Waiting For Robert Johnson

We've been waiting for this one for something like half a century. Was it worth the wait?  Well, yes and no. These days, however important, it's only one more brick in the Robert Johnson wall, now a cottage industry all its own. Johnson's been mythologised by everyone from Samuel Charters and John Hammond Sr to Bob Dylan and John Hammond Jr. as well as demythologised by Elijah Wald. Through it all one sometimes forgets that  that real people have been, and still are, part of Robert Johnson's legacy. Perhaps McCormick's book, after all these years of waiting, was always going to be anti-climatic, all the more compounded by the author's personal problems. Yet I was enthralled by the book, even if there were times that I began to wonder about its veracity. Still, given McCormick's work in general, I was more than willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

Biography of a Phantom could easily qualify as a crime novel. Not only is it an investigation, but Mack’s style and approach to Robert Johnson, is obviously based on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and the tropes of hardboiled narratives.  Okay, the book is flawed, as was, of course, McCormick's approach. His mistreatment of Johnson's relatives, such as Carrie Thompson, cannot be dismissed. Which is why I think it's important to quote the book's editor, John W. Troutman,  when he writes in the book's Afterwards:  

“This book...ultimately is less about the life of Robert Johnson than it is about the human hellhounds and psychological phantoms that affected everyone involved. Their impact and reverberations seem interconnected and boundless, beginning with the lynchings and other racially motivated violence that terrorized and jeopardized Johnson’s family as well as Black communities throughout Mississippi during the early 1900s. They extend to the ineffable consequences of entombing Johnson’s humanity in a mythology that ascribed his musical brilliance literally to the doings of the devil, rather than to recognizing the labor of his craft, and the allusions and allegory in the poetic wellspring of Black songwriters that Johnson was drawing from and replenishing. They manifest in the historical plunder and exploitation of Black music and musicians by the record industry, and the toll weighed on Johnson’s family members as they endured decades of litigation over Johnson’s recordings and likeness. They manifest in the condition that both fueled McCormick’s manic research production and vast assembly of knowledge, and that also relentlessly tormented him, constraining his ability to make good choices, and then expanding the suffering of all those around him when his choices were bad. It is a story of tragedy, suffered by all, where mental health plays a role, but so does racism, greed, and the instruments of white supremacy in the legal system and corporate structure, in which the concerns of Carrie Thompson were so easily and consistently dismissed."