When he traveled to San Antonio, Texas, in the waning months of 1936, 25-year-old Robert Johnson could not have known that he was about to record what many regard as the foundation for all blues and rock 'n' roll music.
The fruits of that three-day recording session, however, are endless. Bands like Led Zeppelin and Cream have recorded Johnson's music and made it their own, while virtually every other rock 'n' roll musician'wittingly or unwittingly'counts Johnson as an inspirational influence.
\On one level, I think Robert Johnson deservedly is viewed by people who really pay attention to the music as one of the greatest American musicians, just flat out,"" said Craig Werner, a UW-Madison professor of African American Studies with a broad expertise in the roots of American music.
""In terms of evoking the psychic reality of what America's about, the racial tangle, the sexual tangle, it just doesn't get any better than that,"" he said.
Born in 1911 in Hazlehurst, Miss., Johnson could never have predicted his massive legacy because, for the most part, his life was very simple. In addition, Johnson died under mysterious circumstances less than a year after recording his whole songbook.
Like any sharecropper's son living in the Mississippi Delta region in the teens and 20s, Johnson was not well off. One of 11 children, his family put a high premium on hard, manual labor and young Robert was expected to earn his keep from a young age. Fortunately for the music world, Robert never took a shine to picking cotton, and with the help of his brother, he picked up some rudimentary guitar skills.
He did not immediately strike anyone as a child prodigy in his early guitar playing days. Much to the contrary, he was harassed and told not to play in front of crowds for fear they would disperse. Fortunately for Robert, the list of blues singers that lived in the Delta at the time reads like a deity of country blues. Son House and Charley Patton, two older, more accomplished Delta singers, were Johnson's early guides to the life of a bluesman. This was a life filled with railroad cars, bootleg whiskey, hotel rooms and other women, all of which Johnson referred to in song.
Another of Johnson's frequent musical topics was the devil, the fight between good and evil. Max Spiegel, publisher of the online blues magazine The Mudcat Caf??, http://www.mudcat.org, said the cultural context of the Delta during this time illustrates why Johnson used Satan as a frequent target.
""There is a big dichotomy in the South in the 1930s that you were either a churchgoer or you were singing the blues and part of the devil group,"" he said.
A legend'one that Johnson took no pains to dissuade people from believing'goes that Johnson was possessed. While on a road trip in northern Mississippi and southern Arkansas, Johnson supposedly parked himself along the side of the now-famous Highway 61. At midnight, as Johnson was playing, the Devil or its likeness approached Johnson, tuned his guitar and walked off. He returned to friends Patton and House and they were flabbergasted with his newfound talent. Many historians dismiss the possession legend as merely that. Others are fascinated by the tale.
""There are a lot of people who are attracted to the Robert Johnson myth more than to his music,"" Werner said.
Nonetheless, such demonic tendencies did invade his music, along with other more secular influences. Johnson, who died after being poisoned in 1938, is widely hailed for the structure that he bequeathed to both the music and the lyricism of the blues.
""[Johnson's lyrics] have double entendres, they have metaphors, they have sexual innuendos,"" Spiegel said. ""It amazed me that this poor sharecropper from the south could achieve this.""
Countless rock 'n' roll gods like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards worship Johnson as a celestial guitar-playing being. They first heard of Johnson's legend in Great Britain in the 1960s, when Johnson's first set of recordings was released, but ""The King of the Delta Blues Singers"" was not a widely known name until Columbia Records released ""The Complete Recordings,"" a two-disc set, in the early '90s.
Robert Johnson's life was filled with traveling, women, revelry and song. And along the way, this skinny, fair-skinned, brilliant but mercurial troubador of life in the American South set the stage for much of popular modern music, while teaching the singers how to wail, the guitarists how to strum and the storytellers how to keep 'em coming back.
