Capturing Black Culture on Film

Capturing Black Culture on Film

By Bill Nichols - 1982

Roland Freeman is driven by dreams that can hide in the guise of demons.

Just watch him as he talks. He coils and uncoils in his chair, tenses his body or tosses back his head in a horselaugh, all depending on the mood of the moment, as a stream of ideas flow forth, racking his body like the pains of labor.

He's a man driven by a vision of history.

Southern Roads/City Pavements, the exhibit of this acclaimed photographer's work on display at the Old Capitol Museum, offers a major clue toward understanding Freeman's artistic obsession. It's the latest compilation of work from an artist/documentarian who intends nothing less than crystallizing the black experience within a lens frame before it is buried like a relic of a lost civilization.

That dream pushes this young black photographer all over the world in search of black culture. Southern Roads/City Pavements pairs pictures shot in 13 counties in southwest Mississippi with photos of urban New York, Baltimore and Chicago, and Freeman is certain of the similarities, the shared tradition, even of the most dissimilar places.

He's developed an eye for the black soul. But it wasn't always that way.

Freeman was born some 44 years ago in Baltimore in the midst of the Depression and lived the street life to the fullest until he was 13, when he was sent to live on a Maryland tobacco farm. It was there he learned the love for the land that is so evident in his pictures of rural farmers.

He grew up some more, joined the Air Force, won a Brownie camera in a crap game and became interested in a growing American civil rights movement. One march led to another until Aug. 28, 1963.

The march on Washington occurred that day and would forever more change Freeman's life.

"I was so choked up watching that march that I knew I wanted to say something," Freeman said. Photography quickly revealed itself as his voice.

The Poor People's Campaign March

"Most people starting photography don't know what they want to say," Freeman said, reminiscing about his start. "I knew from the beginning." He studied the work of Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava, tried and experimented for about five years and in 1968 found himself documenting the Poor People's Campaign march from Marks to Washington, D.C.

The Farm Security Administration documentaries from the Depression fascinated this young artist. "I thought to myself, `If white people were hurting this much, hell, what were the black folks doing?' "Freeman said.

He went on to work for Life Magazine, string for the prestigious Magnum photographic service in Washington and generally become "a pretty hotshot Washington photographer," in Freeman's words.

Yet his real vocation had yet to begin. He always had been fascinated by black traditions in Baltimore, and began photographing street scenes during off-hours. "I didn't even realize what I was doing was folklore," he said as he laughed about his beginnings in the documentary trade.

The Smithsonian Institution knew better. In 1972, Freeman was asked to contribute pictures to the Smithsonian's yearly folklore festival. That association led him to a job in 1974, shooting pictures in Mississippi for the 1974 festival, and finally his own project in 1975, called the Mississippi Folklife project, which Freeman worked on with folklorist Worth Long, a man Freeman calls a brother, "one of those elusive geniuses."

All of which led Freeman down the path to Southern Roads/City Pavements, an extension of the work he began with Long in 1975. The exhibit opened in the New York international Center of Photography before coming to Jackson and New York Times photo critic Gene Thornton described his work as going, "beyond reportage to express something that is universal and lasting."

That pleased Freeman immensely, but the drive goes on. Much remains to be done. After all, this is a man who describes his creative process as "working on raw guts. I work on a lot of nervous, mad energy."

He wants to catalog a black heritage he is intensely proud of, a tradition he maintains exists in spite of the black migration from the South to the economic opportunities of the city.

A city boy by birth, Freemen loves the simplicity and honesty of farm people and that love shines forth in his work.

"What some people call hick is hipper than the people who think they're hip," he said.

The anger he felt in the civil rights period has transformed into the objectivity of the documentarian. "I'm interested in how black people have survived. We've been subject to a mass conspiracy through the Western world, yet we've managed to educate people, sustain a culture and move into mainstream American life," he said.

Southern Roads/City Pavements will remain at the Old Capitol Museum until March 14, but Roland Freeman's work will go on the rest of his life. Commercial assignments, for clients like the World Bank, pay his bills, and his documentary work keeps the energy flowing.

Freeman leaves you certain of his belief in his art. His eyes glaze, the hands swirl in an inadequate attempt to describe what only a photographer's eye can conjure.

The demons subside, the dreams are given form, molded with the press of a finger, the quiet click of a tiny shutter.

