Robert Johnson

If the blues possesses a figure of truly mythic proportions, whose tale looms across the genre much as Charlie Parker's does across jazz or Hank Williams' does across country, that figure is Robert Johnson, without question the most revered name in blues history. His stature gains further weight from the modest but profound body of recordings he left, widely regarded as the emotional summit of the form. Those sides quickly became blues standards ("Love in Vain," "Crossroads," "Sweet Home Chicago," "Stop Breaking Down") and were later reworked by rock & roll acts ranging from the Rolling Stones and Steve Miller to Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton. As a vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist of rare ability, Johnson fashioned some of the music's finest creations while simultaneously embodying its most enduring myth. The image of a haunted, demon-driven talent cut down in his prime has rendered him a character so larger-than-life that, had he never lived, some romantic biographer would surely have invented him.

Even listeners unfamiliar with the blues can recite the essentials of his story, which runs roughly as follows: a young Black man working on a Mississippi plantation, Johnson nursed an all-consuming wish to master the blues. He was told to carry his guitar to a crossroads near Dockery's plantation at midnight, where the Devil appeared, accepted the instrument, retuned it, and returned it. Within a year, in return for his immortal soul, Johnson had become the preeminent Delta blues singer, capable of performing and composing blues of unmatched power.

Fame arrived through road performances and phonograph records, yet Johnson stayed tormented, pursued by visions of hellhounds. Only music offered relief from his anguish. Just as plans were being made to present him at Carnegie Hall in John Hammond's inaugural Spirituals to Swing concert, word reached New York that Johnson had died in Mississippi, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend during a jook-joint engagement. Witnesses recalled him foaming at the mouth, crawling on hands and knees, barking and lunging at those nearby like a rabid dog. His final utterance, whether spoken or scribbled on a scrap of paper, was: "I pray that my redeemer will come and take me from my grave." He was placed in a pine box and laid in an unmarked grave, the supposed bargain with the Devil concluded.

In truth, Johnson's musical education was broader and more earthbound than the legend allows, however often the tale has been repeated or embroidered. As a teenage field hand he dabbled with the harmonica but displayed no conspicuous instrumental gifts. Repeated attempts to join established players such as Son House, Charley Patton, and Willie Brown drew only laughter from the older musicians. Son House later remembered: "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." After an early marriage and the death of his first wife in childbirth, Johnson left Robinsonville, roamed the Delta with Hazelhurst as his base, and resolved to make music his livelihood. When he reappeared in Robinsonville a few years later and performed alongside House and Willie Brown at a juke joint in Banks, Mississippi, the veteran players were stunned. House recalled, "When he finished all our mouths were standing open. I said, 'Well, ain't that fast! He's gone now!'" The only explanation anyone could offer was that Johnson had traded his soul to the Devil.

His actual progress, however, owed more to diligent study than to any infernal pact. He revered the Delta star Lonnie Johnson, occasionally presenting himself to strangers as "Robert Lonnie, one of the Johnson brothers," and drew inspiration from Scrapper Blackwell, Skip James, and Kokomo Arnold. His slide technique developed through countless hours observing local masters including Charley Patton and Son House. An even greater influence came from the unrecorded guitarist Ike Zinneman. Although Zinneman's own playing remains undocumented, accounts agree that he practiced after dark in the local graveyard, perched on tombstones. After roughly a year under Zinneman's guidance, Johnson reemerged with comprehensive command of the guitar, the capacity to sing and play in numerous styles, and a meticulously assembled repertoire whose lyrics he kept in a private notebook. Working country suppers and street corners, he was expected to handle everything from blues to the pop and hillbilly songs of the era; his skills met every demand. His most lasting innovation, the boogie bass figure executed on the lower strings (derived from piano practice), became a defining element of down-home blues. That sound underpins the work of Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, Eddie Taylor, Lightnin' Slim, Hound Dog Taylor, and countless others. His occasional partner Johnny Shines observed, "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." Though his music sits clearly within a recognizable lineage, what he accomplished with that inheritance stands apart.

Johnson never recorded as extensively as Lonnie Johnson, Charley Patton, or Blind Lemon Jefferson, yet he covered more territory than all three combined. When his first sides appeared and "Terraplane Blues" emerged as his signature piece, a "race" record that sold several thousand copies in the mid-1930s counted as a hit. Johnson took to the road, performing wherever an audience could be found. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, he traveled the length of the Delta and reached St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit, where he appeared on the Elder Moten Hour radio broadcast, places that Son House and Charley Patton knew only from films. The end arrived during a Saturday-night dance at a juke joint in Three Forks, Mississippi, in August 1938. Sharing the stage with Honeyboy Edwards and Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), Johnson accepted a jar of moonshine laced with poison or lye, apparently supplied by the husband of a woman to whom he had paid attention. He played on until illness forced him to stop, then was taken to a boarding house in Greenwood fifteen miles away. After several days he seemed to have perspired the toxin from his body, only to contract pneumonia; he died on 16 August. The legend was just beginning.

In the mid-1960s Columbia issued King of the Delta Blues Singers, the first anthology of Johnson's work and one of the earliest collections devoted solely to country blues. Its liner notes offered more romantic conjecture than documented fact, and a painting substituted for a photograph; for years this album served as most listeners' only introduction to the music and the story. A second volume, containing additional master takes and alternates, appeared in the 1970s and allowed fans to hear material previously available only on bootlegs or through covers by British rock musicians. Finally, in 1990, after prolonged legal proceedings, a two-CD box set presented every surviving Johnson recording together with the only two known photographs of the artist. Sony, Columbia's parent company, projected sales of perhaps 20,000 copies; the set ultimately surpassed one million units, the first blues release ever to reach that mark.

In the years since, Johnson's name and image have fueled a brisk merchandising trade. Posters, postcards, T-shirts, guitar picks, strings, straps, and polishing cloths bearing either his likeness or his signature (taken from his second marriage certificate) are now commonplace, transforming him into the ultimate blues commodity whose features are reproduced for profit more than those of any other blues musician, living or dead. Neither the man nor his contemporaries could have foreseen such an outcome, yet both the music and the legend persist.