DOMINIC GREEN: Delta Force.

If the Delta style has a supreme originator, it was not Robert Johnson. It was Lonnie Johnson (no relation) who created the Delta template by transposing Jelly Roll Morton’s piano jazz onto the acoustic guitar. (I discussed this with King on a 2018 podcast). The primitivist legend, King argues, puts the Delta cart before New Orleans jazz. The blues flowed upriver, like investment and technology, not downriver, like the current. It is as if, as in Huckleberry Finn, the Mississippi as metaphor carries away the subject.

Robert Johnson’s music supports this argument. New Orleans music was piano music. Jazz pianists invented the bass boogie. Jazz pianists pitched the vocal between their left-hand boogie and their right-hand ornaments. When Johnson split the low-string pulse from the high-string ornament, he was adapting the piano to the guitar, like Lonnie Johnson had done before him. Both Johnsons “made it new” by making a complex, two-handed style simple.

Johnson’s “Kind Hearted Woman Blues” echoes W.C. Handy’s archetypal and synthetic “St. Louis Blues“: the first nationwide blues hit. On “Walking Blues,” Johnson uses hammered-on ornaments like a two-fingered pianist. The key is B; at 1:45, he pulls against the pulse by striking the dominant F# like Count Basie was then doing with his left pinky. And something else that only comes from New Orleans piano structures the rhythm of Johnson’s playing. Listen to his fills and you hear the left-hand “rumba” pulse of the pianist spread across the guitar.

This explains the paradoxes at the heart of the Johnson legend. He is said to have invented it all, but everything he played had already been invented in New Orleans, and then developed in Memphis and Chicago. He is said to be fons et origo, yet even his biographers admit that the history of the blues would not be greatly altered if he had never lived. The blues migrated to Chicago in the 1920s, when Johnson was a boy. Look at it this way and Delta blues wasn’t the first at all. It was one of several regional responses as jazz spread out of New Orleans.

Adapting piano licks to guitar also created the groundbreaking sound of an even bigger musical legend: Rock ‘n Roll Has Two Daddies? New Revelations from Johnnie Johnson vs. Chuck Berry Lawsuit.

At some point, former Rolling Stone Ian Stewart told Keith Richards, “Don‘t forget that Johnnie Johnson is alive and well and still playing in St. Louis.”

That’s the first domino. Keith told Ian he was going to be the bandleader for the film Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll directed by Taylor Hackford, with a climactic performance at the Fox Theatre for Chuck’s 60th birthday. So Ian Stewart made that statement to Keith Richards, and when Keith came to St. Louis he said, “Is Johnnie still around?” Chuck said, “Yeah, I’ll get in touch with him,” and Johnnie appeared in the film and afterward began to perform much more often, and get much more exposure, whereas before he had been playing smaller local gigs and getting by, by driving an eldercare van. During the filming Keith was talking to Johnnie, and they were discussing how the songs were created. Keith has said that he told Johnnie what he did was “songwriting” and “you should get credit for that if you can.” Johnnie said after that he talked to Little Richard and Bo Diddley and they told him roughly the same thing: he should get credit and money for it.

Richards discusses how Berry based his distinctive chugging low-riff double-stop sound from Johnson’s piano playing in the aforementioned documentary, but I can’t seem to find that clip online.