ROBERT JOHNSON (1911-1938): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, singer, songwriter, and ensemble leader

  SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR:  KOFI  NATAMBU

  SPRING, 2016

  VOLUME TWO           NUMBER THREE

WAYNE SHORTER

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of: 
 
LEO SMITH  
March 26-April 1
 
AHMAD JAMAL  
April 2-8
 
DIONNE WARWICK  
April 9-15
 
LEE MORGAN  
April 16-22
 
BILL DIXON
April 23-29
 
SAM COOKE  
April 30-May 6
 
MUHAL RICHARD ABRAMS
May 7-13
 
BILLY HARPER
May 14-20
 
SISTER ROSETTA THARPE  
May 21-27
 
QUINCY JONES
 May 28-June 3
 
BESSIE SMITH  
June 4-10
 
ROBERT JOHNSON 
June 11-17



http://www.allmusic.com/artist/robert-johnson-mn0000832288/biography

Robert Johnson
(1911-1938)

Artist Biography by Cub Koda

 

If the blues has a truly mythic figure, one whose story hangs over the music the way a Charlie Parker does over jazz or a Hank Williams does over country, it's Robert Johnson, certainly the most celebrated figure in the history of the blues. Of course, his legend is immensely fortified by the fact that Johnson also left behind a small legacy of recordings that are considered the emotional apex of the music itself. These recordings have not only entered the realm of blues standards ("Love in Vain," "Crossroads," "Sweet Home Chicago," "Stop Breaking Down"), but were adapted by rock & roll artists as diverse as the Rolling Stones, Steve Miller, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton. While there are historical naysayers who would be more comfortable downplaying his skills and achievements (most of whom have never made a convincing case as where the source of his apocalyptic visions emanates from), Robert Johnson remains a potent force to be reckoned with. As a singer, a composer, and as a guitarist of considerable skills, he produced some of the genre's best music and the ultimate blues legend to deal with. Doomed, haunted, driven by demons, a tormented genius dead at an early age, all of these add up to making him a character of mythology who -- if he hadn't actually existed -- would have to be created by some biographer's overactive romantic imagination. 

The legend of his life -- which by now, even folks who don't know anything about the blues can cite to you chapter and verse -- goes something like this: Robert Johnson was a young black man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi. Branded with a burning desire to become great blues musician, he was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery's plantation at midnight. There he was met by a large black man (the Devil) who took the guitar from Johnson, tuned it, and handed it back to him. Within less than a year's time, in exchange for his everlasting soul, Robert Johnson became the king of the Delta blues singers, able to play, sing, and create the greatest blues anyone had ever heard. 

As success came with live performances and phonograph recordings, Johnson remained tormented, constantly haunted by nightmares of hellhounds on his trail, his pain and mental anguish finding release only in the writing and performing of his music. Just as he was to be brought to Carnegie Hall to perform in John Hammond's first Spirituals to Swing concert, the news had come from Mississippi; Robert Johnson was dead, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend while playing a jook joint. Those who were there swear he was last seen alive foaming at the mouth, crawling around on all fours, hissing and snapping at onlookers like a mad dog. His dying words (either spoken or written on a piece of scrap paper) were, "I pray that my redeemer will come and take me from my grave." He was buried in a pine box in an unmarked grave, his deal with the Devil at an end. 

Of course, Johnson's influences in the real world were far more disparate than the legend suggests, no matter how many times it's been retold or embellished. As a teenage plantation worker, Johnson fooled with a harmonica a little bit, but seemingly had no major musical skills to speak of. Every attempt to sit in with local titans of the stature of Son House, Charley Patton, Willie Brown, and others brought howls of derision from the older bluesmen. Son House: "We'd all play for the Saturday night balls, and there'd be this little boy hanging around. That was Robert Johnson. He blew a harmonica then, and he was pretty good at that, but he wanted to play a guitar. He'd sit at our feet and play during the breaks and such another racket you'd never heard." He married young and left Robinsonville, wandering the Delta and using Hazelhurst as base, determined to become a full-time professional musician after his first wife died during childbirth. Johnson returned to Robinsonville a few years later and he encountered House and Willie Brown at a juke joint in Banks, MS; according to House, "When he finished all our mouths were standing open. I said, 'Well, ain't that fast! He's gone now!'" To a man, there was only one explanation as how Johnson had gotten that good, that fast; he had sold his soul to the Devil. 

But Johnson's skills were acquired in a far more conventional manner, born more of a concentrated Christian work ethic than a Faustian bargain with old Scratch. He idolized the Delta recording star Lonnie Johnson -- sometimes introducing himself to newcomers as "Robert Lonnie, one of the Johnson brothers" -- and the music of Scrapper Blackwell, Skip James, and Kokomo Arnold were all inspirational elements that he drew his unique style from. His slide style certainly came from hours of watching local stars like Charley Patton and Son House, among others. Perhaps the biggest influence, however, came from an unrecorded bluesman named Ike Zinneman. We'll never really know what Zinneman's music sounded like (we do know from various reports that he liked to practice late at night in the local graveyard, sitting on tombstones while he strummed away) or how much of his personal muse he imparted to Johnson, if any. What is known is that after a year or so under Zinneman's tutelage, Johnson returned with an encyclopedic knowledge of his instrument, an ability to sing and play in a multiplicity of styles, and a very carefully worked-out approach to song construction, keeping his original lyrics with him in a personal digest. As an itinerant musician, playing at country suppers as well as on the street, his audience demanded someone who could play and sing everything from blues pieces to the pop and hillbilly tunes of the day. Johnson's talents could cover all of that and more. His most enduring contribution, the boogie bass line played on the bottom strings of the guitar (adapted from piano players), has become part-and-parcel of the sound most people associate with down-home blues. It is a sound so very much of a part of the music's fabric that the listener cannot imagine the styles of Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, Eddie Taylor, Lightnin' Slim, Hound Dog Taylor, or a hundred lesser lights existing without that essential component part. As his playing partner Johnny Shines put it, "Some of the things that Robert did with the guitar affected the way everybody played. He'd do rundowns and turnbacks. He'd do repeats. None of this was being done. In the early '30s, boogie on the guitar was rare, something to be heard. Because of Robert, people learned to complement theirselves, carrying their own bass as their own lead with this one instrument." While his music can certainly be put in context as part of a definable tradition, what he did with it and where he took it was another matter entirely. 

Although Robert Johnson never recorded near as much as Lonnie Johnson, Charley Patton, or Blind Lemon Jefferson, he certainly traveled more than all of them put together. After his first recordings came out and "Terraplane Blues" became his signature tune (a so-called "race" record selling over three or four-thousand copies back in the early to mid-'30s was considered a hit), Johnson hit the road, playing anywhere and everywhere he could. Instilled with a seemingly unquenchable desire to experience new places and things, his wandering nature took him up and down the Delta and as far a field as St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit (where he performed over the radio on the Elder Moten Hour), places Son House and Charley Patton had only seen in the movies, if that. But the end came at a Saturday-night dance at a juke joint in Three Forks, MS, in August of 1938. Playing with Honeyboy Edwards and Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), Johnson was given a jug of moonshine whiskey laced with either poison or lye, presumably by the husband of a woman the singer had made advances toward. He continued playing into the night until he was too sick to continue, then brought back to a boarding house in Greenwood, some 15 miles away. He lay sick for several days, successfully sweating the poison out of his system, but caught pneumonia as a result and died on August 16th. The legend was just beginning. 

In the mid-'60s, Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues Singers, the first compilation of Johnson's music and one of the earliest collections of pure country blues. Rife with liner notes full of romantic speculation, little in the way of hard information and a painting standing for a picture, this for years was the world's sole introduction to the music and the legend, doing much to promote both. A second volume -- collecting up the other master takes and issuing a few of the alternates -- was released in the '70s, giving fans a first-hand listen to music that had been only circulated through bootleg tapes and albums or cover versions by English rock stars. Finally in 1990 -- after years of litigation -- a complete two-CD box set was released with every scrap of Johnson material known to exist plus the holy grail of the blues; the publishing of the only two known photographs of the man himself. Columbia's parent company, Sony, was hoping that sales would maybe hit 20,000. The box set went on to sell over a million units, the first blues recordings ever to do so.

In the intervening years since the release of the box set, Johnson's name and likeness has become a cottage growth merchandising industry. Posters, postcards, t-shirts, guitar picks, strings, straps, and polishing cloths -- all bearing either his likeness or signature (taken from his second marriage certificate) -- have become available, making him the ultimate blues commodity with his image being reproduced for profit far more than any contemporary bluesman, dead or alive. Although the man himself (and his contemporaries) could never have imagined it in a million years, the music and the legend both live on. 


https://rockhall.com/inductees/robert-johnson/bio/

Biography
Robert Johnson 
guitar, vocals
born May 8, 1911, died August 13, 1938

ROBERT JOHNSON

Robert Johnson stands at the crossroads of American music, much as a popular folk legend has it he once stood at Mississippi crossroads and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar-playing prowess. He became the first modern bluesman, evolving the country blues of the Mississippi Delta. Johnson was a songwriter of searing depth and a guitar player with a commanding ability that inspired no less an admirer than Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones to exclaim, “When I first heard [him], I was hearing two guitars, and it took me a long time to realize he was actually doing it all by himself.”

Born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in 1911, Johnson was ill-suited for sharecropping and gravitated instead toward the itinerant life of the musician. He picked up the guitar in his teens and numbered among his tutors such esteemed blues figures as Charley Patton and Son House. During the Depression years of the early Thirties, Johnson lit out with his guitar and earned his keep as an entertainer - not only as a master of the blues but of the popular tunes and styles of the day. His travels took him throughout the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas, where he performed at juke joints, country suppers and levee camps. He also saw the big cities, traveling with fellow bluesman Johnny Shines to perform in St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere. The entirety of his recorded output was cut in three days worth of sessions in November 1936 and two days in June 1937. His life came to a premature end when he was poisoned by the jealous husband of a woman he began seeing during a stint at the Three Forks juke joint in Greenwood, Mississippi. The poisoning occurred on the night of August 13, 1938, and Johnson died three nights later at the home of a friend.

Though he recorded only 29 songs in his brief career - 24 of which appeared on 78 rpm singles released on the Vocalion label, including his first and most popular, “Terraplane Blues” - Johnson nonetheless altered the course of American music. In the words of biographer Stephen C. LaVere, “Robert Johnson is the most influential bluesman of all time and the person most responsible for the shape popular music has taken in the last five decades.” Such classics as “Cross Road Blues,” “Love In Vain” and “Sweet Home Chicago” are the bedrock upon which modern blues and rock and roll were built.

In an eloquent testimonial included in the liner notes to the box set Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings (Columbia Records, 1990), disciple Eric Clapton said, “Robert Johnson to me is the most important blues musician who ever lived....I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson. His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice.


http://www.biography.com/people/robert-johnson-9356324

Robert Johnson Biography

Guitarist, Songwriter, Singer (1911–1938)

Musician Robert Johnson is best known as one of the greatest blues performers of all time, a recognition that came largely after his death at age 27.

Synopsis

 

Robert Johnson is considered to be one of the greatest blues performers of all time. His hits include "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" and "Sweet Home Chicago," which has become a blues standard. Part of his mythology is a story of how he gained his musical talents by making a bargain with the devil. He died at age 27 as the suspected victim of a deliberate poisoning.

Career Highlights 

Musician Robert Johnson was born on May 8, 1911, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. A singer and guitarist, Johnson is considered to be one of the greatest blues performers of all time. But this recognition came to him largely after his death.

During his brief career, Johnson traveled around, playing wherever he could. The acclaim for Johnson's work is based on the 29 songs that he wrote and recorded in Dallas and San Antonio from 1936 to 1937. These include "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" and "Sweet Home Chicago," which has become a blues standard. His songs have been recorded by Muddy Waters, Elmore James, the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton.

Mass Appeal

 

Johnson came to the attention of many musicians and won over new fans with a reissue of his work in the 1960s. Another retrospective collection of his recordings released in the 1990s sold millions of copies.

But much of Johnson's life is shrouded in mystery. Part of the lasting mythology around him is a story of how he gained his musical talents by making a bargain with the devil: Son House, a famed blues musician and a contemporary of Johnson, claimed after Johnson achieved fame that the musician had previously been a decent harmonica player, but a terrible guitarist—that is, until Johnson disappeared for a few weeks in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Legend has it that Johnson took his guitar to the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61, where he made a deal with the devil, who retuned his guitar in exchange for his soul.

Strangely enough, Johnson returned with an impressive technique and, eventually, gained renown as a master of the blues. While his reported "deal with the devil" may be unlikely, it is true that Johnson died at an early age. 

 

Death and Legacy

Only 27, Johnson died on August 16, 1938, as the suspected victim of a deliberate poisoning. Several movies and documentaries have tried to shed light on this enigmatic blues legend, including Can't You Hear the Wind Howl? (1997) and Hellhounds on my Trail (2000).


Robert Johnson stamp (Photo: via The Robert Johnson Blues Foundation)


http://www.npr.org/2011/05/07/136063911/robert-johnson-at-100-still-dispelling-myths

Robert Johnson At 100, Still Dispelling Myths

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May 6, 20116:13 PM ET

Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday

by Joel Rose 

One of the two known photos of Robert Johnson. This portrait was taken by the Hooks Bros. Photography Company in Memphis, Tenn., circa 1935. Courtesy of the Delta Haze Corporation 

 

Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert Johnson. Although he recorded just 29 songs, the bluesman had a huge influence on guitarists such as Eric Clapton and Keith Richards. Johnson is one of the most studied of all country blues musicians, and he's been the subject of many books, films and essays. But the mythology surrounding his life just won't go away.

If you know anything about Johnson, chances are it's the story that he sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for his musical talent. That legend reached a mainstream audience with the 1986 movie Crossroads, starring Joe Seneca and Ralph Macchio.

But according to folklorist Barry Lee Pearson, it didn't happen.

"The popular mythology has him as a total loner," Pearson says, "and kind of lived this life in regret as a repayment for his alleged sin of making a contract with Old Scratch."

Pearson, a professor at the University of Maryland and the co-author of the book Robert Johnson: Lost and Found, says none of it is true. In the absence of any real biographical information, Pearson says early blues writers got a little carried away.

"Everybody was so anxious to make this devil story true that they've been working on finding little details that can corroborate it," he says.

All Songs Considered Blog 

You've Never Heard Robert Johnson's 'Complete Recordings'?!

Here is what we do know about Robert Johnson. He said he was born in Mississippi on May 8, 1911, and grew up on a plantation in the Delta. As a young man, he was more interested in music than farming: He'd hound the older blues musicians for a chance to play. In an interview included in the 1997 documentary Can't You Hear the Wind Howl, Son House recalls that the young Johnson would annoy audiences with his lousy guitar playing.

"Folks they come and say, 'Why don't you go out and make that boy put that thing down? He running us crazy,' " House said. "Finally he left. He run off from his mother and father, and went over in Arkansas some place or other."

When Johnson came back from Arkansas six months later, he'd mastered the guitar. That's where the rumors about his deal with the devil came from, but Johnson acknowledged studying with a human teacher while he was gone. After that, Johnson worked as a traveling musician, playing on street corners and in juke joints, mostly in Mississippi. And in 1936, he got a chance to record in Texas.

"Terraplane Blues" was a minor hit, and he was invited back for a second recording session. Johnson died a year later at age 27, under mysterious circumstances. Some think he was poisoned, although a note on the back of his death certificate says the cause was syphilis.

In any case, the timing was tragic. Legendary Columbia Records talent scout John Hammond wanted to book Johnson at Carnegie Hall for the landmark "Spirituals to Swing" concert in 1938. Hammond was also the driving force behind the first LP reissue of Johnson's music in 1961. At the time, Johnson was so obscure that Columbia didn't even have a picture of him to put on the cover. The LP was produced by Frank Driggs, who also wrote the liner notes.
"If you read the liner notes," Driggs says, "you see next to nothing. 'Cause I just created a thing out of whole cloth when I wrote the notes. Because there really was very little known about the guy."


Up Against The Wall


That LP, King of the Delta Blues Singers, introduced Johnson's music to a new generation of young, mainly white blues fans, including Eric Clapton, as the rock legend told NPR in 2004.

"It was on Columbia and it had, like, some pretty interesting sleeve notes on it about the fact that these were the only sides he had cut, and that they'd done it in a hotel room, and when he was auditioning for the sessions that he was so shy, he had to play facing into the corner of the room," Clapton says. "I mean, I immediately identified with that, because I was paralyzed with shyness as a kid."
But there may be another reason why Johnson recorded facing the wall. Elijah Wald is a musician and the author of the book Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. He says there were pre-war blues musicians who played guitar better than Johnson, as well as musicians who sang better. But Wald says that, unlike most of them, Johnson learned to play from listening to radio and records.

"Robert Johnson certainly was very conscious of what a hit record sounded like," Wald says. "If you listen to something like 'Come on in My Kitchen,' he's singing very quietly, and he actually has a moment when he says, 'Can't you hear the wind blowin'.' He whispers it and then plays this very quiet riff. That never would have worked on a street corner or a Mississippi juke joint, but it sounds great on records."
Sound is one of the main things that distinguishes Johnson's sides from other records of the time. By facing the wall, Wald says Johnson might have made his vocals sound better to a later generation accustomed to high fidelity. It doesn't hurt that the original masters of his recordings survived, too. But what really set Johnson apart from his peers was all of the mythology that grew up around him, especially the part about the devil. Many of Johnson's friends, including Johnny Shines in Can't You Hear the Wind Howl, dismissed it as false.

"No," Shimes says, "he never told me that lie. If he would've, I would've called him a liar right to his face. You have no control over your soul. How you gonna do anything with your soul?"

But the myth about Johnson persists, in part because it helps sell records. Steve Berkowitz is a producer at Sony Legacy, which is reissuing Johnson's music again, this time in a new centennial edition.

"That was always the heart and soul of the marketing plan," Berkowitz says. "We always knew the music was great. But a guy sells his soul to the devil at midnight down at the crossroads, comes back and plays the hell out of the guitar, and then he dies. I mean, it's a spectacular story."

And there wouldn't be any harm in that, Wald says, except that the legend tends to overshadow the real Robert Johnson.

"To just say that he went to the crossroads in the dead of night, first of all means we're not getting what happened. And second of all, it's kind of insulting," Wald says. "It's kind of implying that, unlike us who do this serious work to understand music, these old black blues guys just went and sold their soul to the devil."

If it were really that easy, Wald says, the devil would own the souls of every teenage boy and girl in America.

Featured Artist

Robert Johnson

• Robert Johnson And Pablo Casals' Game-Changers Turn 75
• Robert Johnson At 100, Still Dispelling Myths
• You've Never Heard Robert Johnson's 'Complete Recordings'?!

