Biography of a Phantom was drafted by one of these Lévi-Strausses in Levi Strauss, Robert "Mack" McCormick. The son of two lab technicians, McCormick was a high-school dropout and erstwhile forger who became a self-made blues archivist. He was the Luddite who pulled the plug on Bob Dylan when he was rehearsing his electric set for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival; McCormick’s other contribution to the festival was to present a gang of ex-convicts who had never performed together.
Between 1969 and 1975, McCormick researched Johnson’s life by driving around the Delta and asking questions. He located Johnson’s two sisters and his son Claud. He identified where Johnson grew up, on the Abbay and Leatherman plantation, near Tunica and Robinsonville, Mississippi. He discovered Johnson’s "rosebud," the source of his fatal taste for romancing with married women, in his falling-out with his stepfather. He interviewed every musician who knew Johnson and two eyewitnesses to Johnson’s death.
Only the killing of Christopher Marlowe in a "reckoning" in a London tavern has attracted so much speculation. Johnson was staying with a musician called Tush Hog near the Star of the West plantation and playing in a "party house" run by a man named "Smokey" Hamber. An eyewitness told McCormick that Johnson, who had ignored warnings from the male companion of the woman he was flirting with, was mid-performance when "he stood up all of a sudden, grabbed his belly and said ‘I’m poisoned,’ and then fell over." Johnson lingered for between one and three weeks in Tush Hog’s house, was taken to Greenwood and back to see a doctor, then died, according to the death certificate that McCormick found, on August 16, 1938.
McCormick agonized over his manuscript, feuded with rival researchers, suffered paranoid torments, acted like he owned Johnson’s story and music, never finished his book, and died in 2015. John W. Troutman of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has cleaned it up and published it. McCormick’s findings have already been incorporated into books by Peter Guralnick (Searching For Robert Johnson, 1998) and Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow (Up Jumped The Devil, 2019). Still, Biography of a Phantom is worth reading. It tells how McCormick set out to replace a legend with the quotidian facts of biography, but it also shows how these facts instead came to refurbish the legend. McCormick mythologizes his zigzagging around the Delta in the quasi-hardboiled style of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965):