The haunting blues record that “possessed” Bob Dylan
In the January of 1961, Bob Dylan drove with two friends from Wisconsin to New York City. At 19, he’d already had his fair share of harsh winters, but he was unprepared for the bitter winds that greeted him on arrival at Greenwich Village. On his very first night in the city – or so the story goes – he walked into Cafe Wha with his guitar in hand and landed a gig for that night. It was the beginning of a brand new life, one which was accompanied by an appropriately novel soundtrack of folk, jazz and delta blues.
Of all the artists Dylan was introduced to during his first year in New York, Robert Johnson had the most profound impact by far. The person responsible for introducing the folk singer to Johnson’s music was John Hammond, who had decided to check out one of Dylan’s Greenwich village gigs after reading a rave review of his concert at Carnegie Hall in the New York Times. He signed Dylan to Columbia Records on the spot. If Dylan’s memories of that time are to be believed, Hammond also gave him the opportunity to listen to Johnson’s ‘The King Of Delta Blues Singers LP prior to its release on Columbia later that year.
In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan writes: “Before leaving that day, he’d [Hammond] given me a couple records that were not yet available to the public…[one] was called King of the Delta Blues by Robert Johnson… I’d never heard of Robert Johnson. Never heard the name, never seen it on any of the compilation blues records. Hammond said I should listen to it, that this guy could ‘whip anybody.'”
Adding: “He showed me the artwork, an unusual painting where the painter with the eye stares down from the ceiling into the room and sees this fiercely intense singer and guitar player, looks no more than medium height but with shoulders like an acrobat. What an electrifying cover. I stared at the illustration. Whoever the singer was in the picture, he already had me possessed.”
The spirit of Johnson entered Dylan from the moment the needle hit the groove: “From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up. The stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armour.” And it stayed with him long after: “The record that didn’t grab Dave [Van Ronk] very much had left me numb, like I’d been hit by a tranquilliser bullet…Over the next few weeks I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player. Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition.”
“Possession”, “haunted”, and “apparition”: why did Dylan regard Johnson in such supernatural terms? One possibility is that he had heard about the bluesman’s dealings with the devil down on the tracks. The story goes that the guitarist traded his soul in exchange for his superhuman musical skill, although Dylan said that he’d never heard of Johnson before listening to The King Of Delta Blues Singers, so he may have been unaware of this particular detail. Another possibility is that Dylan was reacting to Johnson’s spectral presence throughout the album. The first few seconds of The King of Delta Blues feature only the crackle of static and the sound of Johnson walking across floorboards to take his place by the microphone. Where there should be music, there is only the ghostly indicator of the musician’s physical presence. As he enters that recording room, he enters the space where he will be made immortal.
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