to the guitar player. It turns out he is Robert’s only known child, full of curiosity about who his father was and taken aback at the legend he became.
“How come a guitar player can’t stay in one place?” McCormick reports Claud asking him.
Johnson’s itinerant career took him across much of the middle South, up to Arkansas and down to Texas, where he would cut every song he ever released over the course of just five days. McCormick’s travels following this path led him down many roads, too.
But this approach has a downside as the author catalogues his own movements instead of nailing down who Johnson was. For much of the book he introduces people who turn out to have little or no connection to Johnson. Even at the end, after discovering a likely location for Johnson’s death and meeting some old friends willing to talk about him, a pervading elusiveness remains.
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| The legend of Robert Johnson became more widespread with the 1961 release of King Of The Delta Blues Singers by Columbia Records. When McCormick played it for people who had heard Johnson himself perform, they listened with keen pleasure, stopping the record often to replay a favorite track. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Delta_Blues_Singers |
McCormick writes: It’s incredible that so many people should remember Robert Johnson, describe him accurately, talk about him, tell us of weeks or months spent in his company, and yet leave us with such a vague and incomplete picture.
For a lot of the book, we aren’t learning much about Johnson at all, just something of the place that spawned him. As a trade-off, this does offer some meaty, enjoyable reading. It just goes on too long.
We ride with McCormick on a bus that doubles as a country store. We stand on a levee and take in the same horizon a young Robert might have viewed some 50 years before. We see the aftermath of a hog butchering where families are gathered before McCormick and an aging blues musician sneak off to share a bottle of liquor.
For a very long time, we observe people playing pool and tell stories about folks named Johnson who turn out to be unrelated to the singer. “Sometimes I felt like a trained seal that tooted horns and balanced a ball on the end of his nose,” McCormick writes. “If I banged my flippers and barked, someone might toss me another Johnson.”
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| "I sought out LeDell Johnson in the hope that he might help clarify the confusion," McCormick writes. "He didn't." McCormick did take this fine shot of LeDell, at his home in Jackson, Mississippi, while learning he had in fact no direct link to Robert. Image from https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/mack-mccormick-quest-to-find-real-robert-johnson/ |
When he does catch his big break, it almost happens out of frame. One page he’s still on a wild goose chase, the next he has zeroed in on Greenwood, Mississippi, where he not only finds the likely resting place of Johnson but talks at length to many people who knew Johnson well enough to remember him before he played guitar at all:
Robinsonville’s old-timers remembered several other things from this period. Robert was often around whenever there was a dance or any occasion with music, even though he was still a little too young to be fully welcome. He was rather aggressive about wanting to “help out” and would sometimes irritate the musicians by trying to play their instruments when they would take a break.
This is decent material on its own; coming as it does after all the difficulties McCormick had getting to that point makes it more special. Yet Biography Of A Phantom is a hard book to enjoy.
According to Troutman, McCormick’s research was clouded by his singularly problematic personality. Beset by debilitating depression and an obsessive attitude that crossed over at times into paranoia, he was a lonely pursuer of an increasingly subjective truth. At times, he betrayed and stole from people he interviewed. He never finished his manuscript.
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| McCormick also recorded blues and folk artists for a massive archive, which was donated to the Smithsonian Institution after his death. A collection of these field recordings were released in 2023, entitled Playing For The Man At The Door. Image from https://worldmusiccentral.org/2023/08/19/hidden-blues-gems-unearthed-mack-mccormicks-lost-field-recordings-now-available/ |
A core section of that manuscript was expunged entirely from this book, because of what Troutman explains were “years of stress, anxiety, sadness, nightmares, and trauma” endured by members of Johnson’s extended family who spoke to McCormick and felt robbed of their memories by the way he used them.
Why then did the Smithsonian, which has the rights to McCormick’s archive of music research, decide to publish this manuscript? Isn’t it fruit from a poisoned tree? Either that, or else they felt enough virtue signals in the footnotes regarding white exploitation of Black artists would provide them with moral cover. In one footnote, Troutman even singles out McCormick’s word choice about “hunting” after Johnson as “disturbingly close to lynching.”
Biography Of A Phantom has enough problems without the editor kneecapping the author at every turn about being a 20th century guy. McCormick is a solid, descriptive writer with quiet authority that commands respect. I just never felt sure what direction he was taking me until he began to move past it and on to the next thing.
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| In his travels, McCormick visited several roadside inns and lounges of the type Johnson would have known as an itinerant musician. "Robert remained fundamentally restless, unmanageable, full of passion, and anxious about satisfying it," he writes. Image by Michael Harding from https://www.miles2gobeforeisleep.com/blog/2020/2/26/snapshots-the-mississippi-delta |
Toward the end of the book, he introduces a theory he had about how Johnson’s blues represent the summation not of an individual, but of a particular place, time, and people. In the Mississippi Delta, he explains, blues music was “inevitable.”
Take a few thousand families, break them up, scatter them around the country, toss in lynchings and assorted pressures, then set the remnants to sharecropping in the Jim Crow South….They might evolve a new religious movement, build a monument, develop new music, or create a sculpture in the levees.
This is an intriguing idea, but not well connected to Johnson. Perhaps that wasn’t even Mack’s fault. Troutman explains in his Preface that “large swaths of McCormick’s now archaic ruminations” were trimmed away for readability. They may have offered a firmer basis for connecting Johnson to the world he left behind. Or maybe not. Regardless, the result is a book that doesn’t quite justify its long delay to print.
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