This was the Memphis neighborhood where W. Handy created the blues at the turn of the 20th century. By the s, it housed a pulsing, crowded blend of speakeasies and music halls, brothels and houses of worship, criminal elements and respectable families. Anderson lived with her stepbrother off and on for 11 years, starting when she was only three, but her recollections are sharp and detailed.
She is perhaps the only living person who knew Robert Johnson. The first memory of Robert Johnson in this book is of a long-legged eighteen-year-old carrying a toddler up a flight of stairs. For that is what constitutes the bulk of this short book: an extended interview, a free-wheeling journey through old times with an earnest historian and a sharp-witted witness. Anderson, as she insists Lauterbach call her, remains a child of the city that gave the world the blues and ultimately rock and roll.
All the pots were out, heating water on that stove. Brother Robert kept himself clinically clean. He had the African physique. Until now, most people knew Johnson only through his recordings.
The latter part of the book is devoted to the often-infuriating ways that others tried to take advantage of the family to claim a piece of that legacy and the ways his sisters tried to reclaim it. This book gives Mrs. Anderson at long last a chance to have her say β and what a stirring conversation it proves to be.
Michael Ray Taylor is author of Hidden Nature , a mixture of memoir and subterranean natural history to be published in August He chairs the communication and theatre arts department at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. One Plus One by Jojo Moyes is a comedy, family drama, and unexpected romance of happy accidents.