The Headstone of Sonny Boy Williamson II: The Foundation of Blues Tourism Sits in Tutwiler

The Headstone of Sonny Boy Williamson II:
The Foundation of Blues Tourism Sits in Tutwiler 

The back of Williamson's Grave

In the early 1900s, the only way across the Mississippi at Helena. Ark., was a ferry run by Harold Jenkins, father of country singer Conway Twitty. The ferry closed at midnight. "which was good in my favor," says Mrs. Hill. who still runs the hotel, when they were playing juke joints in Clarksdale or nearby towns. 

"When they had to stay over, they stayed with me," she says. The musicians kept a piano on the premises, and the place rang with music.

Mrs. Hill was a good friend of Sonny Boy Williamson, a flamboyant harmonica player and singer who was featured on the popular live radio show King Biscuit Time on station KFFA in Helena. The show's sponsor, Interstate Grocery Co., manufactured Sonny Boy Corn Meal, featuring a drawing of Williamson playing his harmonica while sitting barefoot on an ear of corn.

During the 1960s, Williamson became popular with the rock generation. He played extensively in Europe and considered moving there. But, sensing that he was dying, he returned home a few months before his death in 1965. 

Mrs. Hill recalls that Williamson stopped by one Sunday afternoon and found that she was taking a nap. "Wake her up." he demanded. "I want to play some music." 

"He played in front of my window, on my porch," she recalls. "Oh he had a crowd that Sunday. It didn't take him long to draw a crowd. He went on, and a few days later he was dead." 

Williamson's body was found in the second-floor apartment he kept over a business in downtown Helena. According to King Biscuit Time announcer Sonny Payne, the downstairs business in those days was the Dreamland Cafe. If that sounds like a touch worthy of Tennessee Williams, you'll be interested to know that the late playwright once lived in Clarksdale. 

Williamson's grave is near Tutwiler, which is on U.S. 49. about 15 miles southeast of Clarksdale. No signs point the way, but it's not hard to find someone to direct you down a country road to the churchyard. Unlike in the 1980s, you won't find the musician's grave overgrown. 

McMurry's Rough Draft (c. 1976)

The idea for the headstone came about in Jackson, Mississippi.  Lillian McMurry and the board of directors of Globe Music Corporation met in Jackson to discuss promotions and the music business on December 3, 1976.  Since she wanted to “to get some publicity” for its blues catalogue, McMurry made a motion “to design and purchase a headstone/memorial” to place on the grave of Sonny Boy Williamson II in Tutwiler.  She estimated that the marker and memorial service might cost as much as $1,500.  The motion was seconded and carried on a vote. On December 14, 1976, McMurry commissioned Davidson Marble & Granite Works, of Canton, to provide an upright granite monument for placement on the blues musician’s grave in Tutwiler.  It cost $654.75.  On March 5, 1977, McMurry reported to the board that the “headstone was in the process of being set as per her conversations with Davidson Marble Works.”  The board, however, decided “to do nothing definite right now about a memorial service.”

The grave is in Tutwiler because his two surviving sisters, Mary Ashford and Julia Barner, lived and died in the city.  The late blues researcher Bill Donoghue erected a marker in their honor following their deaths in the 1990s.

Tutwiler is a fitting place for a great bluesman's final resting place because it's also the place where W.C. Handy claimed to have had his first encounter with the blues, around the turn of the century. 

SBW II's Sister's Graves

Handy, who orchestrated and popularized the folk music of his people and created such standards as St. Louis Blues, was a classically trained musician who had expressed little interest in the work songs and field hollers he'd heard. But he later recalled that his interest was piqued when. on a visit to play at a Tutwiler hotel. he was introduced to the weirdest music I'd ever heard." 

During a long night of waiting for a late train in the Tutwiler station, a ragged-looking man sat beside him and began playing a guitar. sliding a knife up and down the strings to produce a moaning, voice-like sound. Picking out a complex rhythm, he sang. repeating a line about "going where the Southern cross the Dog." a reference to the intersection of two railroads in Moorhead, Miss. Handy incorporated that line into his Yellow Dog Blues. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, tourists often made unsuccessful attempts to find the grave of the legendary harmonica player, and the gas station attendant often steered them to the small Whitfield Baptist Church. 

