Nobody knows who this guy is and I'm dedicating the Backwoods Listener's Guide to him.
His legacy is relegated to 3 1/2 seconds of silent film footage, circa 1942. His one claim to fame is that, for the briefest spark of time, it was debated he might have been Robert Johnson.
With the Johnson possibility long since disproved, this gentleman can at least claim the privilege of giving us perhaps the oldest extant footage of a delta bluesman caught in action. Whoever he was, he has come to represent to me the face of all those who came before him, most of whose names have been utterly lost to history. These are the men and women who peopled the blues universe, for surely they vastly outnumbered those to whom posterity has been more kind. We have also those whose names, though obscure, were never once waxed, men such as Henry Sloan, whose steps young Charley Patton supposedly "dogged," and Ike Zinnerman, who would prove to be Johnson's truest mentor. The bottleneck mastery of Willie Wilson and Rube Lacey helped transform fallen Baptist preacher Son House into the icon he became. Wilson is lost to time and Lacey's recorded blues legacy is limited to a pair of sides cut for Paramount in June of '28.
Itinerant and amateur musicians were part of the landscape of the American south for what amounts to a century. Every community and hamlet had those in their number who'd graduated from a diddley bow to a guitar to playing Saturday night fish fries for a sandwich and a jar of moonshine. Some among their number managed to have both the chops and good fortune to be recorded. A barest handful would ever see what could be called musical success, posthumously or otherwise.
And I feel it is with these anonymous folks that the blues were born and let out its barbaric yawp. In 2010, with the history of American music so firmly established, studied, evaluated and dissected, it must be remembered that much of its course was charted by those whose names Time never once wrote down.
As for the iconic man remembered for "Not Being Robert Johnson?"
He was a bluesman plying his trade on the Saturday afternoon streets of Ruleville, MS, just as two and three generations of bluesmen had done before him. It is a shame that the footage is silent as his finger-work seems impressive.
This is a wonderful video of the "Robert Johnson Video" being explained and disproved. Among those present are legendary bluesmen Robert Lockwood and Henry Townsend (the latter of whom is heard but not seen...). Taken in its context, the footage as a whole serves up as tasty a glimpse into the Jim Crow south, less than 2 months after Pearl Harbor.
"The Not-Robert Johnson Video"The sequence, which includes the snippets of our Anonymous Bluesman, was actually filmed by a gentleman named Jackson, the owner of the Delta Theater in Ruleville. He, his wife, and others shot footage of the locals to show between shows--which seems to be nice grass roots marketing to a population that wasn't used to seeing themselves in photographs, much less motion pictures. Mr. Jackson shot two such promotional sequences, one featuring the white folks and one featuring the town's African-American population. He would show one or the other sequence, depending on the evening's audience.
All that we will ever know about the Man Who Isn't Robert Johnson is that he was playing the streets of Ruleville, Mississippi on Saturday afternoon, January 30, 1942.
And that, from the way he works those strings, he was born to play the blues...
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