The Overlooked Roots of Rock N Roll
This article is a walk down Highway 61, arguably the most iconic stretch of highway in music history. Heck, Bob Dylan even named one of his most famous albums, Highway 61 Revisited, after this road. Basically, the Delta is a two hundred mile range of land that starts in Memphis, Tennessee (it technically starts at the Mississippi state line, just south of Memphis) and goes down through Clarksdale, Mississippi. It’s the namesake for the Delta Blues, a musical genre that influenced some of the greatest rock and roll musicians in history: PJ Harvey, Jimi Hendrix, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton and tons of others. No big deal.
Translation: that is a monumentally big deal.
Now, if you’re in a car, this is a fairly quick day trip. If you’re a guitar nerd like me, it takes a little longer, but I don’t think you guys will mind a few detours.
Sam Phillips, Ike Turner and “Rocket 88”
We'll start in Memphis, Tennessee, the home of Sun Studios. Now, Sun Studios is really vital in the story, mainly due to a man named Sam Phillips. Sam Phillips started the Memphis Recording Service in 1950, and in 1951 he recorded Ike Turner in a song called “Rocket 88.”
I’ve mentioned this song in several episodes of the JHS Show because it’s one of the first recorded accounts of rock and roll. Depending on what historian you ask, it might be the very first one. There's a distorted guitar in that track. It's a mix of rhythm and blues and some of the musical styles from the Delta. It’s iconic and way ahead of its time.
Here’s how it happens. Ike Turner and his band have just rehearsed, then they jump in the car from Clarksdale to drive an hour and a half to Memphis, to see Sam Phillips, to track the song, and hopefully get famous. But on their way, the car gets a flat tire. They have to move the gear out of the car to reach the spare tire, and while this is all happening, someone accidentally drops the guitar amp. No one knows exactly what happened, but it’s broken. When they bring it to Sam for the recording session, he doesn’t bat an eye. He just shoves some paper into the amp around the speaker cone to fix the broken speaker. As a result, the sound wasn’t exactly fixed -- but Sam liked the raw sound even better, so he kept it in the recording.
I can’t overemphasize how important this is. “Rocket 88” is the first ever really distorted guitar we hear in the context of rhythm and blues. And thanks to that distorted guitar, “Rocket 88” became a huge hit in 1951. Because of the success of “Rocket 88,” Sam even had the funds to launch his own recording studio in 1952, which he called Sun Studios.
So, basically, a couple of musicians changing a flat in 1951 gave the rest of us permission to distort our guitars. That’s pretty standard for rock and roll history, to be honest. A lot of the greatest discoveries happened by accident.
Then, in 1953, Elvis Presley recorded at Sun Studios, and the rest is history. Tons of these amazing early rock and roll artists performed and recorded with Sun Studios, even early blues artists like Howlin’ Wolf. We hear distorted electric guitar on “How Many More Years,” which was also released in 1951. Sam was familiar with recording distorted electric, which at the time was not permitted, but he liked it and he kept putting it on recordings. This meant that when Ike Turner’s band showed up with a broken amp, he was the perfect sound engineer to “fix” it. This moment is really important. It gave permission to future musicians and recording engineers to turn a guitar up and even distort it. This was revolutionary at the time.
Coincidentally, one of Howlin' Wolf’s biggest fans was a guy named Bob Dylan. Dylan started out as a folk musician, but he took a pretty massive detour onto Highway 61 in 1965.
Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited
Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited is a great picture of how the Delta blues genre impacted modern rock.
So, Dylan was a folk singer, and before 1965 he played acoustic guitar. He covered blues artists, listening to guys like Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie, all these original American folk artists. In 1965, Dylan made a big leap when he released Bringing It All Back Home, because the A side of that record was electric and the B side was acoustic. He’d never done anything like that before, and it completely subverted everyone’s expectations of what a folk album should sound like. The real clincher, though, was a song called “Maggie's Farm.” Now, the reference of Maggie's farm is kind of the folk industry and folk music as a whole. He was getting tired of it, so he literally sings, “I ain’t going to work on Maggie's farm no more.”
That whole side of the Bringing It All Back Home record offended most of his fans and his audience. But Dylan wasn’t satisfied with that, so he delivered a message to the entire folk industry about four months later at the Newport Folk Festival.
