Biography of a Phantom (book review)
Note: Addressing, for the second straight year, my New Year’s Resolution of Contributing to this blog more regularly. Last year that amounted to four entries, between January 14 and February 13, before the resolution died. This entry starts almost exactly a year after my first blog entry from last year was posted.
Maybe an interim goal is to get past four entries this year. I do a lot of writing that is akin to journaling and analogous to sketching in art or working out in fitness, a regular activity that hones my creativity and sharpens my writing (esp. my voice). One of the things I’d like to do in this blog is put some of the material that comes out during this writing that I think is worth sharing. A step past just filling a page but several steps short of more formally presenting elsewhere.
This review provides a good example of this. I start by writing this review, and end with an idea that comes to me in the process of writing that is an excellent idea for a subsequent project. This phenomenon, where this writing organically generates a workable idea, is one of the things that keeps me doing this kind of writing. What follows is a rough draft of a book review that ends with my realization of the idea.
January 15, 2024
Biography of a Phantom
Robert "Mack" McCormick & John W. Troutman (ed.)
This book is ostensibly a long delayed biography of blues singer Robert Johnson. And it is that. However, tt is also a workshop in historic interviewing and investigation. It has a good bit of social commentary. And, thanks to the editor, Troutman, it is also a biography of the biographer (McCormick) and a study of the pitfalls of ethics and appropriation when it comes to doing this line of research. All of these angles are fascinating, and bringing all these together are why this is one of the best and most enjoyable books I’ve read in a while.
I bestow upon this book the highest honor I have to give, and that is the “I wish I had written this book” award. Troutman was a folklorist during the Alan Lomax days when they traveled to obscure corners of the south in search of obscure “authentic” specimens of indigenous music like blues, lugging heavy clunky “portable” equipment and looting music and local history much in a comparable fashion to archaeologists of the time. McCormick was very devoted to blues, had a wide-ranging knowledge of the genre, and was able to spend countless hours on mysteries such as the life of Robert Johnson, a seminal blues musician who died young and about whom little was known. His book chronicles his travels through Mississippi tracking down leads, interviewing, and providing socio-economic context from the 1970s, a time where Johnson’s heyday in the 1930s was still living memory but on the other side of the civil rights era and now, half a century later, his chronicles of towns and life in rural Mississippi, abetted with original photographs, qualifies as history itself. A good example is the location of Johnson’s death in Greenwood in 1939, and the official indifference toward it, gets tied to a subsequent, far more notorious death two decades later in that same small town.
As McCormick’s odyssey progresses, details of Johnson’s life come out from people that he finds and talks to. It is a way to portray a life that I cannot remember previously seeing. It creates a plot and a climax independent of Johnson’s life, and acquaints us well with the narrator as well.
I said that this was a book I would like to have written, both from McCormick’s perspective in that I would have loved to do such a hunt where I can traverse rural Mississippi with a seemingly specific goal that is in fact a daunting task, and come out at the end not only with answers to the question, but also with a much deeper understanding of the context in which that specific question resides. The interviews, how he goes about them, and the techniques used and pitfalls encountered are fascinating and add a methodological dimension to the biography. But alas my doing such a thing is more fantasy, akin to writing the great American novel, than anything I realistically see as undertaking.
More realistic for me to long for is to be put into Troutman’s position. If McCormick had gotten his shit together and published the manuscript (all the info was collected during the 70s) before his death in 2015, we would have gotten a version of the Johnson biography (with some additional material that would have made the bio more whole but would have been problematic in other respects) without the intro and afterward sections that Troutman adds. The book would then have much less biographical information on McCormick which, with this included, is inseparable to the story of how he collected information on Johnson. McCormick did remarkable work in piecing together the biography, but also had a troubled life that led to some serious ethical lapses and where Troutman was handed not only an unfinished manuscript but also an ethical mess.
Troutman faces this situation unflinchingly, and shows how the issues were resolved in a manner that allowed this biography to see publication, but with lingering questions of whether, in doing so, it in fact offers amends for a legacy of white and corporate interests exploiting the music and the lives of the often Black and poor blues musicians who put forth the material, or whether it represents the latest iteration of such exploitation. I don’t have the answer to this dilemma, but admire Troutman’s ability to navigate this in a way that comes across as neither hand-wringing nor dismissive. It is also humbling, as I would have loved to bring a manuscript such as this across the finish line, but don’t feel confident that I would have been up for the task of navigating the ethical quandaries as clearheadedly as Troutman does.
Finally, as I write this I realize that I have, in my work on Skid Row, come across a manuscript that I could take across the finish line. There is a piece in Temple’s archives related to Skid Row in the mid-1950s that is complete but languishing in anonymity. I could pull this out and give it context. The task is not as profound nor as significant as what Troutman had, but is an exercise in bringing a piece to life that should see the light of day. I’d have an outlet for it as well. Perhaps I can fulfill a version of my wish.