"...a mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime - birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death - in unbroken accord simultaneously with the requirements of this world and the rapture of participation in a manner of being beyond time." -
Joseph Campbell

Richard Leo Johnson is writing the history of the development of American music in the 20th Century. Pivoting on unlikely heroes including a brain-damaged hobo who abandoned his wife and family and a guitar playing small engine mechanic who can never escape the arms of his own family, Johnson’s music history is not only idiosyncratic but completely bogus. Johnson’s seminal musicians and their vaguely familiar songs are fully creatures of Johnson’s vivid and detailed imagination. In truth, Johnson isn’t really writing a history, it’s more of a mythology. His characters are attempts to explain his music. Who Knew Charlie Shoe? is his second album naming a fictional musician as the source of the songs. Even with only two albums in what might be an unending series, these characters, Charlie and the hero of The Legend of Vernon McAlister, interact with and influence each other, creating a dramatic sense of depth to the insight they provide into Johnson’s inspiration. Johnson, who has never completely accepted his talent for playing guitar, is blatantly exploring himself. His first two characters, the tragic Vernon McAlister wandering the south with a “blues-free” steel-bodied National guitar, and the innocent Charlie Shoe hiding his genius in a shed behind his parents’ rural home are both aspects of Johnson’s own personality.
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