Biography of a Phantom by Robert Mack McCormick

Author:Robert Mack McCormick [McCormick, Robert Mack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

McCormick’s notes from his interviews with Cleveland and Lula Smith, April 27, 1970, Commerce, Mississippi.

Both of the Smiths remembered those occasions and they recalled, of all his songs, the “one about the Terraplane” most vividly. They started tittering as they remembered bits of the lyrics, like “Who’s been driving my Terraplane for you, since I been gone?”

“Some of the people around here used to own a Terraplane,” Mr. Smith explained. “That was a favorite car in that time. So then Robert got to making up this song about it, and it had such stuff in there like ‘When I mash on your little starter, your spark plug oughta give me fire,’ and all such as that.” Mrs. Smith pulled up her apron, leaned over to hide her face, and started giggling into it as her husband blithely recited the words. “Terraplane Blues” has not been one of the songs that critics have praised. On the contrary, it’s often dismissed as a rather ordinary piece of double entendre, not particularly notable for either bawdiness or wit.

The assessment from the audience for whom it was intended, however, was quite different. It was, without question, Robert Johnson’s best-remembered song, not only in Robinsonville but everywhere that people spoke to me about Johnson from firsthand experience. It was particularly interesting to learn that it had been popular before the record appeared in 1937. Half a dozen people had told me that when they learned Johnson had been invited to Texas to make some recordings, they’d urged him to make certain that he included “Terraplane Blues.” “I told him to make that one,” Mr. Smith said, “even if he didn’t do nothing else.”

Not only was “Terraplane Blues” among the first few songs that Johnson recorded, but it also was one side of the first record scheduled for release, which sold better than any of the subsequent records. Yet, ironically, the Robert Johnson mystique rarely gives it any special attention (in much the same way, Woody Guthrie’s devotees tend to overlook “Oklahoma Hills,” the song that achieved the greatest popularity during his lifetime).

People may remember Robert Johnson’s harsher, more personal songs with awe and a kind of unease, but “Terraplane Blues” was the one they quote and joke about. A fair critical assessment might be that it was probably intended as a simple source of entertainment, and that it succeeded. In the course of my time spent in and around the Abbay & Leatherman Plantation, at least ten people said that they had owned that particular record and bragged that they had played it until it was worn gray. They also talked about Johnson’s other songs, but what they said was more restrained.

The Smiths said that Johnson predicted his own death in his songs, but they couldn’t be more specific about just how he’d done that, and they quickly got into a disagreement about when he’d died. Lula believed he had died sometime after World War II. Cleveland shook his head, saying, “Robert Spencer died in Greenwood in the year 1939.

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