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that had surrounded him. I wanted to get a feeling for his background and the popular tastes of his day, to place his work alongside the records he and his peers were listening to, and to try to explore what he was after on his own terms.
    Obviously, such an aim can never be completely achieved. I was born twenty years after Johnson’s death, and I am not black, not from Mississippi, not a musical genius. I could argue that I have certain insights because I spent many years as a wandering guitarist, hitchhiking into town and looking for someplace to play and someone who would give me a bed for the night, but does that really bring me closer to him, or only give me a deceptive sense of camaraderie? I know of white Mississippians who think that they have insight into Delta blues that no northerner can share, and black college professors who have never been to Mississippi but assume they can get into Johnson’s head better than any white person could. Claims of empathy are as potentially slippery and misleading as they are, perhaps, inevitable. Even for a young, brilliant black blues player from Mississippi, it would be an incredible leap of faith (or hubris) to think that one’s experiences in the twenty-first century gave any clear insight into what Johnson would have experienced in 1930. Far too much water has passed under far too many bridges in the intervening years. In some ways, a young Mississippi rapper might be in a better position, at least understanding the experience of being a black, poor, forward-looking artisttrying to break into a fast-moving, high-powered national scene despite being based in a regional backwater.
    In any case, I have done my best to immerse myself in what is known of Johnson’s world. I have listened to thousands of recordings, concentrating (for a change) not on what I happened to enjoy but on what I know to have been popular with blues fans of his day. I have spent a fair amount of time in the Delta, and have worked and talked with blues players of Johnson’s generation. And I have tried to be aware of my limitations. I did not grow up surrounded by the children’s game songs of rural Mississippi or the jug-band sounds of the Memphis streets. The pop touchstones of my childhood were the Beatles and Monkees, and while thirty years of blues fandom makes it easy for me to tell Lonnie Johnson from Tampa Red, I could not even recognize a Lanny Ross or Rudy Vallee record. Robert Johnson, I assume, would have recognized both, and I have no idea how this affected his musical education or approach—especially since all that remains of his famously varied repertoire is a small pile of three-minute blues recordings, and even those few songs were chosen because they were deemed most likely to sell on the current blues market, not because they were necessarily his favorites or biggest crowd-pleasers.
    There are people who will argue that, especially considering all these barriers of time and culture, it makes no sense to try to understand what Robert Johnson was attempting, that all we can do is listen to the music and react to it in the here and now. This is a valid approach, as far as it goes, and yet it also suggests a certain lack of respect for the music. No one writes about Stravinsky as if all one need do to appreciate him is to listen, without knowing anything about Western concert music. It is assumed that the more we can understand of what went into the making of The Rite of Spring , the more familiar we are with Beethoven and with the thrill of twentieth-century modernism, the more meaning it will have for us. Given this, I cannot help but think that when blues experts say that they prefer not to discuss Johnson’s sources, or consider them irrelevant to his genius, that is often because they do not approve of his tastes—that they would behappy to trace him to Son House, but do not like to think of him copying what they regard as dull assembly-line hits by