Picture it: Bob Dylan walks onstage at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, following up the traditional banjo picker Cousin Emmy. In years past, Dylan has been the spokesperson for this sacred event, plus he’s basically the messiah of American folk music. This year is different. He’s wearing a black leather jacket, and he’s carrying a sunburst 1964 Fender Stratocaster. His band includes Mike Bloomfield and other members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Right away, he launches into a frantic electric version of “Maggie’s Farm.”
The story goes that everyone started booing. People were yelling and started throwing things at the stage. One of the event coordinators threatened to take an ax and cut the power cable to the stage. That said, statistically we know that some people at the concert probably enjoyed the performance, but the vocal majority did not. Folksinger Oscar Brand summed up the crowd’s response really well: “The electric guitar represented capitalism...the people who were selling out.” No wonder the audience was pissed off. The folk music movement prized authenticity above everything else. A perceived “sell out” from Bob freakin’ Dylan was unthinkable.
When we look back over history, this moment is significant because it’s essentially when Bob Dylan said, “This is now folk music.” Folk became rock in July of 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival when the spokesperson for folk strapped on a Stratocaster and turned folk and blues music into rock music.
Dylan took it one step further, though. In August 1965, he released one of my favorite albums ever: Highway 61 Revisited. This album was his follow-up to “Maggie's Farm”, Bringing It All Back Home, his performance at the Newport Folk Festival, all of it. Highway 61 Revisited was a fully electrified album, which was Dylan basically never looking back at the folk singer he had been. Instead he released an album pointing forward to this highway he’s heading towards. In this album he's saying, “Yeah, let's revisit American folk music, and we're going to do it with electric guitar.”
This is a massive moment in music history. A lot of musicologists and historians will say that 1965 is when the 1960s counterculture movement really began. Now, the 1960s probably conjure up images of hippies walking around, classic Jimi Hendrix with his purple army jacket and afro, and insane music inspired by (or at least enhanced by) acid and LSD. The early sixties were actually pretty tame, but after Dylan debuted his whole new sound at Newport in July of ’65 and released Highway 61 Revisited, the world changed forever.
Rolling Stone ranked Highway 61 Revisited as the number 18 album of all time, which is pretty baller considering it’s basically Dylan mocking the folk industry, saying, “History is changing. Music is changing, and all of you have to change, too. Let's move on from this folk thing with acoustic guitars and bring it into a new era.”
Highway 61 Revisited is also important because of the massive amount of artists that Dylan is referring back to. So many incredible musicians came out of the Delta, including (but definitely not limited to) Muddy Waters, Son House, Elvis Presley, Charlie Patton, Ike Turner, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Sam Cooke and Jimmy Reed. Rock music as we know it literally originated here after Dylan and other artists took these Delta blues songs and electrified them.
The Delta Blues
Referring to folk music, it's important to understand that the term “blues music” is a commercialized definition. This term was invented to describe a form of music producers wanted to sell to a certain crowd, or in this case: “This is a type of music that we think white people might enjoy that we're going to pull from these black artists and musicians in the Delta.” For all intents and purposes, white Northerners were pulling black music out of the Delta because it was exotic and interesting, and they defined it as “the blues” even though it was really just the folk music of the South.
Now, I’m a white guy, almost 40 years old, living in the 2020s, so when I hear the term “blues,” I tend to think of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bonnie Raitt, artists like that. But the fact is that they’re not making the same kind of music that these Delta artists made in the sixties. When we listen to Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, they’re just making folk music. It was a standardized form of music from a group of people in a region that represented a culture, and it got commercialized and defined by white people as blues music.
That said, separating artists into these genres wasn't always easy. Take a look at a guy named Robert Johnson, who only recorded 29 tracks total in his incredibly short musical career. He's a huge player in the narrative of how this all evolved. He's the first ever rock star, and all these modern rock artists were influenced by his recordings. Johnson was playing stuff that would have been right at home in the French Quarter in New Orleans, in Chicago, or maybe even in Memphis. It was really broad.
Basically, Johnson wasn't a blues artist. He was a folk artist. And that's why he’s important. That's also why folk music/blues from the Delta meant so much to artists like Bob Dylan. These bluesmen and blueswomen were the original folk artists. The trope that blues is a black guy singing about hard times came from the sixties. No one had defined that as blues until white people (specifically, British white guys like Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger) started referring to it in that way.
This brings up a great question: if the blues are basically Southern folk music, then what separates the Delta blues from standard blues?
