Love In Vain: A Vision Of Robert Johnson - Softcover

Alan Greenberg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 030680557X ISBN 13: 9780306805578

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 1994

Synopsis

Robert Johnson is considered one of the greatest of the Mississippi Delta blues musicians. This screenplay dramatises his life, music and legend in a readable and vivid manner. It is supplemented with extensive historical notes, a selected discography and previously unpublished photographs. "Love in Vain" is directed by Martin Scorsese for Warner Brothers.

About this title

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 has worked with such renowned film directors as Werner Herzog and Bernardo Bertolucci, and has written ten screenplays including Picasso for Warner Brothers and Dance Me Outside for Norman Jewison. His first film, Land of Look Behind, won the top prize at the Chicago International Film Festival, and has been hailed as one of the foremost documentaries of the 1980s. Love in Vain will be directed by Greenberg.

About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 030680557X
• ISBN 13: 9780306805578
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 274