For info on my upcoming tour, hitting Brooklyn NY, Bethlehem PA, Philly, State College, Pittsburgh, Marietta OH, and Cleveland, go to https://elijahwald.com/concertdates.html

Robert Johnson’s most-covered song is in some ways an oddity. It was arguably his most influential guitar arrangement and also the first of his songs to be widely played by other musicians, becoming a standard thanks to versions by Tommy McClennan, Walter Davis,and a terrific, electric-guitar-powered version by Roosevelt Sykes, which in turn spawned the 1959 R&B hit version by Junior Parker.

It was also one of his more derivative and unexciting recordings. Like “Dust My Broom,” recorded just before it at his first recording session, it was reworked from a Kokomo Arnold song, in this case “Old Original Kokomo Blues.” Arnold hadn’t originated the song, or at least was not the first to record it: there were previous recordings by Madlyn Davis (released as “Kokola Blues”) and Scrapper Blackwell, who was an important influence for Johnson’s guitar style. But Arnold’s version was clearly the one that inspired Johnson, and it’s a terrific record. Arnold was a major recording star, a dynamic singer and an incredible slide guitarist. His “Kokomo Blues” is punctuated with ferocious, rhythmically tricky, and spectacularly fast slide riffs and is far more exciting than Johnson’s record. But…

…Kokomo, Indiana, was not a dream destination for Black southerners seeking a new life, nor would it become the fabled Home of the Blues. By changing the destination to Chicago, Johnson transformed a catchy regional lyric into an enduring standard and eventually an anthem.

Speaking of the Great Migration… there has been a lot of confusion and theorizing around Johnson’s tag-line. Arnold asked if his “baby” wanted to go to “the ‘leven-light city, to sweet old Kokomo.” Johnson changed that to “the land of California, my sweet home Chicago,” which a lot of people hear as a mistake, since Chicago obviously isn’t in California. (The blues researcher Mack McCormick did find a small town called Chicago, California, and claimed Johnson had relatives there, but McCormick tended to mix solid research with quirky fantasies.)

My own theory, propounded in Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, is that Chicago and California were the two mythic destinations for Black migrants leaving the Mississippi/Louisiana/Arkansas region, and Johnson was eliding a quiet “or” between them — the point was to get away, to escape the Delta, and he’d be happy to go either place.

As for the guitar part… Johnson was a brilliant, versatile guitarist, equally comfortable in the local Delta style he picked up from older players like Son House and Willie Brown and the varied styles he picked up from recordings or formulated on his own — for example, the way he created a fusion of Leroy Carr‘s piano style with Scrapper Blackwell’s guitar in the accompaniment to “Kind Hearted Woman.” I’ve explored his slide style in previous posts for “Walking Blues,” “Traveling Riverside Blues,” and “Crossroads Blues,” and his adaptation of Blind Blake’s East Coast ragtime style in my post for “From Four Until Late.” However, all of those styles were basically familiar to blues buyers in 1936, and the newest, freshest sound he pioneered was the boogie shuffle he used for this one.

That basic shuffle has become so ubiquitous that it is hard to think of it as an exciting innovation, but Johnson was the first player to use it regularly on his recordings — and, more than anything else, that is what justifies the frequent claim that he was a forefather of rock ‘n’ roll. He had come up in a world where pianists were more respected and better paid than guitarists, both because they could often play a wider range of material and because the instrument was louder and could lay down a percussive bassline for dancing.

Johnson’s records were made just before electric guitars and amplified combos became common, which meant that a pair of guitarists, with more portable instruments, could walk into a bar or dance hall and duplicate a boogie-woogie pianist’s solid left-hand basslines and treble figures. With that innovation, Johnson’s guitar shuffle took over as the essential underpinning for blues bands across the country and then for rock ‘n’ rollers around the world.

As for my version of this song… for a while I used to introduce it by saying I had recently discovered that Johnson had not been killed at age 27, but had retired from music, gotten a PhD in mathematics, and gone on to a quiet professorship at a West Coast university… after which I’d sing a lyric that went from his old “one and one is two” verse to verses like:

Three squared is nine, nine squared is eighty-one,
Come on, baby, let’s have some fun.

Which was fun, for a while, but as the scripture has it, “When I became a man, I put away childish things…”