It all starts with the Mississippi Delta. This is the space where the Mississippi River overflows onto the flat lands and makes the soil really rich. In the 1800s, farmers discovered that this was a great place to plant crops. It’s important to note, though, that this wasn’t historically an area with a ton of plantations or even a big slave population. White Northerners created the narrative that all of these Delta blues artists were basically slaves making music and being recorded, but that's not how it happened.
The real narrative is that the Delta became a sort of promised land for poor black families. They traveled there from all over the South with the promise of having really good jobs, of planting their own crops, of making a better life for themselves and their families. As a result, almost no one who lived in the Delta was originally from there. Families traveled from other areas in the south and built communities like Clarksdale, Greenville, and Tunica. It was a migrant community, different pockets of the South gathering in the Delta, so it turned into a musical playground of really thriving music where everyone learned from each other, where a musician from Louisiana could meet musicians from Mississippi and Florida and swap tips. It became this totally unique musical community, which helps us understand how all these amazing musicians come from this same region.
The main reason we have so much information about the Delta blues and artists from that era goes back to a man named Alan Lomax and other archivists like him who created field recordings. Basically, the Library of Congress sent historians down to the South to record artists in an effort to investigate and document American culture. That's how we transported this music to the North, and it’s also how the message got a little muddled. The white archivists who brought black music to the North painted a picture of the music being sung and played by slaves just getting off work, but that wasn't the real story.
In fact, all of these artists in the Delta wanted to move on. The Delta basically functioned as a middle ground for black families who wanted to get out of the South. You hear it when Robert Johnson sings “Sweet Home Chicago.” He wasn't singing “Sweet Home Delta.” He wanted to get out of the Delta. Everyone did. This group of people came together to take advantage of this fertile soil for new jobs, for a chance to go further North to Chicago. It was purely coincidental that, at the same time, they created this musical subculture of folk music.
The Mississippi Delta is the region where we see the first seeds of rock and roll. We can listen to Led Zeppelin and say, “That's the first form of metal,” but it started in the Delta. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were obsessed with Delta blues artists, and that inspired them.
Robert Johnson and the Devil
Most of you have heard the song “Crossroads” by Cream. It’s a classic for a reason.
“I went down to the crossroads
Fell down on my knees
Down to the crossroads
Fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above for mercy
‘Take me, if you please.’”
That’s our next stop: the intersection of Highway 49 and Highway 61, A.K.A., where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil.
Robert Johnson (also known as the King of the Delta Blues) was born in 1911. He got into the guitar at an early age. A family member said that he actually nailed wire to the side of a house and would pluck one string. He was fascinated with guitar because guitar was becoming the primary instrument of folk music in the Delta; all the people he grew up around were playing it. He eventually got a three-string guitar, then a really beat up six-string guitar.
Here’s the funny thing: Robert Johnson -- who Rolling Stone Magazine listed as one of the top 100 greatest guitar players in history -- was not that great when he started out. In fact, local blues legend Son House said that he remembered Robert Johnson as a teenager coming into the juke joints. House said that Johnson was okay on harmonica, but horrible on guitar, to the point that he would run people out of the juke joints with his awful playing.
Well, Son House says that Robert disappeared for six months or so when he was about twenty years old. When Johnson came back to the Delta, no one could believe it. His voice was amazing. He was doing things on the guitar that no one had done before, picking bass notes and treble notes, playing rhythm and lead, wowing the entire crowd.
This is where the legend comes in. The story goes that Johnson was told to come at the intersection of Highway 49 and Highway 61, to be there at the stroke of midnight. Not eerie at all. Supposedly, the Devil met him, took his guitar, played some chords, and handed it back. And at that moment, Robert Johnson became a blues icon, a superhero, a rock star. That explains how in the world this untalented person became so amazing in his own lifetime and (in hindsight) why he was so influential with British Invasion artists and early rock blues artists. It's especially wild because Johnson only tracked 29 songs total. He had a career for just a few years, then he died mysteriously at age twenty seven. No one even knew he had passed away until decades later.
Whether you believe the supernatural element or not, it’s a valid question: how did someone with no talent end up becoming literally the first guitar superstar?
There’s a more likely explanation, although it does contain a few less devils. A lot of musicologists and researchers did interviews with Robert’s family, who said he disappeared for at least two years around age twenty. Johnson traveled around and became a drifter, the kind of musician you would see traveling around to juke joints all over the Delta and even up into Tennessee and Arkansas.
