Love In Vain: A Vision Of Robert Johnson

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