Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson - Softcover

Greenberg, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816680809 ISBN 13: 9780816680801

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2012

Synopsis

Robert Johnson was undoubtedly the most outstanding of the Mississippi Delta blues musicians and also one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but his short life remains steeped in mystery and wrapped in some of the most enduring legends of modern music. Love in Vain is Alan Greenberg’s remarkable, highly acclaimed, and genre-defying screenplay and is widely considered to be one of the foremost books on Robert Johnson’s life and legacy and an extraordinary exercise in American mythmaking. Newly revised and complete with extensive historical notes on Johnson’s life and the culture of the Mississippi Delta and blues music during the 1930s, Love in Vain is at once a classic of music writing and a screenplay whose reputation lies firmly in the realm of great American literature.

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Review

His music has provided a prototype for several generations of blues and rock musicians, his songs remain current in countless new versions, and his own brief but astonishing output of recordings has earned gold records a half century after his death. Yet bluesman Robert Johnson remains among the most elusive figures in 20th-century art, the details of his life as shadowy as his music is brilliant. Johnson's personal obscurity makes the triumph of screenwriter Alan Greenberg's unfilmed script Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson all the more remarkable, as it weaves the slender factual threads of the musician's life into a haunting--and haunted--portrait that resonates with the history of blues itself.

Written in the early '80s, when blues scholarship was just beginning to unearth important new details about the life of the singer, guitarist, and songwriter, Greenberg's script follows the young Johnson from cotton field to juke joint as he pursued his muse. His abrupt transformation from a ham-fisted blues acolyte into a singer and guitarist of riveting intensity, famously rumored as a deal with the Devil, is inevitably a central plot development, and Greenberg honors both the factual evidence (the influence of guitarist Ike Zinnerman) and the Faustian explanation. Johnson's subsequent triumphs as a performer are laced together with the hardscrabble poetry of the songs themselves, as Greenberg uses blues lyrics to underscore the harsh realities of Mississippi Delta life.

Less obviously, Greenberg re-creates a world where telephones, automobiles, and phonographs coexist with conjurers, devils, and mojo hands. Johnson himself was a cryptic loner whose obsession with his music and immersion in it were paralleled by his descent into alcoholism. While invoking potent and pertinent dualities of sin and salvation (Johnson's early blues peers mirrored--and sometimes became--Bible-thumping preachers), Greenberg does not soften the hard price Johnson paid. His relentless womanizing is neither romantic nor particularly titillating; when the story reaches its inevitable conclusion, with the singer's death from poisoned whiskey, the moment is both tragic and squalid. --Sam Sutherland

About the Author

Alan Greenberg is a writer, film director, film producer, and photographer. He worked on Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear and Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 and with Werner Herzog on his classic screenplays Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde, and Heart of Glass. Greenberg’s documentary Land of Look Behind was awarded the Chicago International Film Festival’s Gold Hugo award, and he is the author of Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of “Heart of Glass.”

Stanley Crouch is a columnist, novelist, and essayist and a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He is the author of many books, including Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz.

Martin Scorsese is an Academy Award–winning director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. He was executive producer for the acclaimed seven-part film series The Blues.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0816680809
• ISBN 13: 9780816680801
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272