Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald Page A

now-classic guitar shuffle pattern.
    According to some blues scholars, Temple had actually learned this bass pattern from Johnson, whom he played with occasionally in Jackson and knew as “R.L.,” though others report that Temple did not remember meeting Johnson and took pride in having pioneered the style. 5 If primacy is important, there is at least a bit of circumstantial evidence in Temple’s favor: He had been employed for a while as chauffeur to Little Brother Montgomery, one of the greatest barrelhouse pianists working the lumber camps and river towns along the lower Mississippi, and since this guitar pattern is adapted from a basic piano left-hand figure, Temple was certainly in the right place to pick it up. On the other hand, so was every other guitarist who ever hung out in a barrelhouse, Johnson included. (And it is worth underlining the fact that pianists like Montgomery were, at least in some areas of Mississippi, so much more popular than guitarists like Temple and Johnson that they could hire the latter as chauffeurs.) If Temple and Johnson did meet, it appears that they traded tunes, as Temple was an associate of the extremely obscure Skip James and probably introduced Johnson to James’s work.
    Even if he was not its originator, Johnson was the first guitarist to make the boogie shuffle a standard accompaniment pattern and use it for multiple songs, and he inspired other players to pick up the style. This innovation was not particularly important at the time, but when electric amplification allowed guitars to supplant pianos as the rhythmic timekeepers of blues combos, it became a basic part of the musical language and one of the building blocks of rock ’n’ roll. Meanwhile, it gave Johnson’s song a propulsive dance beat, and he comes off sounding considerably more relaxed than on “Kind Hearted Woman.”The straight-ahead rhythm was in stark contrast to the idiosyncratic complexities of Arnold and the older Mississippians, and “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” would bubble in the memories of Johnson’s young peers for the next dozen years, before resurfacing on a 1949 record by Big Boy Crudup and two years later in the spectacular Elmore James version, which turned it into a blues standard.
    To the early white blues fans, who valued Johnson as an idiosyncratic folk artist, the straight-ahead, modern quality of this piece was not so appealing. They preferred to think of him as a mysterious Delta roots musician, and wanted to hear him moaning deep laments and playing old-fashioned slide numbers, not kicking off boogie shuffles that sounded only one step removed from the R&B hits of Jimmy Reed and Junior Parker. Thus the irony that his two most influential records in the black blues world, “Dust My Broom” and “Sweet Home Chicago,” were both left off the 1961 album that made him a posthumous legend.
    This was not just scholarly or folkie obtuseness. If one considers Johnson’s records as works of art rather than historical markers, he certainly gave more interesting performances than these. “ Sweet Home Chicago ,” in particular, is about as musically ordinary as his work gets. This is not to deny its strong points: There is the relaxed way Johnson breaks off the guitar boogie for a sweet melodic turnaround at the end of each verse, laying back and giving us a chance to breathe before pumping up the energy again. More important, he is finally sounding completely at home and comfortable, and there is something infectious in the way he balances the whining moan that starts the song with the humorous, conversational tone in which he throws off lines like “I’m heavy-loaded baby, I’m booked, I gotta go!”
    Still, even at the time, this song was held until Johnson’s sixth release, and anyone who wonders why need only refer back to Arnold’s “Old Original Kokomo Blues.” As the flip side of