FILTER BOOKS
Mystery train
The problematic masterpiece by the blues fiend who chased Robert Johnson’s ghost finally arrives.
By Grayson Haver Currin.
The story of the blues: one of the rare photos of enigmatic trailblazer Robert Johnson;
a plaque marking Johnson’s possible resting place;
…Phantom author Robert ‘Mack’ McCormick.
Biography Of A
Phantom: A Robert
Johnson Blues Odyssey
★★★★
Robert ‘Mack’ McCormick; Edited by John W. Troutman
SMITHSONIAN BOOKS. £24
SHOOT SOUTH along Highway 61 from the lobby of Memphis’s Peabody Hotel, the legendary spot where folk wisdom holds that the Mississippi Delta truly begins. Not far beyond the state line, a constellation of sturdy roadside plaques marking the Mississippi Blues Trail will begin to limn the state’s complicated and earth-quaking musical heritage, an inheritance shaped by slavery and Jim Crow that forever altered the way the world sounded. “The boyhood home of blues icon Robert Johnson,” one will soon read near a stately curve in the country’s Great River, not long before you reach towering modern casinos. “Johnson lived here with his family in a tenant shack by the levees during the 1920s.”
Oh, if only spotting the little white shack had been that easy for Mack McCormick. In 1969, the professional blues sleuth began heading repeatedly west to the Delta, doggedly chasing mere whispers of Johnson, whose influence was rivalled only by his enigma. Johnson would have been just 57 then, but he’d already been dead from unknown causes – gunshot? Poison? Knife fight? – for 30 years, all traces of a brief life presumably washed into the Gulf Of Mexico long ago. (McCormick believed, briefly, he might actually be alive.)
McCormick became a relentless gumshoe, using every bit of biographical flotsam to create grids of where Johnson might have lived, where his relatives might remain. He knocked on doors, rode on a decommissioned school bus that had been turned into a mobile grocery store, haunted pool halls long after his welcome was worn thin, and sat dejectedly in his car until old-timers slowly began to eke out memories of an always itinerant and introverted cad who had been far more interested in steel strings than iron ploughshares. McCormick found not only the boyhood home where that marker now stands just south of Memphis, but also the precise setting and circumstances of Johnson’s painful poisoning, plus an incomplete death certificate.