Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald

Arnold’s hands. If Johnson learned it off records, he blended two Arnold pieces: Arnold had used the title verse in his “Sagefield Woman Blues,” and two others in a novelty called “Sissy Man Blues.” (Johnson leaves out the latter song’s defining verse: “I woke up this morning with my pork-grinding business in my hand,/Lord, if you can’t send me a woman, please send me a sissy man.”) On the other hand, if he learned the song from Arnold directly, there is no reason to think that any merging was needed. Unlike Carr, Arnold was not a careful songwriter, and both songs were simply collections of more or less random, “floating” verses, which he undoubtedly assembled differently on different occasions, or strung together into one long song that we only hear slices of on his three-minute recordings. Johnson could easily have picked a handful of favoriteArnold lines and strung them together to suit his own tastes, incidentally making a more cohesive lyric than either of the Arnold pieces—while not strictly linear, Johnson’s song concentrates on the theme of traveling, and being away from the girl he loves. This is not to say that all of his changes were necessarily felicitous. Arnold had sung, “I’m gonna ring up China, see can I find my good gal over there/Since the good book tells me that I got a good gal in the world somewhere.” Johnson, in the most geographically flamboyant verse of his career, changed the second line to “If I can’t find her on Philippine’s Island, she must be in Ethiopia somewhere.” This had a topical touch, since Italy had recently invaded Ethiopia, but lacks the lonesome logic of Arnold’s version. In another verse, where Arnold sang “I believe, I believe I’ll go back home/I’ll acknowledge to my good gal, mama, lord, I know I have done you wrong,” Johnson changed the second line to “You can mistreat me here, babe, but you can’t when I get home,” which may be more interesting, but rhymes “home” with “home.”
    What made “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” exciting for Johnson’s fellow musicians was not the lyric but his stripped-down, driving guitar accompaniment. Though the revolutionary nature of what he played may be lost on modern listeners, it is still easy to be caught up in the way the fast high-note triplets alternate with a pulsing boogie beat. His choice to sometimes sing over the triplets, using the bass figure as an instrumental break, and sometimes to reverse this pattern increases the tension and energy of the performance—as does the fact that he expands and contracts the time, changing chords as inspiration hits, rather than keeping a regular count of twelve bars. In 1930s Mississippi, though, what was most significant about this record was its now rather prosaic-sounding boogie bass line. Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, and thousands of other guitarists have made this sort of solid guitar boogie their stock in trade, but it was brand-new when Johnson did it, and must have sounded astonishingly modern and exciting.
    Other guitarists, including Lemon Jefferson and the Delta legend Hacksaw Harney, had recorded boogie-woogie bass figures before this, but their versions did not have the steadily propulsive one-two beat that Johnson used. 4 This sort of basic shuffle had appeared on onlyone previous record, cut a year and a half earlier by a Mississippi guitarist named Johnnie Temple. Temple had made his start as a musician around Jackson and Vicksburg, then moved to Chicago, where he worked as second mandolinist in a string trio led by Charlie McCoy, playing Italian favorites in restaurants patronized by Chicago’s Mafiosi. Along with the Italian gigs, Temple made a series of blues records, and the first of these was “Lead Pencil Blues,” a double-entendre number about sexual impotence, which premiered the