One of many first inductees into the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame, Robert Johnson (1911-1938) was a legendary blues musician, whose affect spanned a number of generations and genres. A superb guitarist and masterful storyteller, Johnson’s songs – and the intrigue surrounding his quick life and dying – have made for a novel legacy in musical historical past. Beneath, we’re making an attempt to reply just a few key questions on Robert Johnson’s life to offer you an understanding of what made him so essential.
What was Robert Johnson’s adolescence like?
When Robert Leroy Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi on or round Might 8, 1911, his life was already atypical. His mom, Julia Dodds, had birthed ten youngsters forward of him – all together with her sharecropper husband, Charles. However Robert was born out of wedlock; fathered by a plantation employee named Noah Johnson.
Forward of Johnson’s start, Charles Dodds was pressured to relocate to Memphis and alter his title, after being chased out of city by distinguished, white landowners. When Johnson was simply three or 4, he joined Dodds (now Spencer) in Tennessee. Within the metropolis, the younger boy’s world opened up. He attended college and found fashionable music, whereas his older brother taught him the right way to play the guitar. After a number of years, he returned to the Mississippi Delta, the place he joined his mom and her new husband, Dusty Willis. However Johnson had already been bitten by the music bug, and was way more excited by his craft than working the fields.
At 19, Johnson married Virginia Travis. Sadly, only one 12 months later, Travis died throughout childbirth. Not lengthy after, in 1931, Robert married his second spouse, Colleta Craft. Sadly, she too would go away inside just a few years.
How did he set up himself as a musician?
After his foundational years in Memphis, Johnson continued to follow the guitar, whereas classmates remembered him taking part in the jaw harp and the harmonica in class.
One of many earliest accounts of Johnson as a musician comes from Delta blues pioneer Son Home, who first encountered the younger artist round 1930 in Robinsonville, Mississippi. Home recalled that Johnson “blew a harmonica and he was pretty good with that, but he wanted to play guitar.” Johnson’s guitar expertise, based on Home, had been lower than stellar. The truth is, the elder musician referred to his makes an attempt as “such a racket you’d never heard!… ‘Get that guitar away from that boy,’ people would say, ‘he’s running people crazy with it.’”
Simply two years later, when Johnson returned from his travels throughout the Delta, he performed as soon as once more for Son and fellow musician Willie Brown. This time, nonetheless, they had been staggered by his enchancment. “He was so good,” marveled Home. “When he finished, all our mouths were standing open.”
Johnson quickly ventured past the Delta area, performing throughout the South, in addition to in such blues hotspots as Chicago, New York, Detroit, and St. Louis. As legend has it, the artist usually concentrated his efficiency on only one lady within the viewers; a dangerous enterprise in a world the place males had been completely satisfied to struggle once they felt aggrieved.
The artist usually toured with fellow bluesman Johnny Shines, who later recalled that Johnson was at all times neat and tidy, regardless of days spent touring dusty Delta highways. Shines additionally shared that Johnson was simply as more likely to carry out different individuals’s songs, in addition to his personal rising repertoire. On any given evening, his set may need included materials from Bing Crosby, Blind Willie McTell, Lonnie Johnson, or Jimmie Rodgers. Like a lot of his friends, Johnson carried out songs that his viewers requested; songs that earned him cash.
What had been his notable recordings?
Round 1936, Johnson paid a go to to H.C. Speir, a file store proprietor and expertise scout in Jackson, Mississippi. Like a lot of his contemporaries, Johnson wished to place his music on tape. Speir related the artist with ARC information and producer Don Legislation, who would go on to supervise Columbia Information’ Nation Music division and work with the likes of Johnny Money, Jimmy Dean, and Ray Value.
On November 23, 1936, Johnson traveled to San Antonio, TX to file the primary of his 29 sides with Legislation. The artist was allegedly paid round $100.00 for a number of days of labor. The next June, he returned to Texas, this time working with Legislation at a studio in Dallas.
These periods – going down over a complete of 5 days – produced Robert Johnson’s total catalog of recordings, practically all of which have develop into requirements within the blues canon. Whereas 12 double-sided singles had been launched between 1937-1939, a bigger assortment of alternate takes can be unearthed lengthy after Johnson’s dying.
Johnson’s first 78 file (“Terraplane Blues” coupled with “Kind Hearted Woman Blues”) was a average, regional hit, and proved to be probably the most commercially profitable launch of his lifetime. Different highlights embody “Love in Vain” (later tailored by The Rolling Stones), the oft-covered “32-20 Blues,” and “I’ll Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” which Elmore James famously recorded in 1951. James’ model was inducted into the Blues Corridor of Fame, the Grammy Corridor of Fame, and the Library of Congress’ Nationwide Recording Registry.
“Sweet Home Chicago” grew to become one other favourite of Johnson’s, whereas his highly effective performances of “Come on in My Kitchen” and “Hell Hound on My Trail” have lengthy been admired by musicians and historians alike. “Cross Road Blues” would even be coated by Elmore James, and later, by Eric Clapton and Cream. Clapton’s first vocal recording, in the meantime, was a canopy of Johnson’s “Ramblin’ On My Mind,” and appeared on John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers’ 1966 LP, Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton.
As was the custom in blues music, a lot of Johnson’s compositions borrowed parts from different artists’ songs. His singular skills, nonetheless, are what made these recordings so exceptional. Johnson’s vocal supply was complicated and extremely emotive, thanks partly to his refined, but efficient, pitch inflections (often called microtonality). He was additionally admired by future generations of singer-songwriters for his deft lyricism. In Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Quantity One, the folks legend wrote that Johnson’s tunes “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.”
Why was Robert Johnson’s guitar approach so revolutionary?