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2008/11/johnson200811

Portrait of a Phantom

Searching for Robert Johnson

In the seven decades since his mysterious death, bluesman Robert Johnson’s legend has grown—the tragically short life, the “crossroads” tale of supernatural talent, the genuine gift that inspired Dylan, Clapton, and other greats—but his image remains elusive: only two photos of Johnson have ever been seen by the public. In 2005, on eBay, guitar maven Zeke Schein thought he’d found a third. Schein’s quest to authenticate the picture only led to more questions, both about Johnson himself and about who controls his valuable legacy.

by Frank DiGiacomo

October 1, 2008

VANITY FAIR

In June 2005, Steven “Zeke” Schein was killing time on his home computer when he logged on to eBay and typed “old guitar” into the auction site’s search engine. Classically trained as a guitarist, Schein had turned his longtime passion for the instrument into a profession when, in 1989, he had joined the sales force at Matt Umanov Guitars, in Manhattan’s West Village. In the more than 15 years that Schein had worked there, he had cultivated a regular clientele that included Patti Smith, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, and record producers Daniel Lanois and John Leventhal; he had also sold guitars to Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp, among other celebrities. His job had also exposed him to the painstaking, detail-oriented detective work that often goes into identifying and authenticating vintage guitars. Even when the make, model, and serial number of an instrument are apparent, pinpointing its age and value sometimes requires scrutinizing the idiosyncrasies of its construction. The design of the instrument’s tailpiece, its headstock, the number of frets embedded in its neck, its paint job or finish—all could be identifying factors.

The photograph bought on eBay by Zeke Schein, who believes it depicts Robert Johnson, left, and fellow bluesman Johnny Shines. © 2007 Claud Johnson.

Schein enjoyed this aspect of the business, and when he had nothing better to do, he would sometimes log on to eBay to test his knowledge against the sellers who were advertising vintage guitars on the Web site. At the very least, he found it amusing that some people had no idea what they were selling.

As he pored over the mass of texts and thumbnail photos that the eBay search engine had pulled up on that day in 2005, one strangely worded listing caught Schein’s eye. It read, “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B.B. King???” He clicked on the link, then took in the sepia-toned image that opened on his monitor. Two young black men stared back at Schein from what seemed to be another time. They stood against a plain backdrop wearing snazzy suits, hats, and self-conscious smiles. The man on the left held a guitar stiffly against his lean frame.

Neither man looked like B. B. King, but as Schein studied the figure with the guitar, noticing in particular the extraordinary length of his fingers and the way his left eye seemed narrower and out of sync with his right, it occurred to him that he had stumbled across something significant and rare.

If there was one thing that Schein was as passionate about as guitars, it was the blues, particularly the Delta blues, that acoustic, guitar-driven form of country blues that started in the Mississippi Delta and thrived on records from the late 1920s to almost 1940. Not long after he’d begun working at Matt Umanov, Schein’s customers and co-workers had turned him on to this powerful music form, and, once hooked, he had studied the genre—its music and its history—with the same obsessive attention to detail that he brought to his work. And the longer Schein looked at the photograph on his computer monitor, the more convinced he became that it depicted one of the most mysterious and mythologized blues artists produced by the Delta: the guitarist, singer, and songwriter whom Eric Clapton once anointed “the most important blues musician who ever lived.”

That’s not B. B. King, Schein said to himself. Because it’s Robert Johnson.

If his hunch was correct, he’d made quite a find. Johnson is the Delta-blues guitarist who on one dark Mississippi night “went to the crossroad,” as he wrote in one of his most famous songs, to barter his soul to the Devil for otherworldly talent. At least that’s how the legend that’s become ingrained in popular culture has it. (In the song, “Cross Road Blues,” Johnson is actually pleading with God for mercy, not bargaining with the Devil.) A short life, a death under murky circumstances, and a body of recorded work consisting of but 29 songs only added to that legend. So did the preternatural quality of his guitar playing, the bone-deep sadness of some of his music and lyrics, the haunting quaver of his smooth, high voice, and the dark symbolism of his songs. In some respects, you could say that Johnson is the James Dean of the blues, an artist whose tragically foreshortened life and small if brilliant body of work make him a figure of great romantic allure. This was especially true in the 60s and early 70s, when little was known about Johnson, and his music was being taken up by the likes of Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. By the early 1990s, 50 years after his death, he was a platinum-selling artist, and since then he has influenced a whole new generation of guitar players, among them John Mayer and Jack White.

Defiant and Haunted

While popular culture loves a mystery, its most obsessive fans abhor a vacuum; thus there are vast archives of bootleg album outtakes and Ph.D. dissertations on forgotten record labels. The lives of poor, itinerant black musicians in the rural South of the late 1920s and 30s aren’t the most well-documented of lives, but over the past 35 years, blues researchers and historians have done a pretty good job of revealing the man behind the Johnson myth, from his birth in Hazlehurst, Mississippi (May 8, 1911, is often cited as Johnson’s birth date, though his birth certificate has yet to be found), to his death, which probably occurred in the Baptist Town section of Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1938. According to Elijah Wald’s 2004 book, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, there is currently more information available about Johnson “than about almost any of the bigger blues stars of his day.” Still, in the field of Johnson research, attempting to separate fact from fiction from politics can be maddening. As Wald writes, “So much research has been done [on Johnson] that I have to assume the overall picture is fairly accurate. Still, this picture has been pieced together from so many tattered and flimsy scraps that almost any one of them must to some extent be taken on faith.”

The biggest hole in this patchwork is the one thing that would establish Johnson’s humanity in a society hooked on visual media: photographs. In the years since he died, only two known photographs of Johnson have ever been seen by the public. The first of those images is believed to have been taken in the early 1930s and has been described as Johnson’s “photo-booth self-portrait.” The size of a postage stamp, it provided the public its first real glimpse of Johnson when it was published, more than a dozen years after it was found, in Rolling Stone magazine in 1986, the year that Johnson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the photo, Johnson, wearing a button-down shirt with thin suspenders and holding a guitar, stares at the lens with eyes that look both defiant and haunted. A cigarette dangles from his lips, and although the guitar is only partially visible, his long left-hand fingers can be seen forming an indeterminate chord on the guitar’s neck.

If the photo-booth shot was a low-budget affair, the second image had production values. Taken by Hooks Bros., a photographic studio located in Memphis, it shows Johnson once again holding his guitar as he sits cross-legged on what appears to be a tapestry-covered stool. But this time, the bluesman is resplendent in a pin-striped suit, a striped tie, shiny dress shoes, and a narrow-brimmed fedora cocked over his right eye. He is smiling in the photo, but his eyes make him look like a deer caught in the headlights.

The Hooks Bros. photo was first widely seen in 1990, when it was featured on the cover of Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, the two-CD boxed set issued by Columbia Records that collected what, at the time, was Johnson’s entire surviving canon. The set sold more than a million copies, establishing Johnson as the biggest-selling pre-war blues artist of all time.

Schein had bought the boxed set about a year after it came out and had spent numerous hours immersing himself in the music and studying Johnson’s life story. The crossroads legend held little magic for him. After all, Schein dealt with professional musicians every day and knew plenty of talented guitarists and songwriters who toiled in obscurity or struggled for recognition, and even some who had died just as their careers were taking off. For Schein, Johnson’s appeal wasn’t any aura of mystery but rather his humanness. Born illegitimate, Johnson had lived a life freighted with alienation and misfortune. In 1930 he lost his first wife and their baby in childbirth, and yet, in the wake of this tragedy, Johnson managed to become a guitar virtuoso who still influences musicians today. He was “one guy with a guitar standing to [make] his peace,” Schein says. As far as he was concerned, Johnson’s story needed no embellishment.

With the eBay photo still on his computer monitor, Schein dug up his copy of the Johnson boxed set and took another look. Not only was he more confident than ever that he had found a photo of Robert Johnson, he had a hunch who the other man in the photo was, too: Johnny Shines, a respected Delta-blues artist in his own right, and one of the handful of musicians who, in the early 1930s and again in the months before Johnson’s death, had traveled with him from town to town to look for gigs or stand on busy street corners and engage in a competitive practice known as “cuttin’ heads,” whereby one blues musician tries to draw away the crowd (and their money) gathered around another musician by standing on a nearby corner and outplaying him.

Shines had died in 1992. His picture was included in the boxed-set booklet, and Schein saw a resemblance; if both of his hunches were right, then the photo was even more of a find. At that point, Schein became possessed of two thoughts: One was “to hold the photo in my hands,” he says. The other was “to protect it.”

Because the image had just recently been listed, by a New York–based antiques dealer, bidding was still at a reasonable $25, but Schein guessed that the ending bid was going to be many times that initial figure. He had just sold a beautiful 1920s Stella acoustic guitar—a favorite among the old country-blues musicians—and when he added together the money he’d gotten for that and some extra cash on hand, he came up with a budget of $3,100. If someone spends more than that, he figured, the bidder will also know it’s a photo of Robert Johnson, so it will be protected.

A co-worker of Schein’s set up a computer “snipe” program that automatically bid on the picture up to the specified limit, and Schein held his breath. Approximately $2,200 later, he held the photo in his hands. What had he gotten for his money? An extremely fragile, three-inch-by-four-inch photo that bore no identifying marks that could be traced to a photographer’s studio, no date stamp that could establish when the picture had been taken, no provenance whatsoever save for a note from the seller saying he’d purchased the photo in Atlanta. Schein was still convinced that he had found and purchased a photo of Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines. The question was, could he convince anyone else? And, if he could, would he then be able to navigate the complicated and treacherous legal minefield surrounding Johnson’s lucrative and much disputed estate?

The Right to Play the Blues

The story of Robert Johnson is usually presented as a Faustian bargain, but it is really a tale of possession. Johnson was the product of an affair his mother, Julia Dodds, had with a plantation worker. Johnson had unusually long fingers and a bad left eye (that has been attributed to a cataract), and by the time he had recorded his canon, he had earned the right to sing and play the blues.

His youth was spent moving between homes in Memphis and Robinsonville, Mississippi, 30 miles south of Memphis, where he lived with his mother and her second husband on a plantation. There he was known for his interest in guitar and his reluctance to work the fields.

It was in the aftermath of his wife’s and child’s deaths—Johnson was approximately 19 at the time—that his musical education is believed to have begun in earnest. In 1930 the ferocious blues singer Son House had moved to Robinsonville to begin a fruitful musical partnership with the guitar ace Willie Brown, and Johnson became a regular presence at their performances, although the two elder bluesmen perceived him as a nuisance. House’s recollection of Johnson—as told to folklorist Julius Lester in 1965—was of a “little boy” who would commandeer either his or Brown’s guitar during their breaks and irritate the audience with his marginal skills. Perhaps Johnson sensed, too, that he was not ready for the stage, because around this time he moved back to the Hazlehurst area, his birthplace, where he began an apprenticeship with a blues guitarist named Ike Zimmerman (the spelling of his name is disputed) which would transform Johnson into the virtuoso he is known as today.

That Robert Johnson is remembered as a guitarist who could play almost any song after hearing it just once on the radio; a singer whose repertoire, like those of most itinerant bluesmen, included numbers made famous by Bing Crosby, Irish standards, and even polkas, in addition to his own songs; a performer whose travels took him as far north as New York City and even Canada in search of an audience; and an artist who could move an audience to tears and then disappear into the crowd as if he had never played at all.

Clearly, Johnson was a man of some ambition, and in November of 1936 he traveled to San Antonio, Texas, for the first of two recording sessions for the American Record Corporation. Once in the makeshift studio, he played facing a corner, with his back to the technicians and other musicians who had come to record, a move that has been variously interpreted as shyness, an attempt to prevent other guitarists from seeing his unusual playing style, or a street-savvy technique for getting the most sound out of his acoustic guitar. Whatever the case, Johnson recorded approximately 16 songs over three days, most of them in two or three takes. One of those tunes, “Terraplane Blues,” a double-entendre-laden number, was issued as a 78-r.p.m. single on the Vocalion label and became a modest regional hit, selling approximately 5,000 copies. As a result, Johnson was invited back to Texas, this time, in June 1937, to Dallas, where he recorded another 13 tracks, but no more hits.

A little more than a year later, Johnson would be dead—and probably destined for obscurity had his music not already gotten the attention of a record producer who would exert a huge impact on popular music in the 20th century. By the time John H. Hammond Jr. came across Johnson’s records, he had persuaded Benny Goodman to integrate his band, discovered a young Billie Holiday in Harlem, and recorded Count Basie, but he was just getting started. As a talent scout for Columbia Records in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Hammond would discover Aretha Franklin and sign Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan to the label.

Hammond’s role in Johnson’s legacy is pivotal. He first championed Johnson in print in 1937 when, writing under a pseudonym for the left-wing publication New Masses, he asserted that “Johnson makes Leadbelly look like an accomplished poseur.” Then, in 1938, Hammond sought to feature Johnson in a concert he was producing at Carnegie Hall that December called “From Spirituals to Swing.” He sent an emissary into the South to track down Johnson and bring him back to New York. But as the day of the show approached, Hammond learned that Johnson was dead—possibly murdered. On the night of the concert, Big Bill Broonzy took Johnson’s place, but Hammond memorialized the late Delta artist by playing two recordings of his songs for the Carnegie Hall audience.

More than 20 years later, Hammond would expose Johnson’s music to a whole new generation of listeners. Columbia now controlled Johnson’s recordings, and in 1961, Hammond oversaw the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers, the first album-length collection of Johnson’s music, which helped spark a blues revival in America. According to the album’s producer, Frank Driggs, it sold approximately 10,000 copies upon its initial release—impressive for an obscure, dead, vernacular performer.

“The Music Almost Repelled Me”

Not long before the album became available to the public, Hammond had given a young Bob Dylan an early acetate copy of the LP. Near the end of his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan recounts the rather intense effect King of the Delta Blues Singers had on him. If he hadn’t heard the album at such an early, formative stage in his career, Dylan writes, “there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn’t have felt free or upraised enough to write.”

King of the Delta Blues Singers had an arguably larger impact across the Atlantic in Britain, where a new generation of rock ’n’ rollers were learning their chops and finding their influences. One of them was a shy, alienated teenager named Eric Clapton, who was given the Johnson album by one of his early bandmates. “At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play,” Clapton writes in his recently published memoir, Clapton: The Autobiography.
 
The chance of this music’s having such an immediate and visceral effect on an aspiring rock star today is, frankly, pretty slim. To ears accustomed to modern, computer-generated effects that can make almost anyone sound like a guitar god or a vocal powerhouse, Johnson’s music can sound thin and primitive at first spin, even though it’s remarkably complex and polished for its time. As Clapton explains in his autobiography, Johnson employed a fingerpicking style that had him “simultaneously playing a disjointed bass line on the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings, and lead on the treble strings while singing at the same time.” Occasionally, Johnson worked in some bottle-slide playing, too, which involves placing a small glass bottle or sleeve over the left pinkie, then sliding it up and down the guitar’s neck to create the pitch-bending wail that is a signature of the blues. Even accomplished guitarists can have a hard time re-creating Johnson’s sound, let alone mastering it. Says Dave Rubin, an author for the music publisher Hal Leonard Corporation who led the team of musicians who transcribed Johnson’s songs for the guitar instructional Robert Johnson: The New Transcriptions, “When you get to ‘Crossroads’ and ‘Preachin’ Blues’—oh my God, forget it. It sounds like three guys playing.”

Johnson’s guitar chops were just one part of the equation, however. For a blues singer, he was more of a crooner than a croaker, and his voice sometimes had a quaver that could sound haunted or seductive. There was also an urgency to Johnson’s singing that made him sound “like he’s about five minutes away from the electric chair,” Driggs says. Lyrics such as “She got a mortgage on my body now, a lien on my soul,” from “Traveling Riverside Blues,” could also have a devastating poetic economy. In Chronicles, Dylan recounts writing Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper to examine their structure and finding “big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction—themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease.” (Dylan could have been talking about himself.) He doesn’t put much stock in criticism that is often leveled at the blues artist: that Johnson’s work is derivative. In Chronicles, Dylan plays King of the Delta Blues Singers for his friend Dave Van Ronk, the respected folksinger known as the Mayor of MacDougal Street, but Van Ronk mostly hears a musician mimicking his predecessors. “He didn’t think Johnson was very original. I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite. I thought Johnson was as original as could be, didn’t think him or his songs could be compared to anything.”

The “photo-booth self-portrait” of Johnson, believed to have been taken in the early 1930s. It is one of only two known photos of Johnson that have been made public. From the Granger Collection, New York.

What Dylan understands about Johnson is that, while his influences are easily divined, in all but a few cases, every guitar lick, vocal technique, or lyrical flourish that he borrows or steals he makes his own. For example, Rubin explains, while Johnnie Temple’s “Lead Pencil Blues” was the first recorded example of the “cut boogie pattern”—the chugging, trainlike guitar line that’s a staple of basic rock ’n’ roll—it’s Johnson’s harder, more propulsive version, found, for example, on “Sweet Home Chicago,” that other guitarists began to adopt, from Elmore James to Chuck Berry and beyond.

“To me, he was the synthesis of his generation,” says blues guitarist and singer-songwriter John P. Hammond, whose father was the John Hammond who signed Dylan and oversaw the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers. Hammond fils discovered Robert Johnson independently of his father, in the late 1950s, when he heard one of the bluesman’s songs on a Folkways album compilation. “He was my inspiration to want to play,” Hammond says of Johnson. Hammond joined a number of artists in the 60s who were influenced by Johnson, covering his music on their albums or in their concerts, or both. The Rolling Stones reworked Johnson’s “Love in Vain” for their now classic 1969 album Let It Bleed (although they credited the writer as “Woody Payne,” presumably to avoid copyright problems), and that same year Led Zeppelin’s second album included “The Lemon Song,” a track that owed much to Howlin’ Wolf but also took part of its lyrics—“You can squeeze my lemon ’til the juice run down my leg”—from Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues.”

And then there was Clapton. Initially taken aback by the intensity of Johnson’s work, he writes in his autobiography that, after letting the record get under his skin, “I realized that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man’s example would be my life’s work.” In 1966, with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, he recorded Johnson’s “Ramblin’ on My Mind,” and then, in 1968, with the band Cream, he worked up an electrified and modified take on Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” called “Crossroads” that became one of his signature hits. But only after recording his 2004 homage to the blues musician, Me and Mr. Johnson, and filming a companion DVD, Sessions for Robert J, was Clapton left with the sense that “my debt to Robert was paid.”
 

As interest in Johnson’s music was rekindled, curiosity about the man grew. When King of the Delta Blues Singers was released, in 1961, Johnson’s life was almost a complete mystery, save for the lurid bit of information included in the album’s liner notes that he had been murdered, “poisoned by a jealous woman.” But as Columbia’s Johnson release helped spark new interest in the blues artists of the 20s and 30s, field researchers and journalists began to comb the South in search of clues to the lives musicians led. Johnson “was the toughest case to crack,” says blues researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow, author of Chasin’ That Devil Music and the first person to track down an actual document pertaining to the blues musician: Johnson’s death certificate, which Wardlow found in 1968. The record indicated that Johnson died at the age of 26 on August 16, 1938—the same month and day that would claim Elvis Presley in 1977—although it is believed today that Johnson was actually 27. The document lists no cause of death, but years later someone checked the back of Johnson’s death certificate and discovered notes that suggest the owner of the plantation where Johnson died believed syphilis was the cause. It is one of the niggling details that fly in the face of what has become the generally accepted story of Johnson’s death: that he was somehow slipped poisoned whiskey after a juke-joint owner who had hired Johnson to play at his establishment discovered that the blues musician was keeping time with the owner’s wife. Some researchers suspect that Johnson may have survived the poisoning, only to succumb to pneumonia that attacked his weakened immune system.

