Love In Vain: A Vision Of Robert Johnson [Paperback]

Alan Greenberg (Author), Stanley Crouch (Introduction), Martin Scorsese (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 1994 | ISBN-10: 030680557X | ISBN-13: 978-0306805578 | Edition: 1St Edition

Robert Johnson is considered one of the greatest of the Mississippi Delta blues musicians. This screenplay dramatises his life, music and legend in a readable and vivid manner. It is supplemented with extensive historical notes, a selected discography and previously unpublished photographs. "Love in Vain" is directed by Martin Scorsese for Warner Brothers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

His music has provided a prototype for several generations of blues and rock musicians, his songs remain current in countless new versions, and his own brief but astonishing output of recordings has earned gold records a half century after his death. Yet bluesman Robert Johnson remains among the most elusive figures in 20th-century art, the details of his life as shadowy as his music is brilliant. Johnson's personal obscurity makes the triumph of screenwriter Alan Greenberg's unfilmed script Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson all the more remarkable, as it weaves the slender factual threads of the musician's life into a haunting--and haunted--portrait that resonates with the history of blues itself.

Written in the early '80s, when blues scholarship was just beginning to unearth important new details about the life of the singer, guitarist, and songwriter, Greenberg's script follows the young Johnson from cotton field to juke joint as he pursued his muse. His abrupt transformation from a ham-fisted blues acolyte into a singer and guitarist of riveting intensity, famously rumored as a deal with the Devil, is inevitably a central plot development, and Greenberg honors both the factual evidence (the influence of guitarist Ike Zinnerman) and the Faustian explanation. Johnson's subsequent triumphs as a performer are laced together with the hardscrabble poetry of the songs themselves, as Greenberg uses blues lyrics to underscore the harsh realities of Mississippi Delta life.

Less obviously, Greenberg re-creates a world where telephones, automobiles, and phonographs coexist with conjurers, devils, and mojo hands. Johnson himself was a cryptic loner whose obsession with his music and immersion in it were paralleled by his descent into alcoholism. While invoking potent and pertinent dualities of sin and salvation (Johnson's early blues peers mirrored--and sometimes became--Bible-thumping preachers), Greenberg does not soften the hard price Johnson paid. His relentless womanizing is neither romantic nor particularly titillating; when the story reaches its inevitable conclusion, with the singer's death from poisoned whiskey, the moment is both tragic and squalid. --Sam Sutherland

About the Author

Alan Greenberg has worked with such renowned film directors as Werner Herzog and Bernardo Bertolucci, and has written ten screenplays including Picasso for Warner Brothers and Dance Me Outside for Norman Jewison. His first film, Land of Look Behind, won the top prize at the Chicago International Film Festival, and has been hailed as one of the foremost documentaries of the 1980s. Love in Vain will be directed by Greenberg.

Product Details

• Paperback: 274 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; 1St Edition edition (March 21, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030680557X
• ISBN-13: 978-0306805578
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #689,338 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #19 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Composers & Musicians > Rhythm & Blues

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars When will someone turn this into a movie?, January 5, 2000

By 

Garry Heald (Melbourne Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love In Vain: A Vision Of Robert Johnson (Paperback)

It's a long way from the Mississippi Delta to Australia but this screenplay allowed me to visualise and feel the passion and raw edge to the music and landscape of Robert Johnson. It seems a shame that no Director has been brave enough to attempt to put this tale onto film as it could surely be an outstanding work if properly attacked. The comprehensive attached notes provide the reader with an opportunity to fill in any gaps in their knowledge to the point where one can almost picture the juke joints with their duelling musicians. The brutality of life in this community was shocking to me and the early death of Robert Johnson now seems to be less of a tragedy and more of an inevitability.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A neglected American masterpiece about a great fallen angel., June 19, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Love In Vain: A Vision Of Robert Johnson (Paperback)

First released by Doubleday fifteen years ago, this humble trade paperback is as fine a literary
work as any published in our time. This neglected
American masterpiece about the great--and greatly
mysterious--fallen angel, 1930s blues genius Robert Johnson of Mississippi, is about to be transformed into a cinematic classic as well, directed by Martin Scorsese.

"This might be the best movie you'll see all
year--even if it's inside your head."
--Entertainment Weekly

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Groundbreaking Book, October 27, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Love In Vain: A Vision Of Robert Johnson (Paperback)

I never read anything like this before--it was like watching an amazing movie in written form. This unique book is an undiscovered gem.