Robert Johnson

Five days in Texas, and forever after

Robert Johnson spent five days in front of a microphone in his whole life: three in a San Antonio hotel in November 1936 and two in a Dallas office building in June 1937. Out of those sessions came twenty-nine songs. He was dead fourteen months later, at twenty-seven, on a plantation outside Greenwood, Mississippi, and almost nobody outside the Delta noticed.

His records sold modestly in his lifetime. "Terraplane Blues", the best of them commercially, moved perhaps ten thousand copies. Yet those twenty-nine songs, reissued on a Columbia LP in 1961, landed on the turntables of a generation of young musicians in London and New York and changed rock music. Cream, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin all went on to record his songs.

What made the songs so powerful is easy to hear and hard to explain. Johnson played the guitar like a small band, with a walking boogie bass under his thumb, slide lines on top and percussive slaps in between, while singing in a voice that could drop to a confiding murmur and then leap into a cry. He wrote tightly built, three-minute songs at a time when many Delta players still sang loose strings of floating verses. And he sang about hellhounds, the devil and a crossroads at sundown.

Those last songs, along with his short life, his sudden mastery of the guitar and a death nobody can fully explain, grew into the best-known story in the blues: that he sold his soul at a crossroads at midnight. That story has its own full entry, The Crossroads. This entry is about the man, the music and the record.

Worth knowing

Eleven things about Robert Johnson

1. He went by at least four surnames.

   Born to Julia Dodds outside her marriage, he was known as Robert Dodds, Robert Spencer and Robert Willis (after his stepfather Dusty Willis) before taking the name of his biological father, Noah Johnson, in his teens.

2. Son House thought he was hopeless.

   Around Robinsonville the teenage Johnson pestered Son House and Willie Brown on their breaks, and House remembered his early guitar playing as a racket. Within a couple of years Johnson came back able to outplay them both.

3. His real teacher practised in a graveyard.

   Back near Hazlehurst, Johnson studied with the guitarist Ike Zimmerman (often spelled Zinnerman), who liked to play at night among the tombstones of a local cemetery, where nobody would interrupt.

4. He recorded in a hotel room.

   His first session, in November 1936, was set up in Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, a temporary studio rigged by the American Record Corporation.

5. Twenty-nine songs, forty-two surviving takes.

   Johnson cut fifty-nine performances counting alternate takes. Forty-two survive, covering twenty-nine different songs: sixteen in San Antonio and thirteen in Dallas.

6. "Terraplane Blues" was named after a car.

   The Terraplane was a Hudson automobile of the 1930s, and Johnson turned its engine trouble into one long double meaning. Released in March 1937, it was his biggest seller.

7. He was once mistaken for a banjo player.

   The county registrar who investigated his death wrote on the back of his death certificate that he had come to the plantation to play a banjo at a dance.

8. Carnegie Hall played his