But one aspect of Johnson’s life remained stubbornly concealed. In 1971, Columbia released a second volume of King of the Delta Blues Singers, and its cover featured an artist’s rendering of Johnson at his first recording session, playing his guitar while facing the corner of a room. As on the first album, the features of his face were barely discernible for good reason: no one yet knew what Johnson looked like. But that was about to change. And with it would begin a new and disputed chapter in Johnson’s story.

In 1972 a Smithsonian field researcher named Robert “Mack” McCormick, who had been on the blues musician’s trail for more than a decade, located Johnson’s two half-sisters and came away with not only photos of Johnson and members of his family but, reportedly, first publication rights as well. McCormick, who had a reputation as an inspired researcher and an excellent writer, had gone as far as to travel to Mississippi on the Rolling Store, a bus that had been converted into a canteen for sharecroppers—and, in a 1976 Rolling Stone piece, he told writer Peter Guralnick that he had even tracked down and interviewed Johnson’s killer.

McCormick intended to write about this and other revelations in a book about Johnson that he had tentatively titled Biography of a Phantom. Presumably, it was where the first published picture of Johnson would appear as well. But Guralnick’s Rolling Stone piece reported on another man on Johnson’s trail who had come up with his own trove of historical gold and would use it to steal McCormick’s thunder and essentially take control of Robert Johnson’s image and music. A year or so after McCormick had located Johnson’s kin, a record collector and researcher named Steve LaVere, the son of the late jazz pianist and vocalist Charles LaVere, tracked down one of the half-sisters, Carrie Thompson, in Maryland, and hit the jackpot. (Thompson and Johnson were both the children of Julia Dodds but by different fathers.) Since McCormick had come and gone, Thompson had found two more photos of Johnson, the Hooks Bros. photo and the photo-booth self-portrait, and in 1974 she permitted LaVere to make copies of them. Under the assumption that she was Johnson’s next of kin—the second half-sister had reportedly died by then, though Johnson’s mother and other half-siblings were still alive—she also signed an agreement that transferred to LaVere “her right, title and interest, including all common law and statutory copyrights” to the two photographs, as well as a handwritten note Johnson had purportedly composed on his deathbed and, most important, all musical works and recordings of Robert Johnson.

The deal also gave LaVere first right of refusal for any subsequent Johnson-related photos or documents that might be found, and, more crucially, appointed him as Thompson’s agent “for the purpose of collecting royalties in connection with any and all works of Robert L. Johnson” and authorized him “to use whatever means at his disposal to make such collections.” In return, he would split any royalties generated 50-50 with Thompson.

Contract in hand, LaVere went to Columbia Records with an idea to produce an anthology of Robert Johnson’s complete recordings. According to a 1991 piece by Robert Gordon in L.A. Weekly, Frank Driggs, the producer who had worked on both of the King of the Delta Blues Singers releases, was already planning just such a project for Columbia, but John Hammond père added Steve LaVere as a co-producer. In addition, Gordon reported, Hammond, a friend of Charles LaVere’s, signed away the copyrights to Johnson’s music, which Columbia Records may not have even owned. (If Johnson ever signed a contract with American Record Corporation, it has yet to be located, but chances are that, by the 70s, the copyrights to his recordings had expired and his music had entered the public domain.) Driggs told Gordon, “LaVere got a deal such as nobody I’ve ever heard of getting in the history of the business.”

It appeared that all rights to the blues artist who had possessed the Hammonds, Clapton, Jagger, Richards, Plant, Page, and Dylan were now in the possession of Steve LaVere.

When Mack McCormick heard about LaVere’s deal, he contacted Columbia and notified the label that his agreement with Johnson’s half-sisters preceded LaVere’s. Columbia put the anthology on hold for 15 years, during which time vinyl LPs gave way to plastic CDs. In 1990, Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings was finally released. LaVere was listed as a producer, and the biographical essay published in the boxed set’s accompanying booklet carried his byline. Mack McCormick was not involved at all. The Complete Recordings went gold, rekindling interest in Johnson yet again. It put a nice chunk of change in LaVere’s pocket, and it also cemented his status as the gatekeeper to all things Robert Johnson. In that role he soon became known for litigious ways. He sued or threatened to sue bands and artists, and their representatives—including, successfully, ABKO Music, former record label of the Rolling Stones—who had covered Robert Johnson songs and, he alleged, not paid proper royalties. When the cartoonist Robert Crumb drew a vivid homage to Johnson, based on the photo-booth self-portrait, and then had it reproduced on T-shirts and, later, silkscreen prints, LaVere threatened legal action. Initially, Crumb says, “I wrote back a letter that said, ‘Fuck you. It’s my drawing and I’ll do what I want with it.’ ” But faced with the prospect of an expensive legal battle, he eventually settled with LaVere. “If I ever want to use that drawing commercially again,” Crumb says, “he gets part of the action.”

In the late 90s, LaVere also sued McCormick—unsuccessfully—in an attempt to gain possession of the photographs that the Texas researcher had been given by Carrie Thompson. One of the images is of Johnson. It is believed to be another shot taken during the Hooks Bros. studio session, but has yet to be seen by the public. One of the few people who have seen it is Guralnick, who wrote about it in his 1989 book, Searching for Robert Johnson. In the photo, Johnson is joined by a man in a sailor’s uniform—his nephew, who was in the navy (and, according to a comment attributed to Carrie Thompson, was the owner of the pin-striped suit Johnson is wearing). The whereabouts of this photo are currently unknown, and McCormick’s Biography of a Phantom was never published. McCormick did not respond to my requests for an interview, but in a 2002 profile by Michael Hall in Texas Monthly, McCormick revealed that he suffers from crippling “manic-depressive illness,” and that he had abandoned his Johnson book. “It ain’t happening anymore,” he told Hall. “I lost interest.” But a source who has had contact with Mack McCormick in the last two years told me, “One of the reasons McCormick’s Johnson book has never seen the light of day, I think, is that he seems scared of litigation from a notoriously litigious guy like Steve LaVere.”

Dealing with the legacy of Robert Johnson had become a particularly brutal game of cuttin’ heads, and Steve LaVere seemed to be the man holding the sharpest scythe.
Younger than His Years

When I first encounter Zeke Schein, almost two years have passed since he purchased the photo. I hear about him through a friend, a lawyer who has represented me in business dealings. Schein is also a client, and, one afternoon when he is on break, we meet outside Matt Umanov and head to an Italian espresso joint a few storefronts away. After telling me that his legal name is Steven, but that “no one” ever calls him that, Schein places an 8-by-10 blowup of the photo on the table in front of me. The first thing I notice is the repeating pattern of warning bars that have been superimposed horizontally across the image. One reads, this image is copyrighted. The other, unauthorized use is prohibited by law. The next is that the faces peering back at me beneath wide-brim hats appear remarkably young, but the figure holding the guitar does resemble Johnson, and his fingers are long. I remember a description of the blues artist as looking younger than his years.

Schein peers at me from beneath his own hat—a retro-looking stingy-brim that rides low on his head. Lanky, appropriately pale, and dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans, with a strand of Tibetan sandalwood mala beads wrapped several times around his left wrist, he looks as though he could be a rock band’s roadie or a member of Jack Kerouac’s entourage. He recounts how he came to acquire the photo, then points at it and says, “What I can confirm is that the guitar itself—and I feel very comfortable saying this—is a Chicago-made guitar from the mid-30s.”

I study the picture. The instrument is shrouded in darkness. It is possible to make out a fancy tailpiece down by the bridge and the dots on the fretboard, but the insignia on the headstock is blurred, and the arm of the man who’s supposed to be Johnson is covering the sound hole. Plus, my gaze keeps being drawn to those long, long fingers.

“You can tell that?” I ask him.

“I’ve looked at thousands of these,” he says, and explains that, actually, the guitar was probably a prop. There are no strings on it, and it is missing all but one of its tuning pegs. But, he tells me, it is probably a guitar made in the mid-1930s by the Chicago-based Harmony Company. “That guitar, with 12 frets to a body like that, with that specific tailpiece, it’s screaming 1935 to me,” he says. “I just can’t find out more about it. It’s driving me crazy. The decal on the headstock is slightly blurred.” And then he adds with a laconic smile, “It fits in perfectly with the Robert Johnson enigma.”

In the two years since he acquired the image, Schein explains, he has quietly been trying to research it and, if possible, find someone who can tell him definitively that he has a photo of Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines. “I don’t want to put it out there and have people be disappointed that it’s not real,” he says.

So far, he has come up with one good lead. While scouring the Internet for anything he could find on Johnson, Schein ran across a Web site that the filmmaker Peter Meyer had set up in conjunction with his Johnson documentary, Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? On the site, Schein learned a bit of heartening trivia: according to an interview Johnny Shines gave before his death, a photo of him and Robert Johnson had been taken by a woman named Johnnie Mae Crowder in Hughes, Arkansas, in 1937 and later published in a local newspaper.

Schein tells me that after acquiring the photo he began showing it to a small number of trusted friends and clients, seeking their opinion—John Hammond is “sure” the photo depicts Johnson—and advice on how to go about getting the image authenticated.

Schein also showed the image to a collector of blues records and memorabilia named John Tefteller, who has scored a number of significant finds in recent years. In 2005, Tefteller, who’s based in Grants Pass, Oregon, had purchased a large cache of original advertising materials produced for the long-defunct jazz-and-blues label Paramount Records, and it had yielded the first full body shot of Charley Patton, who is considered the father of the Delta blues. Tefteller says he saw Schein’s photo for only a few minutes, “at a diner” during a stopover in New York, but what he saw was enough to persuade him to make a trip down to Hughes, Arkansas, in search of Johnnie Mae Crowder, the woman who Shines said had taken the photo of him and Johnson. Tefteller found a 1918 birth certificate for someone with that name, but he also found a death record. Johnnie Mae Crowder had died in 1940, not long after Robert Johnson, and, Tefteller says, though he looked he could find no evidence that Crowder had left behind any family. He had hit a dead end.

Schein wasn’t having any better luck. In May 2006, he learned that two veteran Delta bluesmen, David “Honeyboy” Edwards and Robert Lockwood Jr., were playing at B. B. King’s Blues Club in Times Square. For a guy trying to establish the bona fides of a Robert Johnson picture, the show was a real opportunity. In his memoir, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, Edwards writes about witnessing a clearly ill Johnson trying to play at what would be his last show, and later, seeing him suffer greatly from what he asserts were the effects of poisoned whiskey. Lockwood, meanwhile, had learned how to play guitar from Johnson during the years that the itinerant artist lived on and off with Lockwood and his mother in Helena, Arkansas. But when Edwards’s manager allowed Schein to show his picture to the musicians—on the condition that he not prompt them with Johnson’s and Shine’s names—neither identified the men in the photo. Still, Schein wasn’t ready to give up. The bluesmen hadn’t said it wasn’t Johnson, and there was another man who might be able to help.

About four months after our first meeting, Schein agrees to let me take a copy of the picture to Mississippi to see if I can make any progress in determining whether it’s authentic or fake. I fly to Memphis and drive to Crystal Springs, Mississippi, the town a man named Claud Johnson calls home.

In 1989, a protracted and, at times, strange legal battle to determine Robert Johnson’s heir had begun in Mississippi. The proceeding was set into motion by two heirs of the bluesman’s half-sister Carrie Thompson. In 1980, she had attempted to rescind the 1974 agreement she had signed permitting Steve LaVere to make copies of the Hooks Bros. and photo-booth portraits and to profit from them. She died in 1983, but her will transferred any rights she still had to those pictures—and any money she was due from them—to her heirs, who turned to the Mississippi judicial system in hopes of gaining control of the estate and eventually recovering the Johnson photos. But after a nine-year legal scrum during which at least two other potential Johnson heirs joined the fray, and the case bounced between the Mississippi Chancery Court, the Mississippi Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court (which twice refused to hear the case), the Chancery Court ruled on October 15, 1998, that a truckdriver named Claud Johnson, who, according to his lawyer, had long heard that the blues legend was his father, was “the biological son and sole heir” of Robert Johnson; he was thus entitled to an initial inheritance of more than $1.3 million with future revenues. The court’s decision, which is irreversible because it was appealed and reaffirmed, was based not on DNA evidence but on an unusual bit of sworn testimony by the elderly Eula Mae Williams, a childhood friend of Claud Johnson’s mother, Virgie Jane Smith Cain. In what sounds more like a scene from Boston Legal than an actual court case, Williams testified that she had watched Cain and Robert Johnson having sex in a wooded area in the spring of 1931, which, nine months later, led to the birth of Claud.

In June 2000, a few days after the Mississippi Supreme Court had reaffirmed the Chancery Court’s decision, Claud gave an interview to The New York Times in which he talked about glimpsing Robert Johnson from the doorway of his grandparents’ house one day in 1937 when the blues artist showed up to visit his mother and the child he had purportedly sired. But a father-and-son reunion did not take place—Claud’s grandparents would not allow it. “They said he was working for the devil, and they wouldn’t even let me go out and touch him,” Claud told the Times. “I stood in the door, and he stood on the ground, and that is as close as I ever got to him.… I never saw him again.”

I was aware that the court’s ruling hadn’t exactly quelled skepticism in the blues world about Claud’s legitimacy, and that if Claud had indeed seen Robert Johnson at least 69 years had passed since then, but I thought that if I could get Claud to see the photo without involving his lawyers, though it might not lead to any definitive answers, it could lead somewhere interesting.

Schein, too, was curious to know what Johnson’s legal heir would make of the photo, and, after consulting with his attorney, he gave me permission to show Claud the photo, even though it carried a potential risk. According to copyright law, because Robert Johnson is no longer alive, his estate controls the right to use his image in a commercial context, which meant that although Schein owned the photograph outright he would have to seek the estate’s permission if he wanted to use the photo in such a manner. Schein had no intention of angering the estate, but there was a chance that, when I showed up on Claud Johnson’s doorstep, he would be more litigious than curious and initiate a legal tug-of-war for the photo.

Just such a skirmish is being waged over the two well-known Johnson photos that LaVere found in the 70s via a pending suit that Carrie Thompson’s heirs have filed in Mississippi Circuit Court against LaVere and Claud Johnson. In the meantime, there are indications that LaVere continues to make money off of Robert Johnson: legal documents indicate that, although LaVere’s deal as exclusive agent has been terminated, he is still splitting royalties with the Johnson estate on at least a couple of licensing deals. He’s quick to label his controversial status in the Johnson world “just so much hogwash” when I contact him. “People aren’t supposed to make money in the music business?” he asks. “Or is it just the blues that they’re not supposed to make money on?”

When I arrive at the 49-acre property where Claud Johnson lives (and where he keeps his gravel truck parked on his lawn), he isn’t home, and his son Michael, who lives next door, has to get on the phone and persuade him to come back so that I can show him the photo. He arrives sheathed in sunglasses and a straw cowboy hat, looking more like Muddy Waters than Robert Johnson. He is stockier and wider-faced than I would expect the son of lithe Robert Johnson to be, but then again, Robert Johnson never drove a gravel truck, and my mental image of him comes from a couple of photos taken long before the thickening of middle age had a chance to encroach. Though Claud is clearly uncomfortable when he shakes my hand, his grip is strong, and the gray in his sideburns and mustache is the only sign that he is a man in his 70s.

I pull the photo out of the envelope I’ve been carrying and hand it to Claud. “Well, no doubt about it,” he says after studying it for a few long seconds. “This look like before he was grown.”

Claud hands the photo back to me and walks away. When I attempt to get him to elaborate upon what he has just said, he explains that he has signed an agreement with HBO (for what I will later learn is a movie that the cable network is developing about Robert and Claud Johnson, which is being written by James L. White, the screenwriter of Ray). “If you cross a company like that, you could get yourself in a problem. And I really don’t need to get in a problem with HBO,” Johnson tells me, adding that as a result he can’t give me any further “insight” into the picture. “It may be a picture of him, but I really, I can’t really—I’m afraid, you know?” he says, sounding genuinely anguished. “Because, man, I’ll tell you—they’re still after me any way they can get at me, right now.”

I realize that Johnson is talking about the court battle that determined he was Robert Johnson’s heir, and perhaps the current legal skirmish being waged over Carrie Thompson’s photos. On the way back to my car, Michael Johnson apologizes for not being more helpful. He is wearing a T-shirt advertising the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the music and the memory of the artist, which is run by another of Claud’s sons, Steve Johnson.

“My dad just got shell-shocked by that case,” Michael tells me. “They put him through a lot of stuff. To actually prove who you is”—he switches to the second person, though he is clearly talking about his dad—“they ask you a thousand questions. Hell, they tried to scrutinize him like he wasn’t nothing, you know, man?”

“The Face Doesn’t Lie”

In late summer 2007, Schein’s attorney, John Pelosi, submitted the photograph to John Kitchens, the lawyer for the Johnson estate, to see if there was any way of authenticating it. Kitchens’s father, Jim Kitchens, had been the lead attorney in Claud Johnson’s fight to be named heir of the Johnson estate, but he had since turned the day-to-day handling of the estate over to his son, who turned 30 this year and was all of 12 when the Johnson boxed set was released. Not surprisingly, when John Kitchens saw a copy of the photo, he wasn’t exactly floored. “I didn’t know who it was,” he says. But Kitchens remembered reading about a forensic artist who, that August, had reportedly determined the identity of the sailor kissing the nurse in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous Life-magazine photo of Times Square on the day World War II ended. The artist’s name is Lois Gibson and she works for the Houston Police Department. She is also a graduate of the F.B.I. Academy Forensic Artist Course and was deemed “The World’s Most Successful Forensic Artist” in The 2005 Guinness Book of World Records because, at the time, her sketches and facial reconstructions had helped net more than 1,062 criminals.

Kitchens sent Gibson a copy of Schein’s photo, along with reproductions of the Hooks Bros. portrait and the photo-booth shot. Gibson compared the facial features in each of the three photos and reported back with a pretty startling conclusion: “My only problem with this determination is the lack of certainty about the date of the questioned photo,” she wrote in her report to Kitchens. But, she continued, if Schein’s photo “was taken about the same time as, or a little earlier than,” the photo-booth self-portrait, “it appears the individual in [Schein’s photo] is Robert Johnson. All the features are consistent if not identical.”

“If the time frame is right, it’s him,” Gibson tells me when I call her up in Houston. “The face doesn’t lie.” She also points out that if Schein’s photo does depict Johnson, he’s probably younger—possibly two to four years younger—than he appears in the photo-booth self-portrait (which would mean that Schein’s photo had been taken years before the picture Johnny Shines remembered from 1937).

