Robert Johnson was undoubtedly the most outstanding of the Mississippi Delta blues musicians and also one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but his short life remains steeped in mystery and wrapped in some of the most enduring legends of modern music. Love in Vain is Alan Greenberg’s remarkable, highly acclaimed, and genre-defying screenplay and is widely considered to be one of the foremost books on Robert Johnson’s life and legacy and an extraordinary exercise in American mythmaking. Newly revised and complete with extensive historical notes on Johnson’s life and the culture of the Mississippi Delta and blues music during the 1930s, Love in Vain is at once a classic of music writing and a screenplay whose reputation lies firmly in the realm of great American literature.
Alan Greenberg’s Robert Johnson screenplay has never been made into a film, though people have certainly tried. In the late ’70s, Mick Jagger backed the project. Throughout the ’90s, Martin Scorsese was gonna direct, and in the early 2000s, Diddy was to star in a version. But Love in Vain the film still hasn’t happened, leaving only a stand-alone biopic script that reads like a great American novel.
Instead of conveniently conflating history like most dramatized musical biographies, the book focuses on milieu and mood. Greenberg, who went to the Mississippi Delta and chased down friends and enemies of Johnson for research, is very sensitive to the contingencies of vagabond living as he conveys the feeling of what it was like to drunkenly shuffle from one dirty and dangerous jook joint to the next each night. There’s a tragic inevitability to the script that’s hard to shake.
For cold hard facts about Johnson, there are 50 pages of end notes, wherein Greenberg cites sources, explicates screenwriting decisions (taking note of where he’s played with the truth or created composite characters), obsessively breaks down blues traditions, and provides prospective directors some cinematic advice (apparently, Ethiopian tribal music should score Johnson’s death). This well-researched, brashly impressionistic screenplay is haunting, but it also happens to be the definitive book of any kind on the gifted, eccentric blues legend. –Brandon Soderberg