The ultimate factor that made Johnson’s recordings so distinctive was his extraordinary guitar approach. The artist, who was usually related to Gibson guitars, used his instrument like a second voice. His eclectic model provided a full sound – one which prompted Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards to declare, “Robert Johnson was like an orchestra all by himself.” Whereas the supply of Johnson’s dexterity was shrouded in thriller (and was a major a part of his legend), he has lengthy been thought-about to be one among historical past’s best guitarists.
What’s the thriller surrounding his dying?
After his last recording session in 1937, Johnson carried out round Texas, accompanied by Johnny Shines. They performed casual “juke joints,” events, and dances, simply as that they had at all times achieved, earlier than heading again to Mississippi. Particulars of the remainder of this 12 months are slim, though it’s identified that Robert spent a while in Memphis and Helena, Arkansas.
What is thought is that Robert died close to Greenwood, MS on August 16, 1938. He was 27 years outdated. His dying remained unreported for 30 years, and, and not using a formal post-mortem, the general public has been left to take a position on the reason for his dying, including to the lore that surrounds Johnson.
Via a wide range of accounts, together with these by fellow blues artists David “Honeyboy” Edwards and Sonny Boy Williamson, we all know that Johnson spent the final weeks of his life taking part in frequently at a juke joint hooked up to The Three Forks Retailer, simply outdoors of Greenwood. In a single model of the story, Johnson flirted with a girl on the celebration (presumably the spouse of the shop’s proprietor) and was poisoned by her jealous husband. He grew to become so sick that he needed to be taken into Greenwood, the place he perished.
In 1968, Mississippi journalist Gayle Dean Wardlow sought to search out out the reality about Johnson’s last days. Along with unearthing his dying certificates, Wardlow found that the artist might have been born with congenital syphilis. Based on a health care provider, it’s doable that he had an aneurysm attributable to syphilis and his love of ingesting moonshine. In a more moderen account, revealed in 2006 within the British Medical Journal, Dr. David Connell argues that, primarily based on Johnson’s look in pictures, the artist might have suffered from Marfan Syndrome. The genetic dysfunction, which impacts the physique’s connective tissue, might have contributed to Johnson’s early dying.
Johnson’s last resting spot can be simply as complicated as his dying. Right now, three headstones round Greenwood pay tribute to the bluesman. In 1990, Columbia Information erected a monument on the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, the place the artist was lengthy believed to be buried in an unmarked grave. That very same 12 months, an Atlanta band (aptly named The Tombstones) had a smaller marker positioned on the Payne Chapel in Quito, Mississippi, the place it was additionally alleged that Johnson was laid to relaxation. In 2000, an 85-year-old lady named Rosie Eksridge claimed that her husband had helped bury Johnson beneath a pecan tree at a church north of Greenwood, the place a 3rd gravestone now sits.
What’s the cope with Robert Johnson and the Satan?
Of all of the myths surrounding Johnson’s life, probably the most well-known one is a declare that the artist bought his soul to the Satan so as to develop into a well-known blues artist.
Residents of the Mississippi Delta roll their eyes when blues lovers ask in regards to the crossroads the place Johnson supposedly met the Satan. These within the know don’t trouble asking; they merely go to the junction of Freeway 61 and Freeway 49 and take a photograph.
However that modern-day spot the place the 2 highways meet is at the very least half a mile from the one that might have existed in Johnson’s lifetime. So, in reality, there are no precise crossroads.
In “Cross Road Blues,” Johnson sings an age-old story a few man’s selection between good and evil: “I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees/Requested the Lord above ‘Have mercy, now save poor Bob, if you please.’
There’s a longstanding Delta legend of a bluesman who waited by the facet of a abandoned crossroads one evening for Devil to come back and tune his guitar. It’s a narrative made extra related when coupled with Johnson’s frequent references to the Satan, together with within the tune “Me And The Devil Blues,” wherein he sings, “Me and the Devil, was walkin’ side by side.” Different songs like “Preachin’ Blues (Up Jumped The Devil)” and “Hell Hound on My Trail” assist mythologize the artist’s supposed cope with Devil.
However Johnson definitely was not the one blues artist who sang in regards to the Satan. Skip James, Tampa Pink, Lonnie Johnson, Joe Williams, and Peetie Wheatstraw, to call just a few, all sang of Devil – the latter artist even nicknamed himself “The Devil’s Son-in-Law” after one among his 1931 recordings.
Whereas Johnson’s unimaginable enhancements on the guitar, as detailed by Son Home, had been definitely miraculous, a 2008 story in Residing Blues Journal presents a extra viable rationalization. In that two-year interval, when Johnson first travelled the Delta, he met guitarist Ike Zimmerman, who took the younger artist beneath his tutelage. Based on blues scholar Bruce Conforth, Johnson spent the higher a part of a 12 months residing with Zimmerman, and learning his craft.
How has Robert Johnson’s music impacted fashionable music, who did he affect, and what’s his legacy?
In 1961, Columbia launched King of the Delta Blues Singers, a compilation of Johnson’s music. The album made its means into the arms of American folks artists, together with Bob Dylan, and shortly grew to become an immensely fashionable title amongst artists in Britain’s rising rock scene, inspiring the likes of Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. Numerous artists (together with nearly everybody talked about on this story) have coated Johnson’s songs, whereas a lot of rock’s best guitarists, together with Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, have cited Johnson as an affect. Johnson’s work additionally helped usher within the electrified, mid-century model of Chicago blues, performed by the likes of Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Chuck Berry.
Johnson’s legacy and his immense contributions to fashionable music have been acknowledged by a broad vary of establishments, together with the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame, the US Postal Service, the Library of Congress, and the Recording Academy, which bestowed a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award upon Johnson in 2006.
Take heed to how Robert Johnson impressed each musical icon on this legacy playlist.