Kitchens is cautiously optimistic about Gibson’s assessment. “Based on the findings, we’re going to get behind it,” he says. “It is impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that this is Robert Johnson,” he adds, pointing out that the few living souls who knew Johnson when he was alive haven’t seen him in 69 years. “But we strongly believe that it is.”

When I meet Schein at a Greenwich Village restaurant to discuss Gibson’s findings, I expect him to be ecstatic. But, actually, he seems slightly conflicted, and I soon realize why. Schein has enjoyed his long strange trip through Robert Johnson’s past and isn’t ready to let go. Although he tells me he thinks Gibson “did a wonderful job” with her analysis, he says he doesn’t agree with her findings that his photo depicts a Johnson who is younger than the man in the photo-booth shot. “I’ve been delving deep,” Schein tells me, and though he still hasn’t been able to crack the make and model of the guitar in his photo, he has come up with a theory about the chronology of the three pictures: They were, he says, all taken within a year of one another. The Hooks Bros. photo was taken first, the self-portrait second, and his photo third, which would make it the latest photo of Johnson, instead of the earliest. His reasoning for this, he explains, is that his photo comes after Johnson has recorded his 29 songs and come away with several hundred dollars, probably the most money he’d ever made. As a result, he doesn’t need to borrow a suit from his nephew, as he did in the Hooks Bros. photo. He can afford his own duds and more. “You got the money from the record deal. People recognize you. You got your own suit,” Schein says. “You’re traveling around. You’re drinking better whiskey. You’re eating better food. Guess what? You’re going to look a little better.”

It is just a theory from a man who plays guitar and works with musicians, a man who respects Robert Johnson, who knows his music, and, after studying his life, feels like he knows Johnson a bit, too—a man who wants to believe that Robert Johnson was singing the blues, but that he wasn't always living them.

Frank DiGiacomo is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

http://www.robertjohnsonbluesfoundation.org/biography/

Biography

ROBERT JOHNSON

One hundred years ago, a boy-child was born in Mississippi – a dirt-poor, African-American who would grow up, learn to sing and play the blues, and eventually achieve worldwide renown. In the decades after his death, he has become known as the King of the Delta Blues Singers, his music expanding in influence to the point that rock stars of the greatest magnitude – the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, the Allman Brothers – all sing his praise and have recorded his songs.

That boy-child was Robert Johnson, an itinerant blues singer and guitarist who lived from 1911 to 1938. He recorded 29 songs between 1936 and ‘37 for the American Record Corporation, which released eleven 78rpm records on their Vocalion label during Johnson¹s lifetime, and one after his death.

Most of these tunes have attained canonical status, and are now considered enduring anthems of the genre: “Cross Road Blues,” “Love In Vain,” “Hellhound On My Trail,” “I Believe I¹ll Dust My Broom,” “Walking Blues,” “Sweet Home Chicago.”

Like many bluesmen of his day, Johnson plied his craft on street corners and in jook joints, ever rambling and ever lonely – and writing songs that romanticized that existence. But Johnson accomplished this with such an unprecedented intensity, marrying his starkly expressive vocals with a guitar mastery, that his music has endured long after the heyday of country blues and his own short life.

Never had the hardships of the world been transformed into such a poetic height; never had the blues plumbed such an emotional depth. Johnson took the intense loneliness, terrors and tortuous lifestyle that came with being an African-American in the South during the Great Depression, and transformed that specific and very personal experience into music of universal relevance and global reach. “You want to know how good the blues can get?” Keith Richards once asked, answering his own question: “Well, this is it.” Eric Clapton put it more plainly: “I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson.”

The power of Johnson’s music has been amplified over the years by the fact that so little about him is known and what little biographical information we now have only revealed itself at an almost glacial pace. Myths surrounding his life took over: that he was a country boy turned ladies’ man; that he only achieved his uncanny musical mastery after selling his soul to the devil. Even the tragedy of his death seemed to grow to mythic proportion: being poisoned by a jealous boyfriend then taking three days to expire, even as the legendary talent scout John Hammond was searching him out to perform at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

In 1990, Sony Legacy produced and released the 2-CD box set Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings to widespread critical acclaim and, for a country blues reissue, unprecedented sales. The Complete Recordings proved the existence of a potential market for music from the deepest reaches of Sony¹s catalog, especially if buoyed by a strong story with mainstream appeal. Johnson¹s legend continues to attract an ever-widening audience, with no sign of abating. If, in today¹s world of hip-hop and heavy metal, a person knows of only one country blues artist, odds are it is Robert Johnson.

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http://modernnotion.com/robert-johnson-the-blues-genius-who-sold-his-soul-to-the-devil/


Robert Johnson: The Blues Genius Who Sold His Soul to the Devil
by Jes Greene
January 11, 2016
Modern Notion

A newly found photo has the music world buzzing with excitement. Could this be a picture of the legendary music genius Robert Johnson? Even though bands including The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and The White Strips have covered Johnson’s music, there are only two other confirmed photos of the musician in existence. But who exactly is this guy?

Though his impact on the music industry is unquestionable, we actually know very little about Robert Johnson. Of the few things we know, Johnson was born in 1911 to impoverished parents on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta. And from there, much is legend. The stories go that Johnson loved to play music but was so terrible he’d annoy anyone in the vicinity of his playing. When Johnson was a teen, he ran away to Arkansas for six months, and when he returned, was suddenly a master of the guitar. Though it’s most likely that he devoted himself to learning the intricacies of the guitar from various teachers or mentors while he was away from home, a much more alluring myth has sprung up to explain the transformation.

Legend has it that one evening after fleeing home, Johnson met the devil at the crossroads of U.S. Highways 49 and 61 in Clarksdale, Mississippi at midnight. Wanting nothing more than to have the sharpest skills possible, he traded his soul to the devil in return for musical genius on the guitar.   From that moment on, Johnson had an uncanny talent that allowed him to travel around the U.S. as an itinerant musician, playing on street corners and crummy joints. In 1936, he finally recorded an album in San Antonio and then another in Dallas the following year. In total, he recorded only 29 songs, but he laid so many of the foundations for rock ‘n’ roll as it would become.

Part of Robert Johnson’s revolutionary impact was the way he played the guitar, making it sound like he was actually playing two guitars instead of one. He did so by partially playing the driving rhythms on the guitar’s lower strings and the melodic chords on higher strings. His hallmark technique was the turnaround but he also used up-the-neck chords, chromatic movement, melodic fills between vocals and a host of others. Johnson was versatile, using both classical methods and twangy improvisations of his own in order to create the haunting sound that influenced everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Jack White. His tunings, though, continue to create the strongest fodder for debate. Because Johnson’s records were sped up when they were first released, it makes it impossible to truly analyze Johnson’s tunings and capo positions, but that doesn’t stop continued fierce debate.

During his lifetime only one of his songs, “Terraplane Blues,” caught anyone’s attention. It was only in 1961 when Johnson’s first LP was reissued that his music took flight. The driving force behind releasing the LP was John Hammond, the same talent scout who discovered Billie Holiday in the early ’30s. In 1938, Hammond sought out the genius blues player to participate in his “Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie, a show comprised of all black musicians and some of the greatest blues and jazz musicians of the time. Tragically, Johnson died right before, at the young age of 27. Unfortunately, just like so much of Johnson’s life the details of his untimely death remain mostly a mystery.

Despite Johnson’s death, Hammond didn’t forget Johnson’s talent.  As he pushed for Johnson’s music to be released over 20 years after the blues musician’s death, Hammond ensured that Johnson’s legacy live on. As that LP was played on the radio, it inspired an untold number of artists and eventually landed Robert Johnson the number five position in Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists.  Many would agree with Eric Clapton who said, “Robert Johnson to me is the most important blues musician who ever lived…I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson. His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice.”

Take a minute to listen to Johnson’s twangy blues, and see if you can spot his influence on your favorite rock ‘n’ roll artist. Pay special attention to “Cross Roads Blues,” “Sweet Home Chicago” and “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” which Rolling Stone  says are among the most popular blues songs of all time.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/01/entertainment/la-ca-robert-johnson-20110501/2

POP MUSIC

Bluesman at 100, ever at a crossroad

Decades after his death, reverence and debate still swirl around the legendary bluesman who supposedly made a deal with the devil.

May 01, 2011|Randy Lewis

CLARKSDALE, MISS. — The intersection of DeSoto and State streets here doesn't look like anything special.

On the southeast corner of the roads is H Town Custom Wheels. Across DeSoto to the west is Beer & Bud Mart, which faces a Church's Chicken stand. Immediately to the east of that are the Delta Donut shop and Abe's BBQ, the latter noting its service to residents and visitors since 1924.

Yet this is the focal point of one of the towering legends of 20th century popular music -- the original intersection of Highways 61 and 49, the place where seminal blues musician Robert Johnson is said to have arrived one midnight to seal a deal with the devil, trading his soul to become the greatest blues musician in history.

Perhaps.

Actually, there are at least three such crossroads around northern Mississippi, any of which might be the one Johnson had in mind 75 years ago when he wrote his signature song "Cross Road Blues" -- and that's only relevant to those who are remotely likely to believe in such things.

The only sign of anything out of the ordinary today at the crossing of 61 and 49 is a triangular traffic island with a tall pole atop which are three identical oversized replicas of a blue electric guitar -- not, by the way, the type of instrument Johnson played in the 1930s.

But whether his reputation was the outcome of a supernatural bargain or simply natural-born talent combined with patience and practice, Johnson remains the man most broadly considered the preeminent bluesman of all time, a reputation that grows only more solid as the 100th anniversary of his birth in Hazlehurst, Miss., approaches on May 8.

Consider that during his lifetime, his biggest-selling recording, "Terraplane Blues," sold about 5,000 copies. When the "King of the Delta Blues Singers" LP surfaced in 1961 with 16 of his songs, it sold around 20,000 copies. Since its 1990 release, a two-CD box set of all his known recordings has sold 1.5 million copies. That's despite detractors who have suggested his reputation is over-inflated.

"Robert Johnson to me is the most important blues musician who ever lived," said Eric Clapton, who helped turn a generation of rock fans on to Johnson playing an amped-up version of "Crossroads" with the English power trio Cream in 1968. "I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson. His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice."

References to the supernatural in songs such as "Cross Road Blues," "Me and the Devil Blues" and "Hell Hound on My Trail" have only enhanced the mystery surrounding Johnson's seemingly overnight transformation from a competent guitarist and singer to the music's most powerful proponent before his death at 27 from poisoning by the jealous partner of a woman.

Hundreds of musicians from the famous to the obscure have recorded his songs over the last half-century since Johnson's own recordings first surfaced in a major way. Dozens of tribute albums have been recorded, and books, plays and films have been made about his extraordinary life, much of it shrouded in uncertainty.

The question is why. Johnson was just one of hundreds of African Americans struggling to eke out a living playing music in rural Mississippi in the early part of the last century, the only alternative for many to the backbreaking labor harvesting cotton in acre after acre of fields that still cover this part of the state.

Even a partial list of the music greats who emerged from Mississippi is imposing: Muddy Waters, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, Son House, Charley Patton, Lonnie Johnson, Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, Howlin' Wolf, Robert Junior Lockwood. And then there are blues-influenced rock and R&B giants including Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke. That cultural richness is the reason the Grammy Museum just announced that it has chosen Cleveland, Miss., as the site for its first facility away from its home in Los Angeles.

Before Johnson came along, others were playing the Delta blues. Artists such as Patton, Brown and House were major influences on him. But Johnson's hauntingly expressive, high-pitched voice, the sophistication of themes and lyrics in his songs and a technical mastery of the acoustic guitar that still has musicians scratching their heads in wonder all helped elevate him above his musical predecessors, peers and descendants.

One of those peers, 96-year-old David "Honey Boy" Edwards, will take part in a major centennial tribute to Johnson and his music coming up Thursday through May 8 in Greenwood, Miss., the town of about 15,000 where he is buried.

Even that core piece of biographical information wasn't confirmed until about 10 years ago. That site is now marked with a stately tombstone at the Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church about three miles north of Greenwood.

"So many mysteries remain, some we may never resolve," pianist and music historian Ted Gioia writes in the notes accompanying "Robert Johnson: The Complete Original Masters -- Centennial Edition," released Tuesday to mark the occasion. It culls all 29 recordings and the surviving alternate takes from his only recording sessions, the first in San Antonio in 1936, the last in Dallas the following year.

Fact or fiction, it can seem everyone in this region wants a piece of the Johnson crossroad myth.

"He was poisoned at a little joint called Three Forks, which is at the crossroad of Highways 49 and 82 -- that could have been the mythical crossroad," said Paige Hunt, executive director of the Greenwood Visitors and Convention Bureau, which is coordinating the four-day Robert Johnson 100th Birthday Celebration this weekend.

Shelley Ritter, director of the Delta Blues Museum in downtown Clarksdale, notes that Living Blues magazine in 1990 identified the most likely sites as the intersection of 61 and 49 in Clarksdale or 61 and 82 in Leland.

Historian and Johnson authority Steve LaVere, the lawyer who championed his music and navigated through multiple lawsuits in recent decades to establish the rights of Johnson's son, Claud, as the legitimate heir to his estate, wants no part of such debates.

"If you want to know where he died, where he lived, where he was born, where he was poisoned -- any factual information, I'll tell you," said LaVere, who moved from Glendale, Calif., to Greenwood about 10 years ago to work on Johnson matters. "But don't ask me about that crap about the crossroad."

Besides, given the string of casinos that have opened in recent years along Highway 61, a.k.a. "the Blues Highway," between Memphis and Clarksdale, there's no shortage of real-world places to make Faustian bargains for those so inclined.

That taboo subject aside, LaVere has lost none of his passion for Johnson's music through more than four decades of work.

"If the music was second-rate, you'd say, 'What's all this fuss about?' But the music delivers," LaVere said. "The mystery and the myth and all that stuff become even more appealing when the music is something of value."

Claud Johnson's son, Steven, is a 51-year-old preacher who in 2009 started singing his grandfather's music to keep the family connection to the music alive. His Robert Johnson Grandson Band also is performing in Greenwood for the centenary festival.

"I believe the crossroad was a point in my granddad's life," he said. "In 'Drunken Hearted Man,' when I heard that song, it felt like my granddaddy was speaking to me, saying what kind of man he was, saying that if he could change his living, he would."

Johnson's posthumous fame also has sparked backlash. Some scholars have gone so far as to debunk not only the Johnson myths but his stature in the blues world.

"As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note," musician and author Elijah Wald wrote in his 2004 book, "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues."

"The fact is, from the first, all sorts of people who heard Johnson had the same experience W.C. Handy did on that (mythical?) night he describes in his autobiography when he first heard someone play the blues," said Greil Marcus, who explored Johnson's legacy in his 1975 book "Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music." "Handy -- the canniest and most ambitious black purveyor of black popular music -- couldn't believe what he heard.' And that's what people have continued to hear since."

Some have even debated the veracity of what everyone has been hearing for seven decades, suggesting the otherworldly sound of Johnson's voice and guitar are merely the result of all-too-worldly speeding up of his recordings -- a theory roundly dismissed by those with access to the original discs.

Musicians, for the most part, seem to think there's enough mystery in the music itself to obviate the need for additional mythology.

In his autobiography "Life," Rolling Stones songwriter and guitarist Keith Richards said that Johnson "took guitar playing, songwriting, delivery, to a totally different height. ... Robert Johnson was like an orchestra all by himself. Some of his best stuff is almost Bach-like in its construction."

Thematically too, Johnson "took the blues into new artistic areas in a new, self-consciously artistic mode," music journalist Peter Guralnick wrote in his 1982 book "Searching for Robert Johnson." "Where someone like Son House or Charley Patton was content to throw together a collection of relatively traditional lyrics ... Johnson intentionally developed themes in his songs; each song made a statement, both metaphorical and real. ...

"Unlike other equally eloquent blues, this is not random folk art, hit or miss, but rather carefully selected and honed detail, carefully considered and achieved effect."

Even with everything that's been said and written about Johnson over the last half century, debate and new analysis is unlikely to subside.

"Almost any interpretation you have of Robert Johnson can find some justification in the body of work he left behind -- but will still lead you to dead ends and unanswered questions," wrote Gioia. "And it is this open-endedness, this richness, his inexhaustibility of meanings that keeps drawing new listeners to Johnson long after other, more glamorous entertainers of his era have fallen from view."

Info Box

Why is Robert Johnson, above all other blues players, the preeminent figure in that bedrock form of American popular music?

"Just look at the picture of him with the acoustic guitar: His fingers are in the weirdest position. If you're a guitar player looking at that, you know this is a guy who's not even thinking; he's just there. ... The soul of his creative originality plays a huge part in music making for everyone who's ever written a song and really known what they're doing."

-- Neil Young

"He might have actually sold his soul to the devil. [Laughing] You know why? He was just an unbelievably great guitarist, a mind-blowingly great guitarist. ... He also was a great composer on the guitar. He wrote, what, 29 songs? Almost all those songs are different from one another. There's a lot of depth to it."

-- T Bone Burnett

"I think it was just more extraordinary things in such a short period of time and a skill set above and beyond. It was ridiculous how good he was at what he did. It was just like a moment, a fleeting moment of music. The fact that we're still talking about him like this ...."

-- Robbie Robertson

"I prefer to steer away from superstition and mystification of these things because, I think in a way, it cheapens it all somehow. If it's as easy as that, then anyone can do it. ... I think he was just incredibly gifted, and he found how to make the most of that."

--Eric Clapton

"You think you're getting a handle on playing the blues, and then you hear Robert Johnson -- some of the rhythms he's doing and playing and singing at the same time, you think, 'This guy must have three brains!' "--

 --Keith Richards

"The deepest, scariest, most elemental and hair-raising blues there is."

-- Bonnie Raitt

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/debra-devi/robert-johnson-and-the-my_b_1628118.html

THE BLOG
Robert Johnson and the Myth of the Illiterate Bluesman

06/28/2012

• by Debra Devi  
  Rock musician and author of The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu 
   

How often have you heard that old saw about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at midnight on a Delta crossroads? It all started because of Johnson’s uncanny mastery of the guitar. A small-boned man with long, slightly webbed fingers, Johnson earned respect and kept fights at bay with his astonishing musicianship. Johnson may have had eidetic memory for music — the ability to hear and then recall music with unusual precision.

(Robert Johnson took this self-portrait in a photo booth in the early 1930s. © 1986 Delta Haze Corporation, all rights reserved; used by permission) 

As Steve LaVere wrote in the Robert Johnson: The Complete-Recordings liner notes: “He could hear a piece just once over the radio or phonograph or from someone in person and be able to play it. He could be deep in conversation with a group of people and hear something — never stop talking — and later be able to play and sing it perfectly. It amazed some very fine musicians, and they never understood how he did it.” Guitarists are still trying to accurately suss out Johnson’s sophisticated chord voicings and unusual tunings. 

