The Styrous® Viewfinder: Robert Leroy Johnson ~ Pact with the devil

I have learned so much about music from films; a case in point is one I saw in 1986, an American musical drama film, inspired by the legend of Robert Leroy Johnson (link below). It was directed by Walter Hill from a screenplay by John Fusco, and stars Ralph Macchio, Joe Seneca and Jami Gertz with an original score by Ry Cooder and classical guitar by William Kanengiser and harmonica by Sonny Terry. Steve Vai appears in the film as the devil's virtuosic guitar player in the climactic guitar duel.

Today is the birthday of Robert Leroy Johnson, the most influential blues man nobody ever heard of. His singing, guitar playing and songwriting on his landmark 1936 and 1937 recordings have influenced later generations of musicians. Although his recording career spanned only seven months, he is recognized as a master of the blues, particularly the Delta blues style, and as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as perhaps "the first ever rock star"

In late 1938, John Hammond sought him out for a concert at Carnegie Hall, From Spirituals to Swing, only to discover that Johnson had recently died. Hammond was a producer for Columbia Records which bought Johnson's original recordings from Brunswick Records which owned them. The musicologist Alan Lomax went to Mississippi in 1941 to record Johnson, also not knowing of his death. In 1961, Columbia released an album of Johnson's recordings titled King of the Delta Blues Singers, produced by producer and music historian Frank Driggs. It is credited with bringing Johnson's work to a wider audience.

Eric Clapton called Johnson "the most important blues singer that ever lived". With the group Cream he recorded a cover of Johnson's Crossroads in 1968. Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, and Robert Plant have cited both Johnson's lyrics and musicianship as key influences on their own work.

In 1983, Johnson's Hell Hound on My Trail was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame as a "Classic of Blues Recording". Writing for the Foundation, Jim O'Neal described it as "among the deepest and darkest of Johnson's legendary blues masterworks." The song is listed as one of the NPR "100 most important American musical works of the 20th century"

In 2013, Soap&Skin did a cover of Me and the Devil Blues by Johnson, released as a single in 1938. It tells the story of the singer's waking up one morning to the devil knocking on the door, telling him that "it's time to go." The lyrics concluded with the lines "You may bury my body down by the highway side" / "So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride."

In 1969, the Rolling Stones recorded an updated rendition of Love In Vain featuring an electric slide guitar solo on their Let It Bleed album. The popularity of their adaptation led to a lawsuit over the copyright, which was eventually resolved in favor of Johnson's estate. Various artists have recorded the song. Critic Richie Unterberger describes it as "as close to the roots of acoustic down-home blues as the Stones ever got". Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards recalled:

"For a time we thought the songs that were on that first album [King of the Delta Blues] were the only recordings (Robert Johnson had) made, and then suddenly around '67 or '68 up comes this second (bootleg) collection that included "Love in Vain". "Love in Vain" was such a beautiful song.

Much of his story has been reconstructed by researchers. Johnson's poorly documented life and death have given rise to legends. The one most often associated with him is that he sold his soul to the devil at a local crossroads in return for musical success. Much of what is known about him was reconstructed by researchers such as Gayle Dean Wardlow and Bruce Conforth, especially in their 2019 award-winning biography of Johnson: Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson (Chicago Review Press). Two films, the 1991 documentary The Search for Robert Johnson by John Hammond Jr., and a 1997 documentary, Can't You Hear the Wind Howl?: The Life & Music of Robert Johnson, which included reconstructed scenes with Keb' Mo' as Johnson, attempted to document his life, and demonstrated the difficulties arising from the scant historical record and conflicting oral accounts.

Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in, 1911,to Julia Major Dodds and Noah Johnson. 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 lynch mob to leave Hazlehurst following a dispute with white landowners. Julia left Hazlehurst with baby Robert, but in less than two years she took the boy to Memphis to live with her husband, who had changed his name to Charles Spencer. Robert spent the next 8–9 years growing up in Memphis and attending the Carnes Avenue Colored School where he received lessons in arithmetic, reading, language, music, geography, and physical exercise. It was in Memphis that he acquired his love for, and knowledge of, the blues and popular music. His education and city upbringing placed him apart from most of his contemporary blues musicians.

When his mother informed Robert about his biological father, he adopted the surname Johnson, using it on the certificate of his marriage to fourteen-year-old Virginia Travis in February 1929. She died in childbirth shortly after. 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 believed 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.

Johnson went to Martinsville, close to his birthplace, possibly searching for his natural father. Here he mastered the guitar style of House and learned other styles from Isaiah "Ike" Zimmerman. Zimmerman was rumored to have learned supernaturally to play guitar by visiting graveyards at midnight. Johnson seemed to have miraculously developed a mature guitar technique. Blues musician Son 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.

Over the years, the significance of Johnson and his music has been recognized by the Rock and Roll, Grammy, and Blues Halls of Fame, and by the National Recording Preservation Board.

His death like his life, was obscure and vague; Johnson died on August 16, 1938, at the age of 27, near Greenwood, Mississippi, of unknown causes. It is likely he had congenital syphilis and it was suspected later by medical professionals that this may have been a contributing factor in his death. According to one theory, Johnson was murdered by the jealous husband of a woman with whom he had flirted. In an account by the blues musician David 'Honeyboy' Edwards, Johnson had been flirting with a married woman at a dance, and she gave him a bottle of whiskey poisoned by her husband. When Johnson took the bottle, Edwards 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. Witnesses reported that he died in a convulsive state of severe pain. The 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 declined to reveal the man's name.

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.

In their 2019 book Up Jumped the Devil, Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow suggest that the poison was naphthalene, from dissolved mothballs. This was "a common way of poisoning people in the rural South", but was rarely fatal. However, Johnson had been diagnosed with an ulcer and with esophageal varices, and the poison was sufficient to cause them to hemorrhage. He died after two days of severe abdominal pain, vomiting, and bleeding from the mouth.

The Leflore County registrar, Cornelia Jordan, years later and after conducting an investigation into Johnson's death for the state director of vital statistics, R. N. Whitfield, wrote a clarifying note on the back of 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.

In 2006, a medical practitioner, David Connell, suggested, on the basis of photographs showing Johnson's "unnaturally long fingers" and "one bad eye", that Johnson may have had Marfan syndrome, which could have both affected his guitar playing and contributed to his death due to aortic dissection.