Robert, Jack and Jill, and others

Annye C. Anderson, “Mrs. Anderson” to all, is Robert Johnson’s stepsister. She was a toddler when Brother Robert, as she calls him, was a young man. She is now in her later nineties, Here are details that I culled from Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, by Mrs. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach (New York: Hachette, 2020):

Robert Johnson played harmonica and piano in addition to guitar. He yodeled too. The pinstripe suit in the famous photograph was made by Eggleston the Tailor or Hooks Brothers, both on Beale Street. (At different points the memoir identifies each clothier as the maker.) While it’s been said that Johnson kept ideas for songs in a notebook, Mrs. Anderson says that she never saw one.

Robert Johnson liked fried pumpkin, spaghetti (“black folks’ spaghetti,” Mrs. Anderson calls it), Bull Durham “roll ’ems,” and Dixie Peach pomade. He paid close attention to westerns, Joe Louis, and Negro League baseball. He would ask a listener, “What’s your pleasure?”

“He didn’t get his abilities from God or the Devil,” Mrs. Anderson writes. “He made himself.”

Titles of songs (in addition to those on record) and rhymes that Johnson played, sang, recited, as Mrs. Anderson recalls them:

44 Blues : 1937 Waters (to the tune of Didn’t It Rain) : Annie Laurie : Auld Lang Syne : Beale Street Blues : Careless Love : Casey Jones : Coon Shine Baby : Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? : Dry Bones : Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush : Humpty Dumpty : Jack and Jill : John Brown’s Body : John Henry : Joshua Fit the Battle : Let Yourself Go (accompanying his stepsister, after seeing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Follow the Fleet ) : Little Boy Blue : Little Sally Walker : Loch Lomond : Mary Don’t You Weep : Mary Had a Little Lamb : Memphis Blues : Mr. Froggie Went to Courting : My Bonnie : Pennies from Heaven : Poor Boy a Long Way from Home : Precious Lord (Take My Hand) : Salty Dog Blues : She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain : Sittin’ on Top of the World : St. James Infirmary : St. Louis Blues : Swing Low Sweet Chariot : Take a Little Walk with Me : TB Blues : Tell Me Mama : That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine : Trouble in Mind : Waiting for a Train (“Jimmie Rodgers was his favorite”) : We Go Lokey, Lokey, Lokey : When They Ring Them Golden Bells

Brother Robert is a powerful rebuttal to the mythologizing that made Robert Johnson into a rootless, doomed existentialist. And it’s a lacerating depiction of the machinations of two white men — Mack McCormick and Steve LaVere — in their dealings with Mrs. Anderson’s half-sisters, Bessie Hines and Carrie Spencer Thompson.

The one thing this book is missing: a family tree, though I wouldn’t want to be the person making it.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Johnson posts (Pinboard)