His record label titled the boxed set of vintage R&B songs “Syl Johnson: The Complete Mythology,” which is a fitting title, though its subject professes not to understand why.
You know this because you asked the veteran singer: Do you think of yourself as a myth?
“What do you mean?” Johnson shoots back during an interview at last weekend’s Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, Mass.
Well, the title includes the word “mythology,” after all.
“I don’t know,” Johnson says, turning to his manager, who also happens to work for the label. “Why did you call it ‘The Complete Mythology?’”
Now on the spot, his manager, Michael Slaboch, carefully phrases a response.
“It’s a complex question, but one of the big things as we started doing the project was we had four different birth dates for you, Syl,” Slaboch says. “At one point you were like, ‘Willie Mitchell [of Hi Records] gave me that birth date.’ Your stories kept changing over time.”
Johnson chuckles and looks delighted behind bulky sunglasses, which he keeps on over his regular spectacles for the duration of the conversation in a dressing room tucked away in the converted mill complex of Mass MoCA.
Why shouldn’t he be delighted? Now 74 (depending on which birth date you believe), Johnson is in the midst of a revival. He’s one of those singers who was a star in his day and has been largely and unfortunately overlooked since.
The day in question was the ’60s and ’70s, when he established the so-called Chicago sound on a string of R&B hits for the Twinight and Hi labels, including 1967′s “Come On Sock It To Me” and 1969′s “Is It Because I’m Black?”
Relegated to the blues-festival circuit — and extensively sampled by rappers — in the ’90s, Johnson’s resurgence is due in part to the boxed set released last year by the Chicago archival label Numero Group and to riotous old-school performances like the one he gave at Solid Sound, where he was asked to play by Wilco, the rock band that organized the festival.
Two of his songs also appear in the new HBO baseball documentary “The Curious Case of Curt Flood,” and he says Alicia Keys is recording a song based on a sample of one of his tunes.
“She paid quite well, too,” Johnson says. After a moment, he continues, “She’s good. She’s grown in the past few years. When she first come out, she was a kid, but now she’s really good. She’s one of my favorites.”
Johnson doesn’t feel as warmly about other artists who have sampled his music, though his performance at Solid Sound — where he wore a bright red suit with white pinstripes — did include an interpolation of the Wu-Tang Clan song “Shame on a Nigga” in the midst of his own “Different Strokes,” which Wu-Tang sampled.
“Do you know how many rappers I’m getting ready to sue?” he asks. “Eighty-five. What the hell. I might as well.”
When it’s suggested that all those samples are a tribute of sorts to his influence, Johnson snorts.
“Well, yeah, but this is my sound, my style,” he says. “You’ve got to pay me for using my sound and my style. I don’t need your tribute. I can work my own music. I can work; I can gig. I go out and gig with three pieces. Two pieces. You use my music and have a hit, pay me.”
Although such samples has made money for Johnson, he says the rappers have benefited more from the quality of his music than he has from the resulting paycheck.
“I made money in the day; don’t ever kid yourself,” he says. “R&B singers made top dollar. They — well, I paid my taxes, but most of them didn’t pay taxes until Reagan came along and started getting after them. They’d go to the South, man, and come back with pockets like this, pockets stacked with cash dollars. Blues didn’t make money. R&B singers made money. They were drunks, they were drug addicts and they were womanizers.”
How did Johnson steer clear of all that?
“Because I’m smart,” he says, launching into a digressive comparison of Smokey Robinson, who took care of his health, and the Temptations, who did not.
“Man, if you went on tour with the Temptations, you’d better hope you were staying in another hotel,” Johnson says. “I was in their backup band for a while. They just partied all night. Said, ‘When are you going to sleep?’ They partied all night after the show and into the next day, and now they hit 60, and they die. Whiskey and women and drugs kill them off. So I was smart; I wouldn’t do it.”
Johnson says he learned to sing by mimicking birds when he was 6 and working in the cotton fields of Mississippi with an older sister. He started a solo career in 1959, after stints playing with Elmore James and Jimmy Reed, among others.
Yet blues didn’t call to him the way R&B did, even though R&B meant navigating the fickle byways of pop currency by sticking to the hits. In fact, there are songs on his albums that Johnson has never performed live.
“Nobody wanted to hear it if it wasn’t a hit, especially black folk,” Johnson says. “They like, ‘What you singing?’ You had to sing your hit or pick up one of the hits from one of the other singers, Johnny Taylor or somebody, if you didn’t have enough hits. But they don’t want to hear you singing a song that they don’t know nothing about.
“I came up the hard way: Blacks are critics! They don’t like nothing,” he continues. “You had to wear the chitlin Jheri and be sharp and clean every night. You didn’t wear no blue jeans on stage then, boy; you better be dressed.”
As the conversation draws to a close — Johnson is overdue to mingle and sign autographs for festival-goers — he gives a sly hint that maybe he understands this mythology business after all.
“I didn’t tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” he says. “But I gave you enough of it.”
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