Beside it, in what looked like nothing more than weeds from the road, was the headstone with Williamson's picture cut into it. The grave was decidedly off the beaten track, but others had made the trek too. Fans often left harmonicas, guitar picks, even a pint of whiskey on the headstone. 

"It's this diamond of headstone, yet it's overgrown with weeds," said Joe Zochowski, host of Nothing But the Blues on WFYI-FM (90.1) in Indianapolis. "You have to look for it, to tramp through the weeds and cut through the briars and the B.S. to get to the heart of it. But people are willing to do it because they care that much about the music. That's a metaphor for the blues to me." 

The Charleston (MS) Sun Sentinel, Nov 29, 1990.

The 1st Annual Tutwiler Blues Festival 

The first Tutwiler Blues Festival was held in late November 1990 in the town's Railroad Park. Mayor Gary Shepherd and the city sponsored the fundraising event and proceeds from donations were supposed to help memorialize Sonny Boy Williamson II, the well-known blues musician who grew up in Tutwiler and was buried in a nearby plantation cemetery.

"We plan to buy a bronze plaque to go in the park in his honor and to put up road signs on the highway showing how to get to the place he is buried," said Shepherd. 

The headliner was none other than will be T.J. Wheeler of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the famous breeding ground of farmers who sold their souls to the devil and got an honest defense from an attorney named Daniel Webster - "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1937).  In an attempt to undo the legacy of these weak-minded farmers from his home state (that's a joke about soul-sellers), Wheeler traveled the country performing and delivering his anti-drug message of "hope, not dope." (not a joke, just a good man)
The mayor said the blues artist plans to make an appearance in several local Tallahatchie County schools while in the area.  As a part of Saturday's activities, the Tutwiler Lions Club had the sight van in the town to screen festival-goers for eye diseases such as glaucoma. Lions members also manned the concession stand to provide refreshments. 

"I'm hoping it'll be a big success," said Shepherd. "I'm looking for several thousand people to show up." He said he expects blues followers from out-of-town. The mayor noted that the festival, if successful, could become an annual event in the town.  In the end, $100 was raised for the Sonny Boy Blues Society, which maintained the site for a while.  Some folks gave lip service to disinterment and reburial in Helena, but the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund obtained a grant for local nuns, who maintained the property into the new millennium.

Payne Chapel Marker Dedication--Last Performance of Johnny Shines

Ignorance, Priviledge, and Self-Interest Equal Exploitation Not Honor: The Activism and Victimhood of Johnny Tombstone and the Intellectual Foundations of the Killer Blues Headstone Project

In late 1990, Living Blues magazine published an article suggesting, among other things, that Johnson was buried at Payne Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Quito--about 2 miles from Mt. Zion MB Church--Morgan City. One woman, at least, remembered it that way. Known as Queen Elizabeth, Ms. Elizabeth Thomas claimed she was once Robert Johnson's girlfriend and she recalls his burial at Payne Chapel. She even pointed out the gravesite--about 30 yards from the white-frame church, near an old tree stump. "It's my gut feeling that it's at Payne," exclaimed Peter Lee, editor of Living Blues, "but I could never prove it. Who knew for sure?"

Skip Henderson wasn't sure, but he planned to erect a marker at Payne Chapel as well as install a brand new PA system--donated by Harley Peavey.  He had the PA installed inside the white-frame church, but a band from Atlanta had plans of their own for the burial ground....

"Admirers Mark Blues Musician's Grave" 

by Tiffany Tyson 

Delta blues king Robert Johnson no longer lies in an unmarked grave. A group of Johnson's admirers, musicians from Atlanta, Ga., placed a marker on his reported gravesite in the cemetery at Payne Chapel Missionary Baptist (MB) Church. They were accompanied by Johnson's boyhood friend and fellow blues singer, Johnny Shines. 

Stevie Tombstone, lead guitarist for the Atlanta-based band the Tombstones, said, "It's a shame that there wasn't a marker there already. (Johnson) was a big influence on our music and we just decided to do it. Once we had the opportunity, we just did it. 

When Stevie says opportunity he means money. Although the Tombstones have been playing together for about six years in clubs and colleges, they just signed their first big recording contract with Relativity Records. With their first advance check from the contract the three-sometimes four-member band bought the 125 pound marker for the grave of Robert Johnson. 

