[78-L] Don Law's notes about Robert Johnson

[soundthink at aol.com]

Courtesy of 
Tom Reney
"Jazz à la Mode"
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NPR News and Music for Western New England
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This link will bring you to a copy of the typewritten letter (now held at the Library of Congress) that Frank Driggs sent to Don Law seeking information about the Robert Johnson sessions that Law had produced 24/25 years earlier in Dallas and San Antonio.  Law's handwritten reply appears on the letter.  This is where the story originated about Johnson turning his back while he played for some Mexican musicians, and of the phone call he made to Law about his encounter with a prostitute: "There is a lady here. She wants 50 cents and I lacks a nickel."   Driggs assumes Johnson to be a man who'd never left the plantation he was born on, but later research found him to have been an itinerant musician who made his way to Memphis, St. Louis, Illinois, and quite possibly Detroit, Windsor, Ontario, New York City, and other eastern states in addition to the trips to Texas for the Brunswick sessions.
 
http://www.scribd.com/doc/11129232/20090122125042109

And this to the article in the Dallas Observer about the fate of the building where the Dallas recording session took place in 1937.
Dallas - Unfair Park - From 1961, Don Law's Notes Concerning What Took Place at 508 Park Avenue in June 1937 <http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2009/01/from_1961_don_laws_notes_conce.php>   


Cary Ginell