Johnson also loved to read, according to my interview with his common-law stepson, Robert Jr. Lockwood, for The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu
 

“Johnson lived with my mother [Estella Coleman] common law for about eight, nine years,” said Lockwood, who was born in 1915 in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, making him 90 when we talked in 2005. “He taught me to play. Can’t nobody play his stuff but me.” The family lived in Helena, Arkansas, and also spent time in Memphis and St. Louis, while Johnson performed throughout the Delta. 

Because of their close relationship, Robert Lockwood was nicknamed Robert Jr. He performed as Robert Jr. Lockwood his entire life, winning a posthumous Grammy in 2008 for Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen... Live in Dallas, recorded at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Festival with Henry James Townsend, Pinetop Perkins and David “Honeyboy” Edwards. 

Lockwood was sharp as a whip when we spoke, and brooked no nonsense. “What did I think about Robert Johnson?” Lockwood said, “I think he’s a nice man. All them stories about him, I don’t know about that. He never told me nothing about it.” 

Lockwood described Johnson as highly intelligent, curious and constantly seeking inspiration for songs like “Cross Road Blues” and “Stones in My Passway,” which describe hoodoo practices in detail. When I asked Lockwood where Johnson got this information, he replied, “I have to say that he done quite a bit of studying in his life. He did a lot of reading and stuff like that. Just about anything you could read, he read it. You read things and after you get through reading about it, you can sing about it.” 

Hoodoo is not Voodoo, though the two are often confused. Voodoo (properly spelled Vodou) is a New World religion derived from West African Vodun. (For more info, please see my post Possessed: Voodoo’s Origins and Influence from the Blues to Britney.) Hoodoo is a folklore system of stories, herbal medicines, and magic practices drawn from African, Native American, and European sources. Many hoodoo practitioners can recite chapter-and-verse from European occult books like The Black Pullet, Secrets of the Psalms, and The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus. 

Examples of hoodoo include mojos, foot track magic (like placing stones in someone’s passway) and divination spells to tell the future. But just because blues musicians used hoodoo imagery in their songs to wonderful effect, that doesn’t mean they believed in it. As Lockwood remarked, “I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe nobody can do nothing without my wanting them to do it.”

Pianist Henry Gray, who played in Howlin’ Wolf’s band from 1956 to 1968, expressed similar feelings to me. Gray, who grew up near Baton Rouge, recalled how people who feared they’d been hoodooed would “go across the river to a place in New Orleans called The Seven Sisters; they supposed to be able to read your palms, tell your future. I never believed in that stuff but a lot of people do, and they would go get a [mojo] hand removed or whatever they needed done.”

Gray also played with Muddy Waters in Chicago and described how transplanted Southerners like Waters and Ernest “Tabby” Thomas would work hoodoo imagery into their songs: “Well, hoodoo, that would come up in songs like ‘Hoodoo Party’ by Tabby Thomas, and Muddy used it in “Got My Mojo Working.” He was using it for a song, you know, but he really didn’t believe in it.”

Johnson never claimed to have made a pact with the devil; that boast was actually made by Tommy Johnson, known for his own intricate guitar playing on songs like “Canned Heat Blues.” According to LaVere, “the crossroads story was also told by [guitarist] Ike Zinermon, Robert’s primary mentor, and for Robert Johnson by Son House during interviews in the mid-1960s.” 

Johnson recorded “Cross Road Blues” in San Antonio, Texas, on November 27, 1936, and both his musical genius and intellectual sophistication are on display in this song.

In the first verse, Johnson goes to the crossroads and falls to his knees, crying out to God to save him. In the second verse, he stands and tries to flag a ride as dusk descends.

In the blues, “rider” is slang for a lover and also a metaphor for divine possession. In Vodou ceremonies, ancestral spirIt-gods called loa descend to “ride” members of the congregation who have reached a state of readiness for ecstatic union with the divine. The morality implicit in this is stated in the Haitian proverb, “Great gods cannot ride little horses.” The loa also like to hang out at a crossroads, waiting for a worthy soul to ride. 

The concept of a deity “riding” a worshiper transferred to Pentecostal churches, where the cry “Drop down chariot and let me ride!” was often heard, as well as “Ride on!” and “Ride on, King Jesus!”, from congregants seeking to be filled with the Holy Ghost.

What’s striking about “Cross Road Blues” is Johnson’s expressed sense of failure at having dug into his spiritual resources and come up empty-handed. Rather than providing a pat story of being lured by the devil or saved by God, Johnson stands at the crossroads, sinking down, crushed by existential dread. Christianity has failed him, and the ancestral rites that might have restored his connection to his own divine nature are lost to him: 

Standing at the cross roads
I tried to flag a ride
Didn’t nobody seem to know me
Everybody pass me by

Nonetheless, rumors of Johnson’s crossroads pact persisted, fueled by his supernatural musical abilities. Johnson’s death in 1938 at age 27 put the seal on the legend of his deal with the devil. 

Johnson, harmonica player “Sonny Boy” Williamson, and Honeyboy Edwards were entertaining at the Three Forks juke in Greenwood, Mississippi, when Johnson suddenly fell ill. Johnson had been playing at the joint for a few weeks, and was having an affair with the owner’s girlfriend. 

Johnson and Williamson were standing outside on break when someone handed Johnson an open half-pint of corn whisky. Williamson purportedly knocked it out of his hand, saying “Man, don’t never take a drink from an open bottle. You don’t know what could be in it.”

Irritated, Johnson snapped, “Don’t never knock a bottle of whiskey out of my hand.” When a second open bottle was proffered, he took a swig. Johnson and Williamson returned to the stage, but several minutes into their set, Johnson could no longer sing. Williamson covered for him on vocals but after a few more tunes, Johnson put down his guitar.

By the time Edwards arrived around 10:30 p.m., Johnson was retching and delirious. He was laid across a bed in an anteroom and taken early the next morning to his room in “Baptist Town,” an African American neighborhood in Greenwood. Although he was removed from Baptist Town to a house on the “Star of the West” plantation, where he was nursed around the clock, Johnson died August 16, 1938. 

To the people who loved him, his death was the hard loss of a sensitive, talented person. “I was pretty shaken up,” Lockwood told David Witter of Chicago Interview. “I didn’t play for over a year. As far as my mother and I were concerned, he was a wonderful, wonderful man.”

Johnson’s songs have been monster hits for rock musicians, who continue to mine his 29-song repertoire. Led Zeppelin (“Traveling Riverside Blues”), The Rolling Stones (“Love in Vain”), Cream (“Crossroads”), the White Stripes (“Stop Breaking Down“) and more have turned Johnson’s songs into rock, funk and heavy metal gold, which is why he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.

These artists all heard the blueprint in his songs for the future of popular music. “Robert was way ahead of his time,” mused Lockwood. “He sounded different. When Robert played the guitar, he played the whole guitar. He played the lead and the background and everything. In the end, rock and roll ain’t nothing but the blues played fast.” 

Paste Magazine - 10 Best Robert Johnson Covers

Follow Debra Devi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/debradevi

From Act One, Scene One of ROBERT JOHNSON:  TRICK THE DEVIL, by Bill Harris © 1995

Originally published in The National Black Drama Anthology:  Eleven Plays from America’s Leading African-American Theaters, Edited by Woodie King, Jr.

SETTING:  A jook joint in the Deep South.

TIME: Summer, 1938

CHARACTERS:

     STOKES:  Blind piano player.  A seer.

     GEORGIA:  Late 30s early 40s.  Her own woman.

   ROBERT JOHNSON:  Mid 20s.  Lean.  Blues singer.  Insecure and braggadociois.

                                    ROBERT

(Enters.  During the following ROBERT shyly moves to GEORGIA, conversing, getting a drink, etc., in the process of hitting on each other, as:)

                                    ROBERT

This the crossroads where the Greyhound stop at?

                                    GEORGIA

Sure is, Sugar.  It ain’t till tomorrow, but you welcome to wait.  You by yourself?

                                   

                                    ROBERT

Ain’t I enough?

                                    GEORGIA

We’ll see.  It look like rain to you?

                                    ROBERT

What you talking about girl?

                                    GEORGIA

Stokes say it’s going to rain.

                                    (Loud enough for STOKES to hear.)

I kid him, but I been knowing Stokes long enough that if he say the hen dipped snuff, all you got to do is look under the right wing and you’ll find the box.  He say two more folks we ain’t expecting coming too.

                                    STOKES

Got it from my grandmamma.  Some used to say she didn’t know what she was talking about, was full of stuff as a Christmas goose.  Thought it myself before I found out better.  She used to sit out there on that porch just a rocking.  And if she said something, it come to pass.  She was a healer.  And a heap more.

                                    ROBERT

                                    (Interested.)

What could she heal?

                                    STOKES

What-ever ailed you.

                                    ROBERT

How?

                                    STOKES

Various of ways.  Sometimes she would heal them just telling them a story.  Just sit there and rock, slow and easy as a summer sunset drowning in its flames.  Tell you a story and by the time she got finished . . .

                                    ROBERT

And she could protect you too, couldn’t she?

                                   

                                    STOKES    

                                    (“That’s right.”)

                                    GEORGIA

Claim he got some of his tricks from her.

                                    ROBERT

                                    (Focusing on STOKES.)

You say you did, huh?  Well that’s good to know.

                                    STOKES

Now I can’t stop what’s got to happen . . .

                                    ROBERT

                                    (“I understand.”)

But you do what you can.

                                    STOKES
                                    (“Yes.”)

When I can.

                                    ROBERT

They tell me time was, when things was known most folks has forgotten.

                                    STOKES

Some folks might forget, but the truth of things don’t change.  You play that guitar?

                                    ROBERT

I’m particular.  I don’t let just anybody touch my guitar.

(Very deliberately takes the instrument from its case, moves to STOKES, kneels before him and using both hands presents to STOKES. 

STOKES takes it and “senses” it with his hands before returning it.  ROBERT begins to play.  STOKES accompanies him as GEORGIA, moved by their music dances a little step.  Tune ends.)

                                    GEORGIA 

                                    (To Audience.)

I was always scared of that kind of old woman like he say his grandmamma was.  Look to me like all that went against the church.  I was still in my mama’s house then and she went for Christian, and all us kids too.  I’ve kind of fell away from that some though, since I been out on my own.

                                    ROBERT

                                    (Sings and plays, seducing GEORGIA.  To GEORGIA.)

You work here, huh?

                                    GEORGIA

It’s my place.  That’s my name, Georgia, that you read above the door.

                                    ROBERT

I missed it, what it say?

                                    GEORGIA

Georgia Mayberry’s Colored Jook Joint.  I’m Georgia.

                                    ROBERT

And I’m colored.

                                    GEORGIA

Every day.

                                    ROBERT

Well, Georgia, that’s something mighty fine and real impressive.  Got you a place with your name over the door, and here I am sitting up in it, big as life.

                                    GEORGIA

Big as life and twice as sharp.

                                    ROBERT

How come you ain’t married?

                                    GEORGIA

Who said I ain’t?

                                    ROBERT

You didn’t mention no Mister on the sign.

                                    GEORGIA

That don’t prove nothing.

                                    ROBERT

Where he at then?

                                    GEORGIA

That’s for me to worry about.

                                    ROBERT

He went off and left you, didn’t he?

                                    GEORGIA

Mostly he was a hard working man, but work around here was scarce.  But,

                                    (Indicating the jook joint with pride.)

I was doing fair.  He took to walking heavy and talking loud—hadn’t never been no gentle man with a tender touch—like you look to be.

                                    ROBERT

You saying you think I ain’t nothing but a cream puff man?

                                    GEORGIA

Just yall different, as cornbread and shoe leather.  And I don’t want to hear a word against him.

                                    ROBERT

Don’t matter to me if he was one of Jesus’ apostles or too mean to be baptized; you don’t care enough to put him on the sign, I don’t care nothing about him at all.  Now what kind of services you got in Georgia’s Colored Jook Joint? Do that sight say that?

                                    GEORGIA

                                    (With innuendo.)

It’s early so I ain’t turned on the fire yet.  What you got a taste for?

                                    ROBERT

Give me somewhere to lay my head.

                                    (Pause as they study each other.)

then watch over me while I take my rest.

                                    GEORGIA

                                    (Intrigued.)

You ain’t no little bitsy baby.  Why you need somebody watch over you while you sleep?

                                    ROBERT

I didn’t say somebody, Miss Georgia with you name up over the door, I said you.

                                    GEORGIA

Oh—that is what you said, ain’t’ it.

(They pantomime the following: —as STOKES plays—she reaches into her bosom and gives him the key, points the direction to her room, indicating she will be there soon.)

                                    ROBERT

                                    (Exits up stairs.

During the following he takes off his coat and shirt.  Lays on the bed.  He tosses and turns restively; at best napping for a few moments at a time, as:)

                                    GEORGIA

                                    (To Audience.)

Men.  Damn them all.  I wouldn’t care if God turned all of them into hedgehogs and run them in the deep blue sea—I got a husband all right enough.  Had one.  Left about a year ago.  Ain’t heard peep or squeak from him since.  I was fool to marry him in the fist place.  He was worrisome as hell, but he come in handy from time to time.  But I like to see a man busy and he got to the place he stayed too drunk to even put down rat poison.  Started staying drunk and ugly mean.  We had some words and he went off.

                                    (Harder.)

Naw, I wouldn’t care if all of them was long gone—

                                    (Laughs.)

Long as it didn’t rain no more I’d be all right.  That’s my weakness.  Rain.  Don’t ask me why.  Look like rain just make my love river rise.  Just let a good hard rain be falling, and a man sweating and grunting and calling my name. . .  And then lay there with him after, and listen at the water running down off the roof.  Hell, can have damn near anything Georgia got.  Don’t even have to leave no receipt.  It rained around the time Robert come in.  I remember that.  And don’t think it’d come down like that in a long long time.  Know it ain’t since.

                                   

THE MUSIC OF ROBERT JOHNSON: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH ROBERT JOHNSON:  

Robert Johnson: Complete Recordings--
["Centennial Collection" 
Rearranged in Chronological Order!]:


THE SAN ANTONIO SESSIONS:
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1936:
 
(0:00) Kindhearted Woman Blues [take 1]
(2:55) Kindhearted Woman Blues [take 2]
(5:27) I Believe I'll Dust My Broom
(8:31) Sweet Home Chicago
(11:32) Ramblin' On My Mind [take 1]
(14:26) Ramblin' On My Mind [take 2]
(16:51) When You Got a Good Friend [take 1]
(19:47) When You Got a Good Friend [take 2]
(22:27) Come On In My Kitchen [take 1]
(25:23) Come On In My Kitchen [take 2]
(28:09) Terraplane Blues
(31:13) Phonograph Blues [take 1]
(33:56) Phonograph Blues [take 2]

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1936:
(36:33) 32-20 Blues

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1936:
(39:26) They're Red Hot
(42:27) Dead Shrimp Blues
(45:01) Crossroad Blues [take 1]
(47:45) Crossroad Blues [take 2]
(50:18) Walkin' Blues
(52:50) Last Fair Deal Gone Down
(55:30) Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the devil)
(58:27) If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day

THE DALLAS SESSIONS:
SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1937:
 
(1:01:06) Stones In My Passway
(1:03:37) (I'm a) Steady Rollin' Man
(1:06:19) From Four 'Till Late

SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 1937:
 
(1:08:45) Hellhound On My Trail
(1:11:25) Little Queen of Spades [take 1]
(1:13:41) Little Queen of Spades [take 2]
(1:16:05) Malted Milk
(1:18:31) Drunken Hearted Man [take 1]
(1:21:03) Drunken Hearted Man [take 2]
(1:23:34) Me and the Devil Blues [take 1]
(1:26:10) Me and the Devil Blues [take 2]
(1:28:48) Stop Breaking Down Blues [take 1]
(1:31:16) Stop Breaking Down Blues [take 2]
(1:33:36) Traveling Riverside Blues [take 1: w/ guitar test groove]
(1:36:32) Traveling Riverside Blues [take 2: once a lost recording!]
(1:39:15) Honeymoon Blues
(1:41:35) Love in Vain Blues [take 1]
(1:43:57) Love in Vain Blues [take 2]
(1:46:26) Milkcow's Calf Blues [take 1]
(1:48:51) Milkcow's Calf Blues [take 2]



 

"Can't You Hear The Wind Howl"-- The Life and Music of Robert Johnson--(Documentary film):

 

http://www.robertjohnsonbluesfoundation.org/track/cross-road-blues/

 
 

Cross Road Blues
(Music and lyrics by Robert Johnson)

I went down to the crossroad
fell down on my knees
I went down to the crossroad
fell down on my knees
Asked the lord above “Have mercy now
save poor Bob if you please”
Yeeooo, standin at the crossroad
tried to flag a ride
ooo ooo eee
I tried to flag a ride
Didn’t nobody seem to know me babe
everybody pass me by
Standin at the crossroad babe
risin sun goin down
Standin at the crossroad babe
eee eee eee, risin sun goin down
I believe to my soul now,
Poor Bob is sinkin down
You can run, you can run
tell my friend Willie Brown
You can run, you can run
tell my friend Willie Brown
(th)’at I got the croosroad blues this mornin Lord
babe, I’m sinkin down
And I went to the crossroad momma
I looked east and west
I went to the crossroad baby
I looked east and west
Lord, I didn’t have no sweet woman
ooh-well babe, in my distress


http://www.robertjohnsonbluesfoundation.org/biography/

Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson
Born	May 8 1911 Hazlehurst, Mississippi, U.S.
Died	August 16 1938 (aged 27) Greenwood, Mississippi, U.S.
Genre(s)	Delta blues Country blues
Instrument(s)	Guitar
Years active	1929 - 1938
Website	www.deltahaze.com/johnson
Notable instrument(s)
Gibson L-1

 
Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938) was a legendary American blues musician and, arguably, one of the most influential. Widely known as the "King of the Delta Blues," Johnson influenced a range of later musicians, including Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton, with his unique vocal style, haunting lyrics, and creative guitar techniques. Clapton in particular played a large role is the renewed interest in Johnson, calling him "the most important blues musician who ever lived." Contemporary artists and groups, such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Keb' Mo, and others, have also credited him as an important influence.

Johnson was also a significant figure in the transition of Delta blues from a purely folk idiom to a viable commercial style. While Johnson learned directly from mentors such as Son House, he also was exposed to the recordings of early blues artists such as Charlie Patton, Leroy Carr,and Tommy Johnson, as well as to other popular musical styles, through radio broadcasting, expanding his repertoire beyond traditional blues.

Contents  [hide]  1 Life 1.1 His music 1.2 "Pact" with the Devil 1.3 Death 2 Influences 2.1 Reappraisal 2.2 Major artists influenced by Johnson 3 Films about Robert Johnson 4 Notes 5 References 6 External links 7 Credits

Johnson's mystique grew to mythic proportions because of his shadowy itinerant life, his violent death at the hands of a jealous husband, and, not least, his purported pact in which he traded his soul to the Devil in exchange for unsurpassed guitar prowess. The promiscuous, love-crossed vagabond existence of the blues musician, who "pays his dues" in order to sing the blues, was played out in Johnson's short life. His poignant artistry drew from his own inner turmoil, while evoking the collective sufferings of rural southern blacks and the anomie of modern life.