Stephen Johnson, Robert’s grandson, says that he went to Hazlehurst, Mississippi in search of his biological father. Along the way, he ran into a blues player named Ike Zimmerman, who took Robert into his family and taught him everything he knew. The story goes that Zimmerman would take Johnson out to a cemetery to teach him guitar. It’s telling that even the tamer version of this legend still has this amazing imagery of these two Delta bluesmen playing blues, slide guitar, learning all these rhythms, writing these lyrics out...in a cemetery. We can't get away from this mythological element to Robert Johnson’s story.
So, we know that Robert Johnson went and learned guitar. Maybe he learned from Ike Zimmerman, maybe he made a deal with the devil. Who knows? The story goes that Johnson made it to Jackson, Mississippi and connected with a guy named C.S. Spire, who owned the local hardware store. C.S. was also the guy who could connect you with people that were recording at the time, almost like a talent scout. Robert goes in, gives a demonstration of his guitar chops, and apparently they liked what he played.
They sent him to San Antonio in November 1936, where he did a good chunk of all the recordings we have in that time period. When Johnson went in for the first recording session, there were some other bands and musicians around, but the legend goes that Johnson faced the corner while he played because he didn't want anyone to see what his hands were doing. Apparently he was worried that people would learn these riffs and guitar licks and styles that he perfected and created. Either that, or he was just incredibly shy. We’ll never know for sure.
Fortunately, the first session was a success, so Johnson got invited to record a second session in Dallas on June 19th, 1937. The end result? Robert Johnson recorded 29 songs that are staples in blues music to this day. At the time, they were released as singles that you would hear in a jukebox. He comes back to the Delta, and some of his songs take off. At this point, you can reasonably say that he’d made it as a musician. He becomes locally famous as a Delta musician whose songs were actually in the jukebox. That had to be an amazing experience.
Unfortunately, Johnson died in 1938, just a few months after his career had started to take off. At this point, he wasn’t only locally successful. His songs were being played all over the South and in different spots in the U.S. He was on his way to becoming the first rock and roll star in history, but success came too late.
Even Robert Johnson’s death had a mythical quality to it. There was no evidence or announcement of his death until thirty years later, when a musicologist from Mississippi State dug up Robert’s death certificate when John Hammond of Columbia wanted to invite him to Carnegie hall to play at this massive concert. Instead, they found out he was dead and nobody knew it. Thirty years after he died, Bob Dylan is plugging Robert Johnson as one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Tons of new musicians are about to come onto the scene, all these amazing blues and folk artists. This folk revival is coming around the corner in the early sixties. If Robert Johnson had lived to old age, he could have very well lived in New York and been a part of that, like Muddy Waters and Sippie Wallace, but he died young.
John Lomax came back down to the Delta in ’41 to try to find Robert Johnson, and he found out how Robert Johnson had died. Supposedly, Johnson had been stabbed or shot, but there were tons of rumors surrounding his death. The most logical explanation with eyewitness accounts is that Johnson was playing at a juke joint and caught the eye of a married woman. The husband was very jealous, so he poisoned Johnson’s whiskey, and three days later, he fell dead in a field. They buried Johnson where he laid. What’s truly bonkers is that musicologists have a written confession from the alleged murderer, but he was never charged with anything.
As a result, Robert Johnson became a member of the Twenty Seven Club, a group of influential, amazing musicians who died at the age of 27. Other members include Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and tons of others. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in ’86, the United States postal service issued a stamp with him on it in ’94 and Rolling Stone Magazine ranked him as the fifth greatest guitarist of all time in 2003 (72 years after his recordings were released).
Robert Johnson may be the most influential American guitarist ever, when you weigh the circumstances and the history surrounding his legacy.
I definitely encourage you to check out his compilation recording released in 1961, King of the Delta Blues. How important is it? That album becomes the record that young Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Bob Dylan hear and are inspired by. Then in 1970, they put out part two of Johnson’s compilation, which had alternate takes. Then in the nineties, they released a two-CD set that sold about a million copies. It's really astronomical how well it did.
In closing, I want to read a quote from Bob Dylan out of his biography about Highway 61 and the way that we think about songs in America: “Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I'd started on Highway 61. I'd always been on it and I couldn't go anywhere else. Even down to the deep Delta country, it was the same road full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors. It was my place in the universe and always felt like that highway was in my blood.”
Basically, if you ever have a chance to come to the Delta, do it. Start in Memphis and just go south. And if you see the Devil standing at a crossroads, I’d advise you to keep on driving.