Annye C. Anderson - Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson

W hen we listen to a favorite artist, they often seem to understand us better than we know ourselves. As we keep listening in different situations, through our changing lives, we inevitably come to feel we know them in similarly deep ways. Robert Johnsons recordings have a particular intimacy because no other musicians are involved. We are alone with just his voice and guitar, hearing his breath between phrases, the strain in his high notes, the rattle of his slide on the frets, and the occasional murmured comments, as if he were talking directly to us.

For more than eighty years, the only way to experience Robert Johnson has been through those recordings. For millions of people all around the world, he is those recordings. We have listened to them over and over, spent hours, days, and years with them. So it is easy to feel we have spent that time with Johnson, and to forget that he only spent a few days making them and what we are hearing is barely an hour and a half of his life.

Annye Anderson really did spend days and weeks with Robert Johnson, over many years, not as a disembodied voice but as a tall, lanky, handsome, warm, and exciting older brother. She was a little girl and her memories of him are a little girls memories. If you ask her about his travels or romantic relationships, about juke joints and rent parties, or about the pleasures and dangers of his life on the road, she tends to say she didnt know about that part of his life. She knew him when he was staying at her daddys house in Memphis, or nearby at their sister Carries. For the rest, shell say, I didnt have him in my pocket.

The first memory of Robert Johnson in this book is of a long-legged eighteen-year-old carrying a toddler up a flight of stairs. The last is of him playing at a party celebrating Joe Louiss victory over Max Schmeling. In between are memories of him taking a little girl to the movies, caring for her fathers horse, teaching her a simple piece on the piano, and sitting outside with his guitar, singing nursery rhymes for her and her friends or playing upbeat tunes that got them dancing.

Annye Andersons Brother Robert was not the rambling, blues-singing loner a lot of us have imagined; he was part of a bustling, vibrant household and neighborhood. His musical skills made him distinctive, but their older brother Son was also an exceptional musician and often teamed up with him as a musical duo and for hoboing journeys. They played blues, including songs we know from the records, but also lots of other music. When you ask Mrs. Anderson about their repertoire, she says Johnson would play whatever people wanted to hear: I remember him asking all the guests, and even the children, Whats your pleasure? Maybe late in the evening they wanted to hear a moody blues like Come On In My Kitchen. Maybe they wanted Son to liven up the mood with a Fats Waller number. Maybe they wanted to hear about rambling and hoboing, and the two men would harmonize and yodel on Jimmie Rodgerss Waiting for a Train. Or maybe it was Annyes turn to show off and theyd back her on a song-and-dance routine from the new Ginger Rogers musical.

Johnson is at the center of this book, but he is surrounded by a lot of other people. One striking figure is Charles Dodds, who became Charles Spencer after a lynch mob forced him to move to Memphis. A barber, carpenter, and jack of all trades, he also seems to have been a formidable musician and mentored the young Johnsonthe son of his first wife by another man, but welcomed as a son to the Memphis householdalong with a changing cast of children, grandchildren, wives, ex-wives, and their various spouses and partners.

Another notable character is Sister Carrie. In the first half of the book she is the fly member of the family, the one with a radio and a phonograph, whose home was Johnsons favored stopping place when he came back through Memphis in later years as a working musician. In the second half she is the one who keeps the family connected as they move north, takes care of the ones who need careand then, when Johnsons music is discovered by a new generation of fans around the world, becomes tangled in the increasingly complicated strands of his legacy.

Finally, there is the voice that tells the stories. I would have enjoyed this book under any circumstances but particularly appreciate it because it gave me the opportunity to meet Annye Anderson. Preston Lauterbach invited Peter Guralnick and me to spend an afternoon with them, and we planned to ask her some questions about Robert Johnson and Memphis. Before we could get to that she was discussing her plans to travel when the book comes out: first to England, then South Africa and France. The mention of France reminded her of her friend Archie Shepp, the avant-garde jazz saxophonist, and soon she was talking about Max Roach and Julius Lester, likewise friends in her current hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts. Then the conversation moved to her barbecue sauce, which she has marketed to merchants around the state, and to her husbands laboratory work and meeting Dr. Charles Drew, the African American surgeon who pioneered modern blood banks. Listening to her plans, enthusiasm, and range of interests at age ninety-three, I can only imagine how vibrant and fascinating she must have been as a young woman. And I cannot help thinking about all the stories we will never knowin particular all the African American storiesbecause they never happened to intersect with a blues legend.