Ever hear of Hank Williams?
Sure. He’s great. But he had a very short career. He’s penned about 10 classics that will remnain in the great American songbook forever. Dylan about 250.
Or Stephen Foster, W.C. Handy, Scott Joplin, George M. Cohen, George & Ira Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Aaron Copland, Miles Davis, Erroll Garner, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Glenn Miller, Lerner & Loewe, Rodgers & Hammerstein etc etc—all writers, composers, or performers of authentic “American” music.
No one else is even close to making real American musicEver hear of Hank Williams?
Ever hear of Muddy Waters? Robert Johnson? Duke Ellington (who once said he preferred his music be called "American music" rather than jazz)?
Sure. [Hank Williams is] great. But he had a very short career. He’s penned about 10 classics that will remnain in the great American songbook forever.Robert Johnson only penned twenty-nine songs in a career even shorter than Hank Williams . . . and those songs became blues standards and should be considered part of the great American songbook.
As an aside, when Columbia assembled the box set of Johnson's complete recordings (all 29 master takes and several alternate takes), they were figuring they'd be lucky if it sold 20,000 copies. It went on to sell more than two million copies---the first purely blues box that ever sold a million copies or more. And that was 52 years after Johnson's death.
I'd hipped to Robert Johnson (as also a lot of bluesmen including B.B. King, who first moved me to try to play a guitar seriously in the summer of 1969 when "The Thrill Is Gone" hit) in the late 1960s when I heard Eric Clapton, whom I admired growing up, rhapsodise about Johnson; on that alone (and certainly Clapton's rearrangement of "Crossroads"---on which he gave Johnson the writing credit he deserved, as always he did) I went out and bought the Columbia LP King of the Delta Blues Singers, issued first in 1963. I got the second volume when it came out circa 1970. Losing those two LPs over the years was a heartbreaker; when the box set came out I pounced on it. It's still music I listen to at least once a week. And, if only based on "Long Gone Lonesome Blues," I'd be willing to bet Hank Williams was aware of Robert Johnson, too. I often thought Hank Williams took a slight wrong musical turn---listening to him even now, that man was born to sing the blues.
Clapton once said that there was a time in his life when, if you didn't know who Robert Johnson was, he wouldn't talk to you. I can't exactly say I blame the man.