When some people die, it’s as if an entire world goes with them. That was certainly the case for Mrs. Annye C. Anderson, of Amherst, Massachusetts, who passed away in July at the age of 99. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1926, Mrs. Anderson’s first job was cutting weeds in a cotton field. “As a child, I wanted to chop cotton,” she once told me, laughing, shaking her head in disbelief. Back then, she was Annie Spencer. Her mother had worked cotton all her life, but she didn’t want that life for Annie, so she brought the girl across the Mississippi River to get a taste of an Arkansas plantation. That day, Annie held her own, keeping up with the other weeders. More importantly, she learned her mother’s lesson.
“I never went back,” Mrs. Anderson told me. “That was the end of that.”
Thus began the multi-career trajectory of this fiercely independent woman. Wholly original, she carved a path of her own through the varied thickets of our recent American century.
“I’ve been a short order cook; I’ve been a dishwasher,” Mrs. Anderson said back in 2020. “I’ve been a sales person door-to-door.” As a teenager, after her mother and father died, she worked as a maid for the Gerber family, of baby food fame (“Mrs. Gerber was as nice to me as any person ever has been. But she was racist as hell”). Later, the young Ms. Spencer left Memphis on her own and moved to Washington D.C., where she took typing classes and went to business school. As a secretary, she worked for at least a half-dozen government agencies: the Air Force; the Commerce Department; the Census Bureau; the Library of Congress.
In D.C., Ms. Spencer met her future husband, Hugh Anderson, a scientist and musician. They had two daughters, Hughia and Sheila. In her 30s, after obtaining her GED, Mrs. Anderson earned her bachelor’s degree from the D.C. Teacher’s College. The family moved to New England, where she worked as a classroom teacher and guidance counselor. Later she was an administrator for Boston schools. Mrs. Anderson was also an avid record collector, and she attended concerts all over the Northeast.
Mrs. Anderson’s younger daughter, Sheila Anderson, is in her 70s now. She spent the last couple years tending to her mother, who had a stroke in 2023 and suffered from aphasia. Sheila still remembers the year her mother moved out to join her in the Pioneer Valley. Mrs. Anderson had just gotten divorced from Sheila and Hughia’s father. She was 62.
“My sister and I thought she was old,” Sheila said, smiling in disbelief. “We were trying to get her into assisted living, because we wanted her to be taken care of. I mean, what were we thinking?”
In fact, Mrs. Anderson had yet to hit her prime.
If you knew Mrs. Anderson during her decades living in Amherst, it will likely have been by that name: Mrs. Anderson. “I’m not accustomed to first names,” she often said. “Mrs. Anderson will do just fine.” And she returned the formality, dignifying everyone around her (I was always “Mr. James”).
Or, you might have known Mrs. Anderson simply as “the Garlic Lady,” since — by the time she was in her late-60s — she’d become a farmer, growing crops on a number of plots around the Pioneer Valley. She sold her own gooseberries and currants at regional farmers markets, along with greens like purslane and callaloo. She developed her own brand of barbecue sauce, based on recipes from her childhood, and sold it as far as Boston and New York. But garlic was her specialty. She cultivated over 50 different varieties.
“I’m partial to the German,” she said. “I like the strong garlic.”
It was during these years that I first met Mrs. Anderson. My wife and I were running Tuesday Market in Northampton. In her mid-80s by that time, Mrs. Anderson would pull up in her brown sedan, bushels of garlic stuffed into every last centimeter of the back seat. I was immensely fond of her. I’d often help her set up her tables and tent.
One day, at the end of market, leaning against the brick wall of Thornes, Mrs. Anderson looked at me and said, “Mr. James, have I ever told you that I’m stepsister to the late blues musician, Robert Johnson?”
I laughed. “You mean the Robert Johnson?”
“You’ve heard of him,” she said.
Yeah, I’d heard of him. I’d grown up with “King of the Delta Blues Singers” in my dad’s record collection. And I’d grown up, too, steeped in the mythology of Robert Johnson, the hard-living man of the Mississippi Delta, who’d sold his soul to the devil to learn to play the guitar. So how did I take the news that I was standing next to what had to be the last-living kin of this legendary figure?
Reader, I’m ashamed to say it: I doubted her.
If I’d had any character, I would have expressed that doubt to Mrs. Anderson’s face. Or, better, if I’d allowed myself to get curious, I would have asked her a century’s-worth of questions. Instead, I listened to her telling me about the book she was trying to write, and then we moved on to other business.
It was a few years later when Mrs. Anderson called me on the phone and told me she had a book she wanted me to see. It was called “Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson.” I looked it up online, and there she was, author and stepsister. Was I embarrassed at my former skepticism? Yes. Had this 90-something-year-old woman put me in my place? Absolutely. But mostly I was in awe that she’d pulled it off.
“I talked about it for years,” Mrs. Anderson later told me. “Everybody knew about that book I’ve talked about, and I thought it would never exist.”
