Robert Johnson

The documented facts of Robert Johnson’s life would fit on an index card: born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi in 1911; an itinerant musician across the Delta and beyond in the 1930s; two recording sessions, in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937), yielding twenty-nine songs; dead at twenty-seven in August 1938. One minor hit in his lifetime (“Terraplane Blues”); two confirmed photographs (Guralnick 1989).

The music is another matter. Johnson synthesized everything the Delta had developed — Son House’s intensity, Charley Patton’s rhythm, the walking boogie bass he adapted to guitar — into compact, haunted, perfectly constructed songs: “Cross Road Blues,” “Hellhound on My Trail,” “Come On in My Kitchen,” “Sweet Home Chicago.” When Columbia reissued the recordings as King of the Delta Blues Singers in 1961, they detonated among young musicians: Eric Clapton called him “the most important blues singer that ever lived,” and the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and the whole blues-rock generation treated the album as scripture (Wald 2004).

This site flags the legends explicitly (see the panel on this page): the crossroads pact is folklore, not biography, and even his cause of death is uncertain. Wald’s larger point is worth keeping in view — in 1937 Johnson was a working entertainer of modest fame; “the king of the Delta blues” is a crown placed on his grave by later listeners. Both halves of that story, the music and the myth-making, are part of how the blues became “the blues.”