IN THE PETER Blake painting that adorns the new Eric Clapton CD, Me and Mr. Johnson – a personalized tribute to early-20th-century Delta blues singer Robert Johnson – there is one Clapton and two Johnsons. The first Johnson is a small, framed close-up portrait based on the '30s dime-store photograph that for decades was the only image of Johnson in circulation. The second is based on a more formal studio shot that surfaced in 1990 for a box set: Johnson in a dark suit, white dress shirt, and striped tie cradling his acoustic guitar.

Clapton is dressed to match this Johnson. Save for Johnson's white handkerchief and tilted fedora, Clapton presents himself as Johnson's inverted racial double: a distorted reflection? a crossbred clone? This isn't Me and Mr. Johnson at all, but me as Mr. Johnson, Mr. Johnson as me – blackface without the black face. Greil Marcus saw this coming when he wrote about Clapton's Johnson obsession in 1975's Mystery Train: "after years of practice and imitation, Johnson's sound was Clapton's sound: there was no easy way to separate the two men, or any need to."

Yet there is a need, an urgent one, to separate them because they are, after all, separate – different people with unequal roles in the racial drama of American musical history that over and over again finds white musicians profiting from the black musicians who inspire them (even Elton John had to point this out as black singers started vanishing from American Idol). As beautifully as Marcus argues for Johnson as "a failed, orphan Puritan," Johnson was still born black and broke in the post-reconstruction South; his "Me and the Devil Blues" is about the devil for sure, but the one right here on earth.

Not to mention that Johnson has been Claptonized against his will. He never had any say about becoming one with a white rock singer who fell in love with his music and subsequently built a career transforming its sensibilities. Clapton has been merging with Johnson since the '60s, but Me and Mr. Johnson is his final push at making himself a musical synonym, from the music inside (Clapton doing 14 of Johnson's songs) to the matching poses and outfits on the cover.

The two Johnson images Clapton sits next to echo the two ways Johnson has been remembered since he was murdered by a jealous husband in 1938. As Elijah Wald notes in his just published reevaluation of Johnson's legacy, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, the well-dressed Johnson is the savvy blues performer who took in the best of Delta styles and exported them northward. This isn't the Johnson of money-making myth. That Johnson is the Johnson in the smaller portrait: bleary-eyed, whiskey drunk, and wild, a mysterious blues primitive who sold his soul to the devil to play better guitar. White blues fans love, and need, this image of Johnson so much that, alongside historians, critics, and record execs, they've all but reinvented him to fit it, projecting (to borrow a Wald phrase) their "own dream movie of the blues life" onto his memory.

Clapton's "dream movie" stars Johnson as the pure, commercially untainted bluesman, an ambassador of authentic Southern blackness. In the CD's liner notes Clapton praises Johnson for not being "dressed up for a shop window somewhere," and in the new issue of Tracks he talks of preferring Johnson to Big Bill Broonzy because Broonzy played to white audiences. It's an odd revelation from someone who in the '60s used Johnson to help solidify the blues as a white market, Johnson's authentic blackness the very thing that would end up making him popular with the same white audiences as Broonzy.

This is a big part of Wald's point in Escaping the Delta, that the Robert Johnson we know best today isn't "real" at all but a mythical figure packaged and imagined at the hands of white romance. Indeed, Johnson is the unwitting poster boy for how the blues – the music and worldview born of the failures of freedom in the Jim Crow South – became "the blues," a white mythology of folksy blackness that's perfect for heartfelt voice-overs and PBS pledge drives.

We should be thankful then that Me and Mr. Johnson isn't Clapton's jungle cruise into the Delta past or, for that matter, his Buena Vista Social Club homage to a dying world. The songs aren't Johnson imitations. There's no tinny hiss, no bids for sonic nostalgia. This is Clapton at his slick VH1 best, a skilled mass-market blues translator whose technical competence trumps, as it always has, any unstudied connection to feeling.

The real Johnson never appears here (not a single photographic reprint or audio sample), but the real Clapton does. In a loose promo card included in the CD packaging, a photo of Clapton as Johnson is printed below an ad for his Web site. On the back, there are instructions on how to get a discount on Clapton T-shirts and key chains. The true story of Me and Mr. Johnson, then, is the true story of pop music: how black commodities sell white ones, how myths become money.