Life

Records concerning Johnson's early life are sketchy, and the biographical information about his childhood remains tentative. Johnson was reportedly born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in 1911, to Julia Major Dodds. His ten older siblings were the children Julia's husband, Charles Dodds-Spencer, but Robert was the illegitimate son of a man named Noah Johnson. As a child, he played a makeshift instrument called a "diddley bow"—created by stretching a wire between two nails on the side of a house—as well as the Jew's harp and harmonica. A friend from his church recalls him playing a three-stringed version of the diddly bow and eventually buying a well worn, second-hand guitar.

Johnson married when he was a teenager, but his wife, Virginia Travis, died while giving birth at age 16, in 1930. It was probably shortly before this time that Johnson met his mentor, Son House, a pioneer of the slide guitar style that Johnson himself would come to epitomize. House did not think much of Johnson's musical ability at first, and described the teenage Robert as "mouthy, a chatterbox." House recalled the young Johnson leaving town for a few months and returning as a virtuoso: "Me and Willie (Brown) got up, and I gave Robert my seat. He set down… And when that boy started playing, and when he got through, all our mouths were standing open. All! He was gone!"

House, who had formerly been a Baptist minister, claims that he tried to warn Johnson against going back out on the road, because of the rough life of a traveling blues musician. Johnson, of course, did not listen. In his 20s, Johnson was known to be a womanizer, a drinker, and a rambler who often hopped trains for transportation. He traveled widely and is known to have performed in Chicago and New York, as well as in many southern towns, especially in Louisiana, Mississippi, and East Texas.
Companions recall him as a dark-skinned, thinly built man who appeared younger than his age. Johnson's "stepson," Robert Lockwood (actually the son of one of Johnson's regular girlfriends) said that Johnson "never had a beard, never shaved." Others reported that he managed to keep himself clean and tidy in appearance, even during times of hard traveling.

His music

Johnson's skills as a guitarist were unquestioned. Son House, himself recognized as a slide guitar master, admitted Johnson's prodigious talent; and Johnson's sometime traveling companion, guitarist Johnny Shines, said of him: "Robert was about the greatest guitar player I'd ever heard. The things he was doing was things that I'd never heard nobody else do… especially his slide (guitar) stuff… His guitar seemed to talk."

Besides having an uncanny talent as a guitarist, Johnson was possessed of another trait necessary for success in the days before microphones and loudspeakers—a powerful voice that could be heard amidst the din of dancing and drinking. Shines recalled him as an immensely charismatic performer. "He was well liked by women and men, even though a lot of men resented his power or his influence over women-people," Shines said. "As for showmanship, he could just stop anywhere and draw a crowd of people." As a result, Johnson had no problem finding work in urban bars and back country "juke" joints wherever he went, commanding as much as six dollars a night while other players were happy with a dollar plus food.

Although he is known today strictly as a blues singer, Johnson also performed other types of music. His repertoire included ragtime numbers, ballads, and even cowboy songs. His favorites included "Yes Sir, That's My Baby," "My Blue Heaven," and "Drifting Along with the Tumbling Tumbleweeds." However, it was his blues playing that affected his audiences most deeply. Said Shines:

One time in St. Louis, we were playing "Come on in My Kitchen." He was playing very slow and passionately, and when we had quit, I noticed no one was saying anything. Then I realized they were crying—both men and women.

Johnson's expressiveness as a blues singer is evident from his recordings. His rendition of "Preachin' Blues," for example, conveys a sense of ultimate crisis:

The blues fell mama's child, tore me all upside down

Travel on, poor Bob, just cain't turn you 'round

The blu-u-u-u-ues is a low-down shakin' chill

You ain't never had 'em, I hope you never will

Johnson recorded only 29 songs on a total of 41 tracks in two recording sessions: One in San Antonio, in November 1936, and one in Dallas in June 1937. Notable among these sides are "Terraplane Blues," "Love in Vain," "Sweet Home Chicago," "Cross Roads Blues," "Come on in My Kitchen," and "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom," all of which have been covered by other artists.

Two modern collections of these recordings have been particularly influential to contemporary audiences. King of the Delta Blues Singers (1961) helped popularize the blues for crossover audiences in the 1960s, and The Complete Recordings (1990) provided the entire body of his recorded work on one dual-CD set.

Rumors and mythology have surrounded Johnson, but it is an established fact that during his recording sessions, he performed with his face to the wall.

"Pact" with the Devil

 

The most widely known legend surrounding Robert Johnson says that he sold his soul to the Devil at or near the crossroads of U.S. Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in exchange for prowess in playing the guitar. The story goes that if one would go to a crossroads just before midnight and begin to play the guitar, a large black man would come up to the aspiring guitarist, re-tune his guitar, and then hand it back. At this point the guitarist had traded his soul to become a virtuoso. (A similar legend even surrounded the European violinist Niccolò Paganini, a century before.)

A contributing factor to the legend is the fact that the older bluesman, Tommy Johnson (no known relation), reportedly claimed to have sold his soul to the Devil. The report, however, comes from Tommy's brother, LeDell, a Christian minister who likely considered the Blues to be the "Devil's music." Another source of the Johnson legend was his mentor, Son House, who also had been a preacher and who had been so impressed by Johnson's amazing progress as a guitarist. Johnson's childhood friend William Coffee comes the closest to a first hand account, reporting that Johnson indeed mentioned selling his soul to the Devil. Coffee added, however, that "I never did think he was serious, because he'd always… be crackin' jokes like that."

The song "Cross Roads Blues" is widely interpreted as describing Johnson's encounter with Satan. In fact, it opens with the singer calling out to God, not the Devil:

I went to the crossroads

I fell down on my knees

I cried the Lord above have mercy

Save poor Bob if you please

However, it also includes a verse expressing the fear that "dark goin' to catch me here," and it closes with an admission of despair:

You can run, you can run

Tell my friend, poor Willie Brown

Say I'm goin' to the crossroads baby

I believe I'm sinking down.

Other of his songs indeed indicate that Johnson was haunted by demonic feelings and fears, although they fall short of confirming a formal pact with the Devil. For example, in "Me and the Devil Blues" he says:

Early this morning, the Blues knocked on my door

And I said "Hello Satan, I believe its time to go."

Me and the Devil were walking side by side

I've got to beat my woman until I get satisfied.

In "Hellhound on My Trail," he complains of being hounded by demonic forces:

I got to keep movin', I got to keep movin'

Blues falling down like hail…

And the day keeps reminding me

Therer's a Hellhound on my trail

Finally, the concluding verse of "Me and Devil" expresses the fear that he will be doomed to wander as an evil spirit after his death:

You can bury my body down by the highway side

So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride

Death

Recollection survives that Johnson died after drinking whiskey poisoned with strychnine, allegedly given to him by the jealous husband of a lover. Fellow blues singer Sonny Boy Williamson II claimed to have been present the night of Johnson's poisoning. Williamson said that Johnson crawled on his hands and knees "howling and barking like a dog," later dying in Williamson's arms. Another, perhaps more credible, report was given by Johnson's temporary musical partner, David "Honeyboy" Edwards, who had teamed up with Johnson for a regular "gig" at the Three Forks juke joint near Greenwood, Mississipi. According to Edwards, the man who ran the juke joint became convinced that his wife had become involved with Johnson and determined to get rid of him. Johnson temporarily recovered from the initial poisoning, but soon died, on August 16, 1938, in Greenwood.

The precise cause of death remains unknown. His death certificate simply states "no doctor," but the official who filled out the form believed that Johnson had died of syphilis. Son House heard that Johnson had been both stabbed and shot. William Coffee reportedly heard that Johnson's family attended his funeral and said the cause of death had been pneumonia. Johnson's last words were reportedly, "I pray that my redeemer will come and take me from my grave."

There are very few images of Johnson; only two confirmed photographs exist.

Influences

 

Johnson is widely cited as "the greatest blues singer of all time," but listeners are sometimes disappointed by their first encounter with his work. This reaction may be due to unfamiliarity with the raw emotion and sparse form of the Delta style, to the thin tone of Johnson's high-pitched voice, or to the poor quality of his recordings when compared to modern music production standards. However, experts agree that Johnson's guitar work was extremely adroit for his time, that his singing was uniquely expressive, and his poetic imagery among the most evocative in the blues genre.

Nevertheless, Johnson's originality has sometimes been overstated. His most important musical influence was Son House, a pioneer of the Delta blues style whose searing slide guitar riffs Johnson clearly imitated and developed. Johnson's singing style shows the influence of the keen whimsy of the then-obscure blues singer, Skip James. He also emulated Lonnie Johnson and had listened carefully to Leroy Carr, probably the most popular male blues singer of the time. He based some songs on the records of the urban blues recording stars, Kokomo Arnold (the source for both "Sweet Home Chicago" and "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom") and Peetie Wheatstraw.

What Johnson did with these and other influences was to create a new sound that was both more immediate and more artful than that of his predecessors. His pioneering use of the bass strings to create a steady, rolling rhythm can be heard on songs like "Sweet Home Chicago," "When You've Got a Good Friend," and many others. Johnson's work also featured snatches of creative melodic invention on the upper strings, mingled with a contrasting vocal line. An important aspect of his singing, and indeed of all Blues singing styles, is the use of microtonality—subtle inflections of pitch that are part of the reason why Jonson's performances convey such powerful emotion.

Johnson's influence on other Delta blues players is not easily documented. He clearly learned from Son House, but the master in turn may have picked up new ideas from his one-time student. Johnson also played with the young Howlin' Wolf and may have influenced his guitar style. Robert's "stepson," Robert "Junior" Lockwood, claimed to have been taught by Johnson. B.B. King, in turn, partnered with Lockwood in his early years. Muddy Waters lived near Johnson in Mississippi, and recalled being influenced by his recordings. Elmore James, Waters, and other Chicago blues greats covered Johnson's songs.

Johnson's impact on Rock and Roll is significant, but again it is not always easy to trace. Early rock stars probably had never heard his music but inherited some of his stylistic innovations from other performers whose music was widely played on the Negro-oriented radio stations of the 40s and 50s. Nearly all rock musicians—from Chuck Berry to the great rock guitarists of the late twentieth century to today's garage band prodigies—constantly use the rhythm riffs that Johnson was the first to record, usually with no knowledge that he may have originated them.

Until the early 60s, Robert Johnson remained a relatively obscure blues musician whose premature death prevented him from attaining great fame. Then, in 1961, Johnson's recordings saw a wide release and a fan base grew around them, including stars such as Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, and Eric Clapton. When Richards was first introduced to Johnson's music by his band-mate Brian Jones, he commented, "Who is the other guy playing with him?" not realizing it was Johnson playing on one guitar. Clapton said, "His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice." Bob Dylan was strongly impressed by a pre-release copy of Johnson's first Columbia album in 1961. In his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan said:

I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting and staring at the record player. Wherever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition… Johnson's words made my nerves quiver like piano wires… If I hadn't heard that Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn't have felt free enough or upraised enough to write.

Johnson's recordings have remained continuously available since John H. Hammond convinced Columbia Records to compile the first Johnson LP, King of the Delta Blues Singers, in 1961. A sequel LP, assembling the rest of what could be found of Johnson's recordings, was issued in 1970. An omnibus two-CD set (The Complete Recordings) was released in 1990.

Ralph Maccio starred in a popular 1986 Hollywood movie, Crossroads, in which Maccio plays an aspiring young blues musician who links up with Robert Johnson's old buddy, Willie Brown, to retrace Johnson's footsteps. The movie features impressive recreations of Johnson's guitar work by Ry Cooder, as well as a powerful musical finale in which the Devil attempts to claim the soul of Maccio's character.
In the summer of 2003, Rolling Stone magazine listed Johnson at number five in their list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.^[1]

Reappraisal

 

Some scholars believe that Johnson's influence as a blues musician is overstated. Blues historian Elijah Wald, in Escaping the Delta, wrote a controversial reappraisal to the effect that:

As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note.

Wald claims that Johnson's influence came mainly through the later white rock musicians and fans who became enamored of Johnson, perhaps unconsciously exaggerating his impact. According to Ward, Johnson, although well traveled and always admired in his performances, was little heard by the standards of his time and place, and his records even less so. Terraplane Blues, sometimes described as Johnson's only hit record, outsold his others but was still a very minor success at best. If one had asked black blues fans about Robert Johnson in the first twenty years after his death, writes Wald, "the response in the vast majority of cases would have been a puzzled 'Robert who?'"

Major artists influenced by Johnson

 

Many artists have recorded Johnson's songs. The following musicians have been heavily influenced by him, as evidenced by recording several of his songs:

• Eric Clapton released, in 2004, an album consisting solely of covers of Johnson's songs, Me and Mr. Johnson. In addition, he had previously performed or recorded "I'm a Steady Rolling Man," "Cross Road Blues," "Malted Milk," "From Four Until Late," and "Ramblin' On My Mind."
• Led Zeppelin (Traveling Riverside Blues)
• Cream (Crossroads)
• The Rolling Stones (Love in Vain, Stop Breaking Down)
• Bob Dylan (Kindhearted Woman Blues, Milkcow's Calf Blues, Rambling On My Mind, I'm A Steady Rolling Man)
• Fleetwood Mac (Hellhound On My Trail, Kind Hearted Woman, Preachin' Blues, Dust My Broom, Sweet Home Chicago)
• Peter Green Splinter Group (all 29 songs)
• Keb' Mo (Come On In My Kitchen, Last Fair Deal Gone Down, Kindhearted Woman Blues, Love In Vain)
• John Hammond Jr. (32-20 Blues, Milkcow's Calf Blues, Traveling Riverside Blues, Stones In My Passway, Crossroads Blues, Hellbound Blues [Hellhound On My Trail], Me And The Devil Blues, Walking Blues, Come On In My Kitchen, Preaching Blues, Sweet Home Chicago, When You Got A Good Friend, Judgement Day, Rambling Blues)
• Rory Block (Come On In My Kitchen, Hellhound On My Trail, If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day, Rambling On My Mind, Walking Blues, Cross Road Blues, Walking Blues, Kindhearted Man [Kindhearted Woman Blues], Terraplane Blues, When You Got a Good Friend, Me and the Devil Blues, Stones in my Passway, Last Fair Deal Gone Down, Traveling Riverside Blues)
• Robert "Junior" Lockwood (32-20 Blues, Stop Breakin’ Down Blues, Little Queen Of Spades, I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom, Ramblin’ On My Mind, Love In Vain Blues, Kind Hearted Woman Blues, Walking Blues, I’m A Steady Rollin’ Man, Sweet Home Chicago)
• The Red Hot Chili Peppers (They're Red Hot) their 1991 album Guitarist John Frusciante, said that he listened to Johnson every night throughout the writing and recording of the Blood Sugar Sex Magik album and that Johnson strongly influenced his subsequent solo work.
• The White Stripes covered "Stop Breaking Down (Blues)." They have covered many Robert Johnson songs live on stage.

Films about Robert Johnson

 

• Crossroads, 1986 (based on the theme of a Johnson selling his soul to the Devil)
• The Search for Robert Johnson, 1992
• Can't You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson, 1997
• Hellhounds On My Trail: The Afterlife of Robert Johnson (2000). Directed by Robert Mugge.
•  

Notes

1. ↑ Rolling Stone, 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Retrieved April 21, 2008.

References

• Greenberg, Alan and Stanley Crouch. Booklet accompanying the Complete Recordings box set. Sony Music Entertainment, 1990.
• Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson. 1998, ISBN 0452279496
• LaVere, Stephen. Blues World—Booklet No.1—Robert Johnson—Four Editions. 1967.
• Pearson, Barry Lee and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. 2003. ISBN 025202835X
• Schroeder, Patricia R. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture. 2004. ISBN 0252029151
• Scorsese, Martin. Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson. 1994. ISBN 030680557X
• Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. 2004. ISBN 0060524235
• Wolf, Robert. Hellhound on My Trail: The Life of Robert Johnson, Bluesman Extraordinaire. 2004. ISBN 1568461461
•  

External links

All links retrieved May 20, 2014.

• Site for "Escaping the Delta," with links to related material.
• Delta Guitar Player Robert Johnson.
• Robert Johnson at Find-A-Grave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson 

Robert Johnson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Johnson
Studio portrait (circa 1935), one of only two or three verified photographs
Background information
Birth name	Robert Leroy Johnson
Born	May 8, 1911 Hazlehurst, Mississippi
Died	August 16, 1938 (aged 27) Greenwood, Mississippi
Genres	Delta blues
Occupation(s)	Musician, singer, songwriter
Instruments	Guitar, vocals, harmonica
Years active	1929–1938
Notable instruments
Gibson L-1

Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938) was an American blues singer-songwriter and musician. His landmark recordings in 1936 and 1937 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that has influenced later generations of musicians. Johnson's shadowy and poorly documented life and death at age 27 have given rise to much legend, including the Faustian myth that he sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads to achieve success. As an itinerant performer who played mostly on street corners, in juke joints, and at Saturday night dances, Johnson had little commercial success or public recognition in his lifetime.