The Tombstones purchased this flat stone grave marker in honor of Robert Johnson, which sits on the spot pointed out by Queen Elizabeth.

The marker is tasteful. It says simply: 

"Robert Johnson, Born -May 8, 1911, Died - August 16, 1938, Resting in the Blues."

Rick Richards of the band Georgia Satellites was also at the service. `The way I see it, if it weren't for the blues we wouldn't have a job." 

Greenwood Commonwealth, Feb 28, 1991

Shines, who lives in Tuscaloosa, Ala., said, think he should have had a headstone a long time ago. His influence meant a lot to a lot of people and I'm glad to see this finally happening." 

While there are many rumors that blues music is associated with voodoo and Robert Johnson was reported to have made a pact with the devil, Shines said that blues is the basis of all other modern music. He explained that slaves used music to get messages across the fields to each other. This lyrical communication became a way of life that is now called the blues. I have a God given talent to play the blues," he said. "If you don't use your talents they'll be taken away from you." Shines says he has proof of that. "In 1978 I quit playing the blues, and in '80 I suffered a stroke that paralyzed my left hand. I've started playing again now and my hand is coming back." 

Greenwood Commonwealth,
Feb 28, 1991

Shines played one of the most famous Robert Johnson songs, "Crossroads," at the gravesite after the stone was laid. Stevie, Richards, folklorist Charles Locke and Tombstone manager Andrew Adler stood by silently, heads bowed, listening with the reverence usually reserved for religious services. 

And it was a religious service of sorts. While Robert Johnson has had a cult following among blues enthusiasts, the myths about his associations with the devil have kept his life and death shrouded in mystery. He was buried without a funeral service and no stone was ever placed a the gravesite. The only marker there was a small pot, rumored to be a sort of collection plate. People place money in the pot to buy Johnson's soul back from the devil. At last count, someone had contributed one penny. 

But now, 53 years after he with reportedly poisoned, he has been properly laid to rest with a marker and a service befitting the man known best as 'The King of the Delta Blues." 

Shines passed away the following year,
Greenwood Commonwealth, Apr 20, 1992.

Johnson was reportedly poisoned at a have down the road from Payne Chapel church, located a few miles from lila Bena. 'there have also been reports that he was stabbed, although the cause of death is officially pneumonia.

No one in the group wanted to speculate about his deals with the devil or the varied myths about when and where he was killed.  They just wanted to remember a man they consider a friend.

The 1992 Robert Johnson Memorial Blues
Festival (Greenwood) was dedicated to Shines. 

Click HERE for more on Johnny Shines 
Shines explained Johnson's death this way. "Robert was versatile and he was way ahead of his time. That's why he had to die and that's why someone will come back and be as great as Robert Johnson was. I don't know who it will be yet, but someone will come back." 

Johnson's music is still alive and well. Columbia Records, who has been releasing Johnson's music regularly since his death, recently put out a two CD reissue set. "Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings," has gone gold. 

The Tombstones, a band from Atlanta, had signed a record deal after several years on the road.  The band used some of its advance to purchase a flat marker for Robert Johnson and dedicate it at Payne Chapel.  Johnny Shines attended the graveside service, and despite his ill health, even performed a few songs.  The Mt. Zion Memorial Fund had already planned to commission a separate cenotaph to erect at Payne Chapel,  but the Tombstones and a retired Johnny Shines did the honors themselves.  Everyone at the time felt it in their bones that his remains were at Payne Chapel.

Only Remembering Robert (Not Claiming to Mark a Damn Thing)

Greenwood Commonwealth, Mar 26, 1992.

by John Butch (in the Greenwood Commonwealth December 29, 1999)

Arthneice Jones has played the blues most of his life and doesn’t expect it to live much past his generation of musicians. Truth is, said Jones, a Glendora native in his mid-50s, the younger folks don’t know the blues he knew growing up in a rural, segregated, dead-end Mississippi. And they wouldn’t want to.

Walking down Issaquena Avenue during Clarksdale’s Sunflower Blues Festival this fall, Jones looked toward the refurbished train station that will house the expanded Delta Blues Museum. He then pointed beneath the railroad trestle to the decay of what used to be the “black” downtown where President Clinton stood for his photo opportunities during his July visit.

