There's A Hellhound In My Ale
The late, great Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, who died in 1938, would have been 100 years old this month. His birthday was yesterday - May 8 - as near as blues historians can figure out. Another good excuse, in other words, for Johnson's slim but massively influential catalog to be re-issued yet again.
And also a good excuse, happily, for Milton, Delaware music-savvy brewery Dogfish Head to get in on the synergistic celebration. They've done so with a small-quantity limited-run specialty beer called Robert Johnson's Hellhound On My Ale, a nod to the scarifying "Hellhound On My Trail," one of several haunted Johnson tunes that helped create the myth that he really had sold his soul to the devil.
There's no point in bitching about the endless rehashing of the Johnson catalog. The bluesman who had a powerful impact on '60s blues revival artists such as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones has been celebrated over and over again since the fittingly titled King Of The Delta Blues Singers was first issued on Columbia Records as an LP compiled by John Hammond in 1961.
Johnson's music keeps getting repackaged because it demands to be heard - and also, because it doesn't cost Sony much of anything to put it out all over again. This time, there's a deluxe set called Robert Johnson: The Complete Original Masters - Centennial Edition that includes 12 vinyl 45's, plus 4 CDs of music by Johnson and related artists in a it-better-be lavish package that sells for over $300. And on the more economically managable front there's also a two-disc Centennial Collection, containing the same 29 recordings (including outtakes) that comprise the entire Johnson ouevre that were released on CD as Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings in 1990.
The music hasn't gotten any better since then, but it hasn't gotten any less commanding, either: As I type this, I'm listening to "Travelin' Riverside Blues," and I'm again being taken aback by the complexity and clarity of Johnson's Delta blues guitar playing and the expressive force of his singing.
And the lyrics are pretty good, too. Johnson could be Lil Wayne, rhyming about contemporary economic woes when he sings of his woman with "front teeth lined with gold" who "got a mortgage on my body, got a lien on my soul." And the salacious sexual innuendo in the same song is pretty amusing, too: "Squeeze my lemon, till the juice run down my leg," he sings, then breaks the fourth wall and talks to the microphone: "I wonder if you know what I'm talkin' about," he asks. Yes, Mr. Johnson, I believe we do.
I don't think those lemons were the ones Dogfish founder Sam Calagione was thinking of when he brewed up Hellhound On My Ale, a particularly strong, highly hoppy beer made with 100% Centennial hops, and 10.0% alcohol, in keeping with the theme of the 100 years since Johnson's death.
Dogfish Head is a musically minded company. They've done a bunch of small batch brews and barley wines before with label artwork by Waco Brothers leader and Renaissance man Jon Langford - my favorite being the mix of old English ale and Imperial IPA that's called Burton Baton. And Hellhound is the second special brew Dogfish has come up with in conjunction with a Sony re-issue: Last year, the Calagione and co. created Bitches Brew, a three-parts Imperial stout one-part honey beer with gesho root released to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Miles Davis' jazz fusion album of the same name.
I wouldn't call Hellhound On My Ale hellacious exactly, but it's powerful stuff, more of a straight-to-the-point kind of beer than Bitches Brew. That's fitting, since Johnson's blues convey such elemental force. My 25 ounce bottle packed a pretty urgent pucnch, and it didn't last long in the fridge, either. My only quibble is with the Hellhound label, which explains that the excellent idea of adding lemon peel and flesh to the mix was done in in part "as a shout-out to Robert Johnson's mentor Blind Lemon Jefferson."
A cute idea, that. And Johnson, who traveled widely, was undoubtedly familiar with the Texas bluesman, who was popular in the 1920s while Johnson was in his formative years. But Jefferson was hardly his mentor. As this family tree maps out, Johnson's Mississippi blues forebear and father figure of sorts Son House fits that bill much more neatly.
A Beer Geek Nation review of Hellhound is here. The deluxe Johnson Centennial set is only avaiialble a thecompleterobertjohnson.com. A list of Philadelphia area bars and beer distributors who've been carrying Hellhound can be found here, I'm headed down to the crossroads in search of another bottle right now.
Previously: For Dear Old Ma