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"
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.
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.
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