“The blues ain’t on this side of those tracks,” Jones' said. “It’s on that side.”

Many say the blues are as dead as the legendary Robert Johnson in the Delta, killed by the mechanical cotton picker and technology, the depths of yesteryears pain soothed by todays easy comforts and universal civil rights.

Musically, it has given way to hip-hop, soul, country - nothing resembling the piteous moan of Johnson’s vocals. A few older players still teach, but more in the manner of historians keeping a traditional craft alive than as a living, evolving art form. Socially, Jones maintains, life has become too comfortable and predictable for even the most down-and-out. 

James Thomas Jr., whose father Son Thomas was one of the Delta’s more well-known latter-day bluesmen, said he sings to honor his father’s memory. Thomas hopes the next generation of African Americans rediscovers the blues and adopts it as its heritage.

“When I go play, it’s something for him and me to go promote his music--to get everybody to feel the blues,” Thomas said of his father. “Like he said, there’s a lot of ways to feel the blues. Have a good woman, she quits you, that’s the blues. Ain’t got no money, that’s the blues. You know if you’re broke you got the blues right there. I’m living a life of music I hope will mean more later on.

A $10,000 cenotaph honors a person buried elsewhere--the legendary Delta bluesman Robert Johnson--at the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church cemetery in Morgan City. The other side has a photo of Johnson (right). NO BIRTH OR DEATH DATES--a prime indicator of grave markers.

Tom Hagenaars, 33 (left) and Irene Smits, 31, both of the Netherlands, share stories about Johnson with Bert Robertson, Greenwood fire-fighter and former Morgan City. catfish farmer, and Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church pastor the Rev. James Ratliff Jr. (right). while looking through guide books in the Mt. Zion cemetery where Johnson is not buried but honored like a BOSS.

“He died back in 1938, and I didn't even get on this earth until 1948," said James Ratliff Jr., pastor of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, where Robert Johnson is reportedly buried. Ratliff said he believes Johnson's body would have been buried away from the church near the highway. “lt he was out here at all,” he said.

What’s left are the memories, museums and the music. And the legacy of the musicians. In Morgan City, for instance. they come from around the world to pay homage to Robert Johnson.

Once there, visitors like Dutch couple Tom Hagenaars and Irene Smits do the things common to modern-day pilgrims who seek cultural icons where their ancestors might have sought religion. They compare notes with their travel guide. Pose for pictures with the “King of the Delta Blues Singers” monument erected in Johnson’s honor, and chat with the Rev. James Ratliff`Jr. of the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, where a $10000 stone obelisk stands on the spot where Johnson's ole evil spirit would have caught that afterlife Greyhound Bus, and took off smooth into the never...... 

Hagenaars. 31, doesn’t play an instrument, Smits confided as her boyfriend circled the monument. Smits, 25, watched as Hagenaars carefully stepped over plastic flowers, beads. cigarette butts, guitar picks and other flotsam left as Johnson’s tribute - reading every word of the rich engraving. He lives for the music, she said. “lt`s because I`m a big Rolling Stones fan that we came. If you dig deeper into their music, you have to come here," Hagenaars said. He was delighted to find Love In Vain, which the Stones covered on their 1969 album Let It Bleed, at the top of the list of Johnson’s songs etched into the marker

Don‘t Get Their Due

With few exceptions - the obvious being BB. King, who has transcended the genre by recording with major stars across the rock and pop universe, and John Lee Hooker, who no longer records because of ill health -- white musicians from the Stones to Erie Clapton to the late Stevie Ray Vaughn to Johnny Lang have become the blues guitar heroes.

"Disco and rap music got the rap generation with Boom! Boom! Got the one beat to it." Thomas said. "Lot of young whites play good blues and are really interested in it. I think the white players like it because of the feeling they have, something really fascinating – the sound. The feeling is different, but a good blues sound is good music and they like to listen to it.”

Wade Walton. 76, a Clarksdale barber for 55 years. signed his first blues recording contract in 1958. He said many of the white players like Vaughn and the local bands that circulate through Southern blues festivals have the music. But they don’t have the personal experience to make it original. “The way we lived was a lot of it. When they come to town, they had a curfew, 12 o’clock. That was for black people,” he said “I’ve been mistreated in this town. The police, they was all white then, used to go upside my head with a blackjack.”

