English musician Eric Clapton is known for his sketchy racial comments, the most famous being his drunken onstage British Nationalist rant. This was a relatively recent event in the timeline of Old Slowhand, but it’s far from being new. It’s tempting to think that these are simply the rantings of a disillusioned old man who used to make great records. The truth, though, is that he’s been blowing it since the 60s.
In 1968, Clapton’s legendary psych-blues band Cream released the masterful “Wheels of Fire.” This was, next to “Disraeli Gears” (which included everyone’s dad’s favorite “Sunshine of your Love”), the most successful Cream album. “Wheels of Fire” is full of intense solos and revamped pre-war blues tunes. Among these songs was their cover of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads,” a tale of a young man going down to a Mississippi crossroad and interacting with some vague supernatural force. In the context of the rest of Johnson’s music, this is pretty standard subject matter amidst other songs of the era, like “Hellhound on my Trail” and “Me and the Devil Blues.” When Clapton discovered these records, he had a field day reworking the old songs he admired into something fresh and relevant for the budding psychedelic revolution around him.
He also had a field day, however, playing folklorist and blowing it in a gruesome and longstanding way. After analyzing the lyrics in Johnson’s songs, he began going around spreading the rumor that Johnson had sold his soul to the devil to acquire his unbelievable guitar skills; a myth that some people still believe.
What’s funny about this rumor is that it was originally attributed to Delta blues moaner Tommy Johnson, most known for his song “Canned Heat Blues” (about the perils of an alcoholic drinking Sterno cooking fuel during Prohibition to ward off delirium tremens). Clapton managed to pin this legend on the wrong Johnson and everyone bought it because he was so revered as a musician.
The big issue with this legend is that it began the unfortunate trend of mythologizing black blues musicians. Robert Johnson was not possessed. He was not even really a blues musician. He was an incredible guitar player who wrote spooky songs for his records, imitating his idol Skip James, who lived well into the 1960’s and was most certainly not possessed (although by most accounts he was kind of rude). The misconception about pre-war blues artists is that they were solely blues artists, which is a major fallacy. Most of these musicians were songsters who would play whatever their crowd requested so that they could make money. They only recorded blues material for their records at the request of the record companies so that they could market them as mystical “race artists”.
Clapton blew it by reviving this minstrelized public perception of blues musicians as voo-doo affiliates and devil worshippers. If Slowhand really wanted to spread this erroneous rumor, he could have at least gotten his Johnsons right.