Here’s how the book did come to exist. One day, Mrs. Anderson’s daughter, Hughia, found a book called “The Chitlin’ Circuit” at the Hadley Barnes & Noble. It was by a music writer named Preston Lauterbach. When Mrs. Anderson saw the white face in the author’s photo, she said, “Well, what does he know about the chitlin circuit?” But she kept reading, and she was impressed. “I must have read half of it that night,” Mrs. Anderson said. “I called my daughter up. I had to find that author.”
Mr. Lauterbach was notified by his agent that a woman claiming to be the stepsister of Robert Johnson wanted to speak to him.
“The first syllable that I heard come out of her mouth,” Mr. Lauterbach told me recently, “I could hear the Memphis in her voice.” He was immediately hooked. “I knew she was the real deal.”
Mr. Lauterbach (I can’t stop with the “Mr.” and the “Mrs.”; I know she’s up there listening) conducted extensive interviews with Mrs. Anderson. They traveled together to Memphis, visiting the house she’d grown up in, where Robert Johnson often stayed (the house was derelict at the time of their visit; it’s since been torn down). Mrs. Anderson told Mr. Lauterbach about learning the “buck dance” from her older brother, and about listening to him sing from their sister’s neighboring porch, because her own mother wouldn’t allow blues to be played in her home.
“Brother Robert” is a goldmine of intimate, never-before-heard stories about a man that most people had relegated to the realm of shadowy myth. Perhaps more significantly, it’s a record of a feisty girl’s life in 1930s Memphis, as she grew up listening to the music and the voices of that incomparable, floor-shaking decade.
As it happens, “Brother Robert” is also a severe incrimination of a music industry intent on making every last buck off the work and the legacy of Black musicians. In the book, Mrs. Anderson recounts the sordid details of how her half-sisters, Sister Carrie and Sister Bessie (they were Robert’s half-sisters, too) were connived by two white producers into signing over the rights to photos and documents that connected their family to Johnson. Those producers, Steve LaVere and Mack McCormick, were in competition with one another, both trying to release the definitive album from Robert Johnson, whose songs by then were being covered by bands as big as Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. LaVere eventually got wealthy off of the royalties from Johnson’s recordings. The musician’s family got peanuts.
Shortly after its publication, the imminent music critic Greil Marcus praised “Brother Robert” in an article called “The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It” for the New York Review of Books, acknowledging that Mrs. Anderson had turned a half-century worth of Johnson scholarship on its head. She was 94 years old at the time.
One reader of “Brother Robert” was Amherst-based musician and ethnomusicologist Tim Eriksen. He already knew Mrs. Anderson from her garlic, but now he reached out directly, and they became fast friends.
“We had little dates,” Mr. Eriksen said. “We joked about how, you know, Erickson and Anderson, two Scandinavians, like our little dog-and-pony show.”
Mr. Eriksen helped arrange speaking events and book signings for Mrs. Anderson at the Drake, Bombyx, Dartmouth College and other venues. “She would read, I would ask her largely rhetorical questions, the audience would gasp,” Mr. Eriksen said. “Every time she opened her mouth to say something about history, you’d kind of have to reorient. Like wait, what decade are we talking about?”
Mr. Lauterbach, too — when chatting with Mrs. Anderson — often got a similar, multi-century kick.
“Her father was born 1866, the year after emancipation,” Mr. Lauterbach said. “So you could say that her personal history covers the entirety of emancipation for Black people in this country, and runs the full spectrum of having experienced violence, exploitation, the struggle of work and compensation that Black people have had to go through. You name it, she’s lived it all.”
After her 2023 stroke, but before she passed, Mrs. Anderson finally won a major victory in the family’s 50-year struggle to recover the photos and documents swindled from them by Mack McCormick. After years of legal wrangling, the Smithsonian — which now had the items in its possession — flew representatives up to Amherst to place the documents in Mrs. Anderson’s hands.
It tells you everything about Mrs. Anderson that — after she died, and according to her wishes — Sheila donated the items back to the Smithsonian for posterity.
“The material is safely tucked away,” Sheila said, and it will remain so, she added, until the Trump administration makes its intentions clear in regard to the display of African American history at the Smithsonian.
“My mother is truly the one who worked on getting the documents returned,” Sheila said. “Right now, I’m re-reading my mom’s book, and it hurts me to my heart that my Aunt Carrie and Aunt Bessie died impoverished.”
Mrs. Anderson, too, was often bitter about all of this brutal business, but she also had a philosopher’s touch to her, and a sensitive ear for the melancholy, life-giving music of the blues and country singers who started it all.
“The blues sets the tone for all American music,” she said to me one time. Then she gave her familiar, short hmmph and peered at me shrewdly.
“That will be in my next book,” she said.
Ben James is an independent writer and reporter based in Northampton. His work can be found at www.benjabirdy.com. He teaches journalism at Northfield Mount Hermon high school.