Robert Lockwood Jr. is well known for having learned his style directly from Robert Johnson, a pretty good mentor if you had to pick one. Lockwood has gone on to blaze a remarkable career as an ace session guitarist during the golden age of Chicago blues and as a one of the blues most innovative bandleaders. At 89 Lockwood isn't resting on his laurels sounding commanding and assured on "The Legend Live", an elegant solo live recording.

 When Johnson began following Lockwood's mother around in the 30's he became entranced with Johnson's guitar style eventually learning it inside and out. In fact Lockwood is the only one who learned directly under Johnson's tutelage and to this day there's no one better at conjuring up those timeless songs. Lockwood's technique evolved into a jazzy, swinging style still rooted in the delta but with a decidedly sophisticated feel. By the 1950's he was in Chicago where he became an in demand session man cutting records with just about everyone including Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Roosevelt Sykes, Sunnyland Slim, Baby Face Leroy, Eddie Boyd and many others. Lockwood cut stray sides under his own name for Bluebird, Mercury and JOB but began recording as a leader in earnest in the 70's, cutting prolifically ever since.

 "The Legend Live" captures Lockwood for the first time live and solo running through songs by Johnson, Leroy Carr, Roosevelt Sykes and others to an appreciative audience at the Rhythm Room in Phoenix. Lockwood is in fine and mellow form as he plays twelve-string with subtle sophistication, putting across the songs in his rich, expressive vocals. Lockwood effortlessly rolls through Johnson classics like "Sweet Home Chicago" (the first song he learned to play), "Love In Vain", "From Four Until Late" and "Ramblin' On My Mind" all played with a delicacy and nuance few can match. Other tunes include fine renditions of "Mean Mistreater Mama" and "In The Evening" drawn from the Leroy Carr songbook, someone Lockwood has covered many times over the years and a pair by Roosevelt Sykes another obvious inspiration.

 Robert Lockwood Jr. has remained as active as ever in recent years continually cutting records, touring and playing regularly in his hometown of Cleveland. "The Legend Live" is classy document of a true blues giant still playing marvelously sixty years into a career that has spanned nearly the entire history of the blues.

-Check out these related links:
Robert Lockwood Website

(Jeff Harris)

 I know what your thinking - Robert Johnson again? Hasn't everything possible been written already? Well not really as author Elijah Wald thoughtfully ruminates on the most famous of all bluesman seeking to put Johnson in his proper historical context and strip away the layers of misinformation, mythology and just plain fantasy that has surrounded him since his untimely death in 1938. Wald is after bigger things than just myth busting and in "Escaping the Delta" Wald delivers a heavily researched, well reasoned revisionist history of the blues that discards many of our most ingrained views of the music we love.

 The central themes of the book can been seen in two parts: How is it that Robert Johnson's music is now "widely hailed as the greatest and most important blues ever recorded" when Wald makes the case that in fact he "was an extremely minor figure, and very little happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had ever played a note." This brings us to Wald's second theme which is that much about our notion of what the blues is is misinformed. Wald hammers home the point that blues was once popular music: "its evolution as a style, and the career paths of most of it's significant artists, were driven not by elite, cult tastes, but by the trends of mainstream black buyers" and "the artists we most admire often shared the mass tastes we despise and dreamed not of enduring artistic reputations but of contemporary pop stardom." The people who determined what blues is and who the important artists are (almost all white) were far removed from blues culture and their views bear little in common with those who created and listened to the music.

 The blues was "working-class pop music" and like the artists of today the early bluesman were looking for hits. The early stars were not the blues artists we worship today like Charlie Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson but a more mainstream breed. The first stars were the woman blues queens of the 20's like Bessie Smith, Sara Marin and Ida Cox with the popularity of rural male bluesman only coming after the enormous success of Blind Lemon Jefferson in 1926. The next blues trend would produce a more hip, urbane style epitomized by hugely influential stars like Leroy Carr, Tampa Red and Lonnie Johnson. The numbers bear this out and between 1920-1942 Wald cites these examples: Tampa Red cut 251 sides, Leroy Carr cut 120 (if not for his untimely death in 1935 his number would be higher) and Lonnie Johnson with 191. Blues was the popular, hip music of the day but the blues audience and musicians listened and played a much wider spectrum of music than is usually thought. So called blues musicians had wide repertoires that included pop, ethnic music, country, gospel, basically playing whatever suited the audience and could earn them a living. Likewise Wald offers strong evidence that the so called blues audience had equally wide tastes.

 It's this historical context that Wald seeks to place Johnson and indeed Johnson's music was squarely in this tradition. The demon haunted, sold-his-soul-to-the-devil view of Johnson is strictly a white invention. The idea that the music of Robert Johnson wa somehow more authentic than the music of Leroy Carr and Lonnie Johnson was again strictly a white conceit and the bias against these more mainstream artists still holds strong today. "Until the 1960's Johnson's name was all but forgotten" and it was a minority of white fans that crowned him King of the Delta Blues Singers, a title prominently displayed on the first LP to reissue Johnson's recordings which hit the market in 1961. Paradoxically few blacks even to this day will recognize Johnson's name. As Wald makes clear in the five chapters devoted to Johnson, he was very much a man of his time. He learned directly from the records of the popular artists of the day like the aforementioned Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson and Leroy Carr plus other hot recording artists like Kokomo Arnold and Peetie Wheatstraw. His brilliance was in how he borrowed, adapted, synthesized and added his own flourish to the music of those who came before him. Wald's writing on Johnson is some of the best written and his detailed breakdown and analysis of Johnson's songs should be required reading for all blues devotees.

 Yes this book is controversial but it's also a major work that should be read by all blues aficionados. Wald blazes many new and fascinating trails and burns more than a few bridges along the way. "Escaping the Delta" will no doubt join the pantheon of seminal blues books and will no doubt be the spark for many important blues works to come.

(Jeff Harris)