Walton said he began wearing his trademark barber’s coat as a form of identification, hoping police would recognize him and leave him alone: “The blues come from that kind of stuff. Hard times. Good times. No money. The blues come from that. I wouldn’t think a lot of the kids understand. A lot don’t pay attention to it. They don’t seem to get into the blues.”

An Early Lesson

Marco Stewart, a Clarksdale native, learned about the blues sitting in Walton’s barber chair as a kid. The older man played harmonica and the strop, beating out time as he sharpened his razor on the thick leather.

A successful West Coast rap and R&B producer, Stewart is attempting to showcase some of the old blues artists as well as expose the Delta to other live music through Mingles Sports Bar & Coffee House. The first of what he hopes will become a Delta franchise has opened in Clarksdale’s train depot, which he’d like to see turned into a miniature Beale Street.

Stewart said he plays around with the blues but never plays it. It does, he said, influence his musical style as a producer. "lt takes listening to someone who created it and was around it years and years. You never get the full understanding of it in a week or two weeks: it`s impossible. That’s why you’ve got to have so much respect for old blues," Stewart said.

“I don’t see that much of it anymore. Not that that’s bad, but you can’t take away from what was real. Years ago, in the '50s and ’60s. it was real. Now, basically, we’re just copycats. We’re trying to copy the style, trying to copy Muddy Waters and Ike Turner. If we want to keep that tradition alive, it takes time, practice and dedication. You really have to be sincere with it.”

To countless thousands of visitors from around the world, the Delta, with its vast cotton fields, cypress swamps and rich, flat land, is the blues. This is the land that spawned King and Hooker. Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon. Son House and, of course, the man whose grave Hagenaars came to see.

It can be argued that without Mississippi’s bluesmen, seminal British rock bands like the Stones, the Yardbirds, Cream and Led Zeppelin never would have existed. Their albums carry songwriting credits by Mississippi-born bluesmen, many of whom left to form the core of the Chicago blues scene.

Ratliff had never heard of Johnson until 1991, when a New Jersey music preservationist approached his congregation with the idea of placing a monument in the cemetery where Johnson was once rumored to be buried. That’s after the Payne Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Quito, a couple of miles north on Mississippi 3, which [IS NOT HIS BURIAL SITE], turned down the opportunity. Johnson, as history tells it, was poisoned by a jealous woman after performing in a Three Forks honkytonk. [PROBLEM WAS THAT THREE FORKS IS UP NEAR FORT PEMBERTON NOT QUITO] 

“Some of the older people don`t think the blues ought to have no connection with religion,” said Payne Chapel church deacon Richard Johnson, no relation. And certainly not with Robert Johnson, whom legend has it sold his soul to the devil at a Delta crossroads.

Mount Zion had no such qualms regarding Johnson, Ratliff said. “He died in 1938, and I didn’t even get on this earth until 1948,” he said. “I’ve always been open-minded. Blues don’t have nothing to do with salvation. If you believe in Jesus, that’s all you need to do. There’s no harm in this monument out here. Folks could use churching up.”

Ratliff believes Johnson’s body was probably buried by an old oak tree near the road in the Mount Zion cemetery. “if he was out here at all." The Payne Chapel contingent, who have since laid a small headstone with Johnson’s name on it in their cemetery, have the word of one of Johnson’s old girlfriends “before she got too old and started forgetting.” Richard Johnson said. The dispute is friendly enough. Both churches get their share of visitors. [NOT TOO MUCH ANYMORE]

International Language

Bert Robertson. a Greenwood firefighter and former Morgan City catfish farmer had never heard of Johnson either until the tourists began coming in. Though Robertson has met visitors from all over the world two bewildered Japanese tourists encountered in the Morgan City post office rank among the most memorable.

Robertson speaks no Japanese. Their English wasn’t much better. After failing to understand “Where grabe?" - repeated loudly a number of times apparently to overcome the language barrier. Robertson said one of the tourists tried another phrase. Only later, Robertson said, did he figure out it was air attempt at "blues singer." 

Frustrated. one finally began playing an air guitar. “I said, `Oh, Robert Johnson. Come with me. I`ll show you where he is.` " Robertson said, laughing at the memory. “They came all this way and couldn’t even speak English. They flew from Japan to Los Angeles and drove a car to Morgan City to see this. “It happens all the time."