It was only after the reissue of his recordings in 1961, on the LP King of the Delta Blues Singers, that his work reached a wider audience. Johnson is now recognized as a master of the blues, particularly of the Mississippi Delta blues style. He is credited by many rock musicians as an important influence; Eric Clapton has called Johnson "the most important blues singer that ever lived."^[1][2] Johnson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early influence in its first induction ceremony, in 1986.^[3] In 2010, David Fricke ranked Johnson fifth in Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".^[4]

Contents

• 1 Life and career
  • 1.1 Early life
  • 1.2 Itinerant musician
  • 1.3 Recording sessions
  • 1.4 Death
  • 1.5 Gravesite
• 2 Devil legend
  • 2.1 Various accounts
  • 2.2 Interpretations
• 3 Musical style
  • 3.1 Voice
  • 3.2 Instrument
  • 3.3 Lyrics
• 4 Influences
• 5 Legacy
  • 5.1 Rock and roll
  • 5.2 Rock music and related genres
  • 5.3 Guitar technique
  • 5.4 Lifetime achievement
  • 5.5 Use in advertisements
• 6 Problems of biography
  • 6.1 Photographs
  • 6.2 Playback speed hypothesis
  • 6.3 Descendants
• 7 Discography
• 8 Awards and recognitions
  • 8.1 Grammy Awards
  • 8.2 Grammy Hall of Fame
  • 8.3 National Recording Registry
  • 8.4 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
  • 8.5 Blues Foundation awards
  • 8.6 Honors and inductions
  • 8.7 Tribute albums
• 9 See also
• 10 References
• 11 Bibliography
• 12 External links

Life and career

Early life

Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, possibly on May 8, 1911,^[5] to Julia Major Dodds (born October 1874) and Noah Johnson (born December 1884). Julia was married to Charles Dodds (born February 1865), a relatively prosperous landowner and furniture maker, with whom she had ten children. Charles Dodds had been forced by a mob to leave Hazlehurst following a dispute with white landowners. Julia left Hazlehurst with baby Robert but after some two years sent him to live in Memphis with her husband, who had changed his name to Charles Spencer.^[6]

About 1919, Robert rejoined his mother in the Mississippi Delta area around Tunica and Robinsonville, Mississippi. Julia's new husband, known as Dusty Willis, was 24 years her junior. Robert was remembered by some residents as "Little Robert Dusty",^[7] but he was registered at Tunica's Indian Creek School as Robert Spencer. In the 1920 census he is listed as Robert Spencer, living in Lucas, Arkansas, with Will and Julia Willis. Robert was at school in 1924 and 1927^[8] and the quality of his signature on his marriage certificate^[9] suggests that he was relatively well educated for a boy of his background. One school friend, Willie Coffee, was located and filmed, recalling that Robert was already noted for playing the harmonica and jaw harp.^[10] He also remembered that Robert was absent for long periods, which suggests that he may have been living and studying in Memphis.^[11]

After school, Robert adopted the surname of his natural father, signing himself as Robert Johnson on the certificate of his marriage to sixteen-year-old Virginia Travis in February 1929. She died in childbirth shortly after.^[12] Surviving relatives of Virginia told the blues researcher Robert "Mack" McCormick that this was a divine punishment for Robert's decision to sing secular songs, known as "selling your soul to the Devil". McCormick believes that Johnson himself accepted the phrase as a description of his resolve to abandon the settled life of a husband and farmer to become a full-time blues musician.^[13]

Around this time, the blues musician Son House moved to Robinsonville, where his musical partner Willie Brown lived. Late in life, House remembered Johnson as a "little boy" who was a competent harmonica player but an embarrassingly bad guitarist. Soon after, Johnson left Robinsonville for the area around Martinsville, close to his birthplace, possibly searching for his natural father. Here he perfected the guitar style of House and learned other styles from Isaiah "Ike" Zinnerman.^[14] Zinnerman was rumored to have learned supernaturally to play guitar by visiting graveyards at midnight.^[15] When Johnson next appeared in Robinsonville, he seemed to have miraculously acquired a guitar technique.^[16] House was interviewed at a time when the legend of Johnson's pact with the devil was well known among blues researchers. He was asked whether he attributed Johnson's technique to this pact, and his equivocal answers have been taken as confirmation.^[5]

While living in Martinsville, Johnson fathered a child with Vergie Mae Smith. He married Caletta Craft in May 1931. In 1932, the couple moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the Delta. Here Caletta died in childbirth, and Johnson left for a career as a "walking" or itinerant musician.^[14]

Itinerant musician

From 1932 until his death in 1938, Johnson moved frequently between large cities like Memphis, Tennessee, and Helena, Arkansas, and the smaller towns of the Mississippi Delta and neighboring regions of Mississippi and Arkansas.^[17][18] On occasion, he traveled much farther. The blues musician Johnny Shines accompanied him to Chicago, Texas, New York, Canada, Kentucky, and Indiana.^[19] Henry Townsend shared a musical engagement with him in St. Louis.^[20] In many places he stayed with members of his large extended family or with women friends.^[21] He did not marry again but formed some long-term relationships with women to whom he would return periodically. One was Estella Coleman, the mother of the blues musician Robert Lockwood, Jr. In other places he stayed with a woman he seduced at his first performance.^[22][23] In each location, Johnson's hosts were largely ignorant of his life elsewhere. He used different names in different places, employing at least eight distinct surnames.^[24]

Biographers have looked for consistency from musicians who knew Johnson in different contexts: Shines, who traveled extensively with him; Lockwood, who knew him as his mother's partner; David "Honeyboy" Edwards, whose cousin Willie Mae Powell had a relationship with Johnson.^[25] From a mass of partial, conflicting, and inconsistent eyewitness accounts,^[26] biographers have attempted to summarize Johnson's character. "He was well mannered, he was soft spoken, he was indecipherable".^[27] "As for his character, everyone seems to agree that, while he was pleasant and outgoing in public, in private he was reserved and liked to go his own way".^[28] "Musicians who knew Johnson testified that he was a nice guy and fairly average—except, of course, for his musical talent, his weakness for whiskey and women, and his commitment to the road."^[29]

When Johnson arrived in a new town, he would play for tips on street corners or in front of the local barbershop or a restaurant. Musical associates have said that in live performances Johnson often did not focus on his dark and complex original compositions, but instead pleased audiences by performing more well-known pop standards of the day^[30] – and not necessarily blues. With an ability to pick up tunes at first hearing, Johnson had no trouble giving his audiences what they wanted, and certain of his contemporaries later remarked on Johnson's interest in jazz and country music. Johnson also had an uncanny ability to establish a rapport with his audience; in every town in which he stopped, Johnson would establish ties to the local community that would serve him well when he passed through again a month or a year later.

Fellow musician Shines was 17 when he met Johnson in 1933. He estimated Johnson was maybe a year older than himself. In Samuel Charters' Robert Johnson, Shines describes Johnson:

Robert was a very friendly person, even though he was sulky at times, you know. And I hung around Robert for quite a while. One evening he disappeared. He was kind of a peculiar fellow. Robert'd be standing up playing some place, playing like nobody's business. At about that time it was a hustle with him as well as a pleasure. And money'd be coming from all directions. But Robert'd just pick up and walk off and leave you standing there playing. And you wouldn't see Robert no more maybe in two or three weeks ... So Robert and I, we began journeying off. I was just, matter of fact, tagging along.^[31]

During this time Johnson established what would be a relatively long-term relationship with Estella Coleman, a woman about 15 years his senior and the mother of musician Robert Lockwood, Jr. Johnson reportedly cultivated a woman to look after him in each town he played in. He supposedly asked homely young women living in the country with their families whether he could go home with them, and in most cases he was accepted, until a boyfriend arrived or Johnson was ready to move on.

In 1941, Alan Lomax learned from Muddy Waters that Johnson had performed in the Clarksdale, Mississippi area.^[32] By 1959, historian Samuel Charters could add only that Will Shade of the Memphis Jug Band remembered Johnson had once briefly played with him in West Memphis, Arkansas.^[33] In the last year of his life, Johnson is believed to have traveled to St. Louis and possibly Illinois, and then to some states in the East. In 1938, Columbia Records producer John H. Hammond, who owned some of Johnson's records, had record producer Don Law seek out Johnson to book him for the first "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. On learning of Johnson's death, Hammond replaced him with Big Bill Broonzy, but still played two of Johnson's records from the stage.

Recording sessions

Johnson's recordings were released by several record companies: "Milkcow's Calf Blues" by Perfect, "Love in Vain Blues" by Vocalion, and "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" by Conqueror

In Jackson, Mississippi, around 1936, Johnson sought out H. C. Speir, who ran a general store and also acted as a talent scout. Speir put Johnson in touch with Ernie Oertle, who, as a salesman for the ARC group of labels, introduced Johnson to Don Law to record his first sessions in San Antonio, Texas. The recording session was held on November 23, 1936, in room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio,^[34] which Brunswick Records had set up to be a temporary recording studio. In the ensuing three-day session, Johnson played 16 selections, and recorded alternate takes for most of these. Johnson reportedly performed facing the wall, which has been cited as evidence he was a shy man and reserved performer. This conclusion was played up in the inaccurate liner notes of the 1961 album King of the Delta Blues Singers. Slide guitarist Ry Cooder speculates that Johnson played facing a corner to enhance the sound of the guitar, a technique he calls "corner loading".^[35]

Among the songs Johnson recorded in San Antonio were "Come On In My Kitchen", "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" and "Cross Road Blues". The first to be released were "Terraplane Blues" and "Last Fair Deal Gone Down", probably the only recordings of his that he would live to hear. "Terraplane Blues" became a moderate regional hit, selling 5,000 copies.

His first recorded song, "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", was part of a cycle of spin-offs and response songs that began with Leroy Carr's "Mean Mistreater Mama" (1934). According to Wald, it was "the most musically complex in the cycle"^[36] and stood apart from most rural blues as a through-composed lyric, rather than an arbitrary collection of more-or-less unrelated verses.^[37] In contrast to most Delta players, Johnson had absorbed the idea of fitting a composed song into the three minutes of a 78-rpm side.^[38] Most of Johnson's "somber and introspective" songs and performances come from his second recording session.^[39]
In 1937, Johnson traveled to Dallas, Texas, for another recording session with Don Law in a makeshift studio at the Vitagraph (Warner Brothers) Building, at 508 Park Avenue,^[40] where Brunswick Record Corporation was located on the third floor.^[41] Eleven records from this session would be released within the following year. Johnson did two takes of most of these songs and recordings of those takes survived. Because of this, there is more opportunity to compare different performances of a single song by Johnson than for any other blues performer of his time and place.^[42] Johnson recorded almost half of the 29 songs that make up his entire discography in Dallas.

Death

Johnson died on August 16, 1938, at the age of 27, near Greenwood, Mississippi of unknown causes. Several differing accounts have described the events preceding his death. Johnson had been playing for a few weeks at a country dance in a town about 15 miles (24 km) from Greenwood. According to one theory, Johnson was murdered by the jealous husband of a woman with whom he had flirted. In an account by fellow blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson, Johnson had been flirting with a married woman at a dance, where she gave him a bottle of whiskey poisoned by her husband. When Johnson took the bottle, Williamson knocked it out of his hand, admonishing him to never drink from a bottle that he had not personally seen opened. Johnson replied, "Don't ever knock a bottle out of my hand." Soon after, he was offered another (poisoned) bottle and accepted it. Johnson is reported to have begun feeling ill the evening after and had to be helped back to his room in the early morning hours. Over the next three days his condition steadily worsened and witnesses reported that he died in a convulsive state of severe pain. Musicologist Robert "Mack" McCormick claimed to have tracked down the man who murdered Johnson and to have obtained a confession from him in a personal interview, but he has declined to reveal the man's name.^[13]

While strychnine has been suggested as the poison that killed Johnson, at least one scholar has disputed the notion. Tom Graves, in his book Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson, relies on expert testimony from toxicologists to argue that strychnine has such a distinctive odor and taste that it cannot be disguised, even in strong liquor. Graves also claims that a significant amount of strychnine would have to be consumed in one sitting to be fatal, and that death from the poison would occur within hours, not days.^[43] Johnson's contemporary David "Honeyboy" Edwards similarly noted that the poison could not have been strychnine, since Johnson would have died much more rapidly, instead of suffering for three days.^{[citation needed]}

LeFlore County registrar Cornelia Jordan, after conducting an investigation into Johnson's death for the state director of Vital Statistics, R.N. Whitfield, wrote on Johnson's death certificate:

I talked with the white man on whose place this negro died and I also talked with a negro woman on the place. The plantation owner said the negro man, seemingly about 26 years old, came from Tunica two or three weeks before he died to play banjo at a negro dance given there on the plantation. He stayed in the house with some of the negroes saying he wanted to pick cotton. The white man did not have a doctor for this negro as he had not worked for him. He was buried in a homemade coffin furnished by the county. The plantation owner said it was his opinion that the man died of syphilis.^[44]

Gravesite

Alleged gravesite with one of Johnson's three tombstones

The exact location of his grave is officially unknown; three different markers have been erected at possible sites in church cemeteries burial outside Greenwood.

• Research in the 1980s and 1990s strongly suggests Johnson was buried in the graveyard of the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church near Morgan City, Mississippi, not far from Greenwood, in an unmarked grave. A one-ton cenotaph in the shape of an obelisk, listing all of Johnson's song titles, with a central inscription by Peter Guralnick, was placed at this location in 1990, paid for by Columbia Records and numerous smaller contributions made through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund.
• In 1990, a small marker with the epitaph "Resting in the Blues" was placed in the cemetery of Payne Chapel near Quito, Mississippi, by an Atlanta rock group named the Tombstones, after they saw a photograph in Living Blues magazine of an unmarked spot alleged by one of Johnson's ex-girlfriends to be Johnson's burial site.^[45]
• More recent research by Stephen LaVere (including statements from Rosie Eskridge, the wife of the supposed gravedigger) indicates that the actual grave site is under a big pecan tree in the cemetery of the Little Zion Church, north of Greenwood along Money Road. Through Stephen LaVere, Sony Music has placed a marker at this site, which bears LaVere's name as well as Johnson's.

An interviewee in the documentary The Search for Robert Johnson (1991) suggests that owing to poverty and lack of transportation Johnson is most likely to have been buried in a pauper's grave (or "potter's field") very near where he died.

Devil legend

According to legend, as a young man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi, Johnson had a tremendous desire to become a great blues musician. He was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight. There he was met by a large black man (actually the Devil) who took the guitar and tuned it. The Devil played a few songs and then returned the guitar to Johnson, giving him mastery of the instrument. This was in effect, a deal with the Devil mirroring the legend of Faust. In exchange for his soul, Johnson was able to create the blues for which he became famous.

Various accounts

This legend was developed over time and has been chronicled by Gayle Dean Wardlow,^[46] Edward Komara^[47] and Elijah Wald, who sees the legend as largely dating from Johnson's rediscovery by white fans more than two decades after his death.^[48] Son House once told the story to Pete Welding as an explanation of Johnson's astonishingly rapid mastery of the guitar. Welding reported it as a serious belief in a widely read article in Down Beat in 1966.^[49] Other interviewers failed to elicit any confirmation from House and there were fully two years between House's observation of Johnson as first a novice and then a master.
Further details were absorbed from the imaginative retellings by Greil Marcus^[50] and Robert Palmer.^[51] Most significantly, the detail was added that Johnson received his gift from a large black man at a crossroads. There is dispute as to how and when the crossroads detail was attached to the Robert Johnson story. All the published evidence, including a full chapter on the subject in the biography Crossroads by Tom Graves, suggests an origin in the story of blues musician Tommy Johnson. This story was collected from his musical associate Ishman Bracey and his elder brother Ledell in the 1960s.^[52] One version of Ledell Johnson's account was published in David Evans's 1971 biography of Tommy Johnson,^[53] and was repeated in print in 1982 alongside House's story in the widely read Searching for Robert Johnson.^[54]
In another version, Ledell placed the meeting not at a crossroads but in a graveyard. This resembles the story told to Steve LaVere that Ike Zinnerman of Hazlehurst, Mississippi learned to play the guitar at midnight while sitting on tombstones. Zinnerman is believed to have influenced the playing of the young Robert Johnson.^[55]

The legendary "Crossroads" at Clarksdale, Mississippi

Recent research by blues scholar Bruce Conforth, in Living Blues magazine, makes the story clearer. Johnson and Ike Zimmerman did practice in a graveyard at night, because it was quiet and no one would disturb them, but it was not the Hazlehurst cemetery as had been believed. Zimmerman (his actual name as it was reportedly spelled on census records for the family going back into the early 1800s, his social security card, social security death notice, funeral program, and by his daughters) was not from Hazlehurst but nearby Beauregard, Mississippi. And he didn't practice in one graveyard, but in several in the area.^[56] Johnson spent about a year living with and learning from Zimmerman, who ultimately accompanied Johnson back to the Delta to look after him.

While Dockery, Hazlehurst and Beauregard have each been claimed as the locations of the mythical crossroads, there are also tourist attractions claiming to be "The Crossroads" in both Clarksdale and Memphis.^[57] Local residents of Rosedale, Mississippi, claim Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the intersection of Highways 1 and 8 in their town, while the 1986 movie Crossroads was filmed in Beulah, Mississippi. Blues historian Steve Cheseborough writes that it may be impossible to discover the exact location of the mythical crossroads, because "Robert Johnson was a rambling guy".^[58]

Interpretations

Folklorist Alan Lomax, who was instrumental in preserving Johnson's recordings and spreading the mythology about his skill

Some scholars have argued that the devil in these songs may refer not only to the Christian figure of Satan but also to the African trickster god Legba, himself associated with crossroads. Folklorist Harry M. Hyatt wrote that, during his research in the South from 1935–1939, when African-Americans born in the 19th or early-20th century said they or anyone else had "sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads," they had a different meaning in mind. Hyatt claimed there was evidence indicating African religious retentions surrounding Legba and the making of a "deal" (not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by Graves) with this so-called "devil" at the crossroads.^[59]

The Blues and the Blues singer has really special powers over women, especially. It is said that the Blues singer could possess women and have any woman they wanted. And so when Robert Johnson came back, having left his community as an apparently mediocre musician, with a clear genius in his guitar style and lyrics, people said he must have sold his soul to the devil. And that fits in with this old African association with the crossroads where you find wisdom: you go down to the crossroads to learn, and in his case to learn in a Faustian pact, with the devil. You sell your soul to become the greatest musician in history.^[60]

This view that the devil in Johnson's songs is derived from an African deity was disputed by the blues scholar David Evans in an essay published in 1999, "Demythologizing the Blues":

There are ... several serious problems with this crossroads myth. The devil imagery found in the blues is thoroughly familiar from western folklore, and nowhere do blues singers ever mention Legba or any other African deity in their songs or other lore. The actual African music connected with cults of Legba and similar trickster deities sounds nothing like the blues, but rather features polyrhythmic percussion and choral call-and-response singing.^[61]

The musicologist Alan Lomax dismissed the myth by stating "In fact, every blues fiddler, banjo picker, harp blower, piano strummer and guitar framer was, in the opinion of both himself and his peers, a child of the Devil, a consequence of the black view of the European dance embrace as sinful in the extreme".^[62]

Musical style

Johnson is considered a master of the blues, particularly of the Delta blues style. Keith Richards, of the Rolling Stones, said in 1990, "You want to know how good the blues can get? Well, this is it." But according to Elijah Wald, in his book Escaping the Delta, Johnson in his own time was most respected for his ability to play in a wide range of styles, from raw country slide guitar to jazz and pop licks, and for his ability to pick up guitar parts almost instantly upon hearing a song.^[63] His first recorded song, "Kind Hearted Woman Blues," in contrast to the prevailing Delta style of the time, more resembled the style of Chicago or St. Louis, with "a full-fledged, abundantly varied musical arrangement."^[64] Unusual for a Delta player of the time, a recording exhibits what Johnson could do entirely outside of a blues style. "They're Red Hot", from his first recording session, shows that he was also comfortable with an "uptown" swing or ragtime sound similar to that of the Harlem Hamfats, but as Wald remarked, "no record company was heading to Mississippi in search of a down-home Ink Spots ... [H]e could undoubtedly have come up with a lot more songs in this style if the producers had wanted them."^[65] Myers adds:

To the uninitiated, Johnson's recordings may sound like just another dusty Delta blues musician wailing away. But a careful listen reveals that Johnson was a revisionist in his time... Johnson's tortured soul vocals and anxiety-ridden guitar playing aren't found in the cotton-field blues of his contemporaries.^[66]

Voice

An important aspect of Johnson's singing was his use of microtonality. These subtle inflections of pitch help explain why his singing conveys such powerful emotion. Eric Clapton described Johnson's music as "the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice." In two takes of "Me and the Devil Blues" he shows a high degree of precision in the complex vocal delivery of the last verse: "The range of tone he can pack into a few lines is astonishing."^[67] The song's "hip humor and sophistication" is often overlooked. "[G]enerations of blues writers in search of wild Delta primitivism," wrote Wald, have been inclined to overlook or undervalue aspects that show Johnson as a polished professional performer.^[68]
Johnson is also known for using the guitar as "the other vocalist in the song", a technique later perfected by B. B. King and his personified guitar named Lucille': "In Africa and in Afro-American tradition, there is the tradition of the talking instrument, beginning with the drums ... the one-strand and then the six-strings with bottleneck-style performance; it becomes a competing voice ...or a complementary voice ... in the performance."^[60]
Bob Dylan wrote that "When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard. The songs weren't customary blues songs. They were so utterly fluid. At first they went by quick, too quick to even get. They jumped all over the place in range and subject matter, short punchy verses that resulted in some panoramic story-fires of mankind blasting off the surface of this spinning piece of plastic."^[69]

Instrument

Johnson mastered the guitar, being considered today one of the all-time greats on the instrument. His approach was highly complex and extremely advanced musically. When Keith Richards was first introduced to Johnson's music by his bandmate Brian Jones, he asked, "Who is the other guy playing with him?", not realizing it was Johnson playing one guitar. "I was hearing two guitars, and it took a long time to actually realise he was doing it all by himself,"^[70] said Richards, who later stated that "Robert Johnson was like an orchestra all by himself."^[66] "As for his guitar technique, it's politely reedy but ambitiously eclectic—moving effortlessly from hen-picking and bottleneck slides to a full deck of chucka-chucka rhythm figures."^[66]

Lyrics

In The Story with Dick Gordon, Bill Ferris, of American Public Media, said, "Robert Johnson I think of in the same way I think of the British Romantic poets, Keats and Shelley, who burned out early, who were geniuses at wordsmithing poetry ... The Blues, if anything, are deeply sexual. You know, 'my car doesn't run, I'm gonna check my oil' ... 'if you don't like my apples, don't shake my tree'. Every verse has sexuality associated with it."^[60]

Influences

Johnson fused approaches specific to Delta blues to those from the broader music world. The slide guitar work on "Rambling on My Mind" is pure Delta and Johnson's vocal there has "a touch of ... Son House rawness," but the train imitation on the bridge is not at all typical of Delta blues, and is more like something out of minstrel show music or vaudeville.^[71] Johnson did record versions of "Preaching the Blues" and "Walking Blues" in the older bluesman's vocal and guitar style (House's chronology has been questioned by Guralnick). As with the first take of "Come On In My Kitchen," the influence of Skip James is evident in James's "Devil Got My Woman", but the lyrics rise to the level of first-rate poetry, and Johnson sings with a strained voice found nowhere else in his recorded output.^[72]

The sad, romantic "Love in Vain" successfully blends several of Johnson's disparate influences. The form, including the wordless last verse, follows Leroy Carr's last hit "When the Sun Goes Down"; the words of the last sung verse come directly from a song Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded in 1926.^[73] Johnson's last recording, "Milkcow's Calf Blues" is his most direct tribute to Kokomo Arnold, who wrote "Milkcow Blues" and who influenced Johnson's vocal style.^[74]

"From Four Until Late" shows Johnson's mastery of a blues style not usually associated with the Delta. He croons the lyrics in a manner reminiscent of Lonnie Johnson, and his guitar style is more that of a ragtime-influenced player like Blind Blake.^[75] Lonnie Johnson's influence on Robert Johnson is even clearer in two other departures from the usual Delta style: "Malted Milk" and "Drunken Hearted Man". Both copy the arrangement of Lonnie Johnson's "Life Saver Blues".^[76] The two takes of "Me and the Devil Blues" show the influence of Peetie Wheatstraw, calling into question the interpretation of this piece as "the spontaneous heart-cry of a demon-driven folk artist."^[68]

Legacy

Johnson has had enormous impact on music and musicians—but outside his own time and place and even the genre for which he was famous. His influence on contemporaries was much smaller, due in part to the fact that he was an itinerant performer—playing mostly on street corners, in juke joints, and at Saturday night dances—who worked in a then undervalued style of music. He also died young after recording only a handful of songs. Johnson, though well-traveled and admired in his performances, was little noted in his lifetime, his records even less so. "Terraplane Blues", sometimes described as Johnson's only hit record, outsold his others, but was still only a minor success.

If one had asked black blues fans about Robert Johnson in the first twenty years after his death, writes Elijah Wald, "the response in the vast majority of cases would have been a puzzled 'Robert who?'" This lack of recognition extended to black musicians: "As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note".^[77] Columbia Records released the album King of the Delta Blues Singers, a compilation of Johnson's recordings, in 1961, which introduced his work to a much wider audience—fame and recognition he only received long after his death.

Rock and roll

Johnson's greatest influence has been on genres of music that developed after his death: rock and roll and rock. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included four of his songs in a set of 500^[78] they deemed to have shaped the genre:

• “Sweet Home Chicago” (1936)
• “Cross Road Blues” (1936)
• “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937)
• “Love in Vain” (1937)

Johnson recorded these songs a decade and a half before the advent of rock and roll, dying a year or two later. The Museum inducted him as an early influence in their first induction ceremony in 1986, almost a half century after his death. Marc Meyers, of the Wall Street Journal, wrote that "His 'Stop Breakin' Down Blues' from 1937 is so far ahead of its time that the song could easily have been a rock demo cut in 1954."^[66]

Rock music and related genres

Many of the artists who claim to have been influenced by Johnson the most, injecting his revolutionary stylings into their work and recording tribute songs and collections, are prominent rock musicians from the United Kingdom. His impact on these musicians—who contributed to and helped to define rock and roll and rock music—came from the compilation of his works released in 1961 by Columbia Records (King of the Delta Blues Singers).

Brian Jones, of the Rolling Stones, introduced his bandmate Keith Richards to his first Robert Johnson album. The blues master's recordings would have as much impact on him as on Mick Jagger. The group performed his "Walkin' Blues" at the Rock and Roll Circus in 1968. They arranged their own version of "Love in Vain" for their album Let It Bleed and recorded "Stop Breakin' Down Blues" for Exile on Main Street. Mick Jagger, in the role of Turner in the 1970 film Performance, performed excerpts from "Come On In My Kitchen" and "Me and the Devil Blues."

Alexis Korner, who has been called "the Founding Father of British Blues", co-wrote and recorded a song entitled "Robert Johnson" for The Party Album released in 1978. Other examples of the influence he had on English blues and blues-rock musicians and musical groups include:

• Eric Clapton considers Johnson "the most important blues musician who ever lived."^[70] He recorded enough of his songs to make Me and Mr. Johnson, a blues-rock album released in 2004 as a tribute to the legendary bluesman (it was also used in the film Sessions for Robert J). He earlier recorded "Crossroads", an arrangement of "Cross Road Blues", with Cream in 1968, leading some to consider him "the man largely responsible for making Robert Johnson a household name."^[79]
• Robert Plant, of Led Zeppelin, referred to him on the NPR radio program Fresh Air (recorded in 2004) as “Robert Johnson, to whom we all owed our existence, in some way.” His group recorded "Traveling Riverside Blues", a song that drew from Johnson's original and quoted a number of his songs; the accompanying music video showed images from the Delta, which Johnson often wrote about.
• Fleetwood Mac was strongly influenced by Johnson in the group's early years as a British blues band. Guitarist Jeremy Spencer contributed two covers of Johnson-derived songs to the group's early albums, and lead guitarist Peter Green later recorded Johnson's entire catalogue in two albums, The Robert Johnson Songbook and Hot Foot Powder.

Sam Dunn's documentary Metal Evolution cites Johnson as the "great grandfather to all things heavy metal", with members of the bands Rush and Slipknot agreeing that he played a major role in the development of rock music.
Bob Dylan wrote of Johnson in his 2004 autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, "If I hadn't heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn't have felt free enough or upraised enough to write."^[69]

Guitar technique

Johnson with an L-1 Gibson guitar, subsequently reissued by Gibson as a tribute to Johnson

Johnson's revolutionary guitar playing has led contemporary experts, assessing his talents through the handful of old recordings available, to rate him among the greatest guitar players of all time:

• In 1990 Spin magazine rated him first in its list of "35 Guitar Gods"—on the 52nd anniversary of his death.^[80]
• In 2008 Rolling Stone magazine ranked him fifth on their list of "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time"—70 years after he died.^[4]
• In 2010 Guitar.com ranked him ninth in its list of "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time"—72 years after he died.^[81]

Musicians who proclaim Johnson's profound impact on them—including Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton—all rated in the top ten with him on each of these lists. The boogie bass line he fashioned for "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" has now passed into the standard guitar repertoire. At the time it was completely new, a guitarist's version of something people would otherwise have heard only from a piano.^[82]

Lifetime achievement

The Complete Recordings, a double-disc box set released by Sony/Columbia Legacy on August 28, 1990, containing almost everything Robert Johnson ever recorded, with all 29 recordings (and 12 alternate takes) won a Grammy Award for “Best Historical Album” that year. In 2006 he was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (accepted by his son Claud).

Use in advertisements

Johnson's recordings, such as "Sweet Home Chicago", have been used by companies and nonprofit organizations for marketing purposes. "Sweet Home Chicago" is played at many events in Chicago.^[83]

Problems of biography

The thing about Robert Johnson was that he only existed on his records. He was pure legend.

–Martin Scorsese, Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson

Very little of Johnson's early life is known with certainty. Two marriage licenses for Johnson have been located in county records offices. The ages given in these certificates point to different birth dates, as do the entries showing his attendance at Indian Creek School, in Tunica, Mississippi. That he was not listed among his mother's children in the 1910 census^[8] casts further doubt on these dates. Carrie Thompson claimed that her mother, who was also Robert's mother, remembered his birth date as May 8, 1911. The 1920 census gives his age as 7, suggesting he was born in 1912 or 1913.^[84] Five significant dates from his career are documented: Monday, Thursday and Friday, November 23, 26, and 27, 1936, at a recording session in San Antonio, Texas; and Saturday and Sunday, June 19 and 20, 1937, at a recording session in Dallas. His death certificate, discovered in 1968, lists the date and location of his death.^[85]
Johnson's records were admired by record collectors from the time of their first release and efforts were made to discover his biography, with virtually no success. Blues researcher Mack McCormick began researching his family background, but was never ready to publish. McCormick's research eventually became as much a legend as Johnson himself. In 1982, McCormick permitted Peter Guralnick to publish a summary in Living Blues (1982), later reprinted in book form as Searching for Robert Johnson.^[86] Later research has sought to confirm this account or to add minor details. A revised summary acknowledging major informants was written by Stephen LaVere for the booklet accompanying the compilation album Robert Johnson, The Complete Recordings (1990), and is maintained with updates at the Delta Haze website.^[87] The documentary film The Search for Robert Johnson contains accounts by McCormick and Wardlow of what informants have told them: long interviews of David Honeyboy Edwards and Johnny Shines and short interviews of surviving friends and family. These published biographical sketches achieve coherent narratives, partly by ignoring reminiscences and hearsay accounts which contradict or conflict with other accounts.
A relatively full account of Johnson's brief musical career emerged in the 1960s, largely from accounts by Son House, Johnny Shines, David Honeyboy Edwards and Robert Lockwood. In 1961, the sleeve notes to the album King of the Delta Blues Singers included reminiscences of Don Law who had recorded Johnson in 1936. Law added to the mystique surrounding Johnson, representing him as very young and extraordinarily shy.

Photographs

The two confirmed images of Johnson were located in 1973, in the possession of his half-sister Carrie Thompson, but were not widely published until the late 1980s. A third photo, purporting to show Johnson posing with the blues musician Johnny Shines, was published in the November 2008 issue of Vanity Fair magazine.^[88] It was declared authentic by the forensic artist Lois Gibson and by Johnson's estate in 2013.^[89] The authenticity of the third photo has been disputed by some music historians, including Elijah Wald and Gayle Dean Wardlow, who considered that the clothing suggests a date after Johnson's death and that the photograph may have been reversed and retouched.^[90] In December 2015 a fourth photograph was published, purportedly showing Johnson, his wife Calletta Craft, Estella Coleman, and Robert Lockwood Jr.^[91] This photograph was also declared authentic by Lois Gibson, but her identification of Johnson has been dismissed by other facial recognition experts and blues historians.^[92][93] In his book Searching for Robert Johnson, Peter Guralnick stated that the blues archivist Mack McCormick showed him a photograph of Johnson with his nephew Louis, probably taken at the same time as the famous "pinstripe suit" photograph, showing Louis dressed in his United States Navy uniform. This photograph has never been made public.

Playback speed hypothesis

In The Guardian's music blog from May 2010, Jon Wilde speculated that Johnson's recordings may have been "accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78 [rpm records], or else were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting."^[94] He does not give a source for this statement. Biographer Elijah Wald and other musicologists dispute this hypothesis on various grounds, including that Johnson's extant recordings were made on five different days, spread across two years at two different studios, making uniform speed changes or malfunctions highly improbable.^[95] In addition, fellow musicians, contemporaries and family who worked with or witnessed Johnson perform spoke of his recordings for more than 70 years preceding Wilde's hypothesis without ever suggesting that the speed of his performances had been altered.^[95]

Descendants

Johnson left no will. In 1998, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that Claud Johnson, a retired truck driver living in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, was the son of Robert Johnson and his sole heir. The court heard that he had been born to Virgie Jane Smith (later Virgie Jane Cain), who had a relationship with Robert Johnson in 1931. The relationship was attested to by a friend, Eula Mae Williams, but other relatives descended from Robert Johnson's half-sister, Carrie Harris Thompson, contested Claud Johnson's claim. The effect of the judgment was to allow Claud Johnson to receive over $1 million in royalties.^[96] Claud Johnson died, aged 83, on June 30, 2015, leaving six children.^[97]

Discography

Main article: Robert Johnson discography

	Traveling Riverside Blues Menu 0:00 Cross Road Blues Menu 0:00
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Eleven 78-rpm records by Johnson were released by Vocalion Records during his lifetime. A twelfth was issued posthumously.^[98] Johnson's estate hold the copyrights to his songs.
The Complete Recordings, a two-disc set, released on August 28, 1990, contains almost everything Johnson recorded, with all 29 recordings, and 12 alternate takes. (Another alternate take of "Traveling Riverside Blues" which was released by Sony on the CD King of the Delta Blues Singers and was included in early printings of the paperback edition of Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta.)^[99]
To celebrate Johnson's 100th birthday, May 8, 2011, Sony Legacy released Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection, a re-mastered 2-CD set of all 42 of his recordings^[100] and two brief fragments, one of Johnson practicing a guitar figure and the other of Johnson saying, presumably to engineer Don Law, "I wanna go on with our next one myself."^[100] Reviewers commented that the sound quality of the 2011 release was a substantial improvement on the 1990 release.^[101]

Awards and recognitions

Grammy Awards

Year	Category	Title	Genre	Label	Results
1990	Best Historical Album	The Complete Recordings	Blues	Sony/Columbia Legacy	Winner

Grammy Hall of Fame

Year Recorded	Title	Genre	Label	Year Inducted
1936	Cross Road Blues	Blues (Single)	Vocalion	1998

National Recording Registry

The National Recording Preservation Board added The Complete Recordings to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2003.^[102] The board annually selects songs that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" for inclusion in the Registry.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included four songs by Johnson in its list of the "500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll".^[103] A memorial to him reads, "Robert Johnson stands at the crossroads of American music, much as a popular folk legend has it he once stood at Mississippi crossroads and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar-playing prowess.^[3]

Year Recorded	Title
1936	"Sweet Home Chicago"
1936	"Cross Road Blues"
1937	"Hellhound on My Trail"
1937	"Love in Vain"

Blues Foundation awards

Robert Johnson: Blues Music Awards[104]
Year	Category	Title	Result
1991	Vintage or Reissue Album	The Complete Recordings	Winner

Honors and inductions

On September 17, 1994, the U.S. Post Office issued a Robert Johnson 29-cent commemorative postage stamp.^[105]

Year	Title	Results	Notes
2006	Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award	Winner	accepted by son Claud Johnson
2000	Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame[106]	Inducted
1986	Rock and Roll Hall of Fame	Inducted	Early Influences
1980	Blues Hall of Fame	Inducted

Tribute albums

Tribute albums to Robert Johnson include:

Year	Artist	Album
1998	Peter Green Splinter Group	The Robert Johnson Songbook
2000	Peter Green Splinter Group	Hot Foot Powder
2001	Peter Green Splinter Group	Me and the Devil (set of 3 CDs, consisting of the Robert Johnson Songbook and Hot Foot Powder and 1 CD of original recordings by Johnson)
2003	John Hammond	At the Crossroads
2004	Eric Clapton	Me and Mr. Johnson
2006	Rory Block	The Lady and Mr Johnson (2007 Acoustic Blues Album of the Year)
2006	Thunder	Robert Johnson's Tombstone
2010	Todd Rundgren	Todd Rundgren's Johnson
2011	Big Head Blues Club	100 Years of Robert Johnson

See also

• Robert Johnson (guitars)

References

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"Handwritten note on the back of Johnson's death certificate" (JPG). Blues.jfrewald.com. Retrieved 2015-09-06.

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• Blesh, Rudi (1946). "Jazz Begins", quoted in Hamilton, Marybeth (2007). In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-06018-X.
• Charters, Samuel B. (1959). The Country Blues. Rinehart.
• Charters, Samuel B. (1967). The Bluesman: The Story of the Music of the Men Who Made the Blues. Oak Publications.
• Charters, Samuel B. (1973). Robert Johnson. Oak Publication. ISBN 0-8256-0059-6.
• Edwards, David Honeyboy (1997). The World Don't Owe Me Nothing. The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards. Chicago Review Press. ISBN 1-55652-368-8.
• Evans, David (1971). Tommy Johnson. Studio Vista. ISBN 978-0289701515
• Freeland, Tom (2000). "Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life". Living Blues no. 150, March/April 200. p. 49.
• Gioia, Ted (2008). Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-33750-1.
• Graves, Tom (2008). Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. DeMers Books. ISBN 978-0-9816002-1-5.
• Greenberg, Alan (1983). Love in Vain: The Life and Legend of Robert Johnson. Doubleday Books. ISBN 0-385-15679-0. (Revised as Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson, 1994. Foreword by Martin Scorsese. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80557-X.)
• Guralnick, Peter (1989). Searching for Robert Johnson. E. P. Dutton. ISBN 0-525-24801-3. (Paperback edition, 1998, Plume. ISBN 0-452-27949-6.)
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External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Robert Johnson (musician).

• Robert Johnson Death Certificate. State of Mississippi.
• Robert Johnson at Find a Grave
• Bluesman's Son Gets His Due Ellen Barry, Los Angeles Times. June 2, 2004. Johnson Legal Battle.
• [1]. Knopper, Steve. "'Sweet Home Chicago' leaves sour taste for some". Chicago Tribune. 30 May 2002. Pages 1–2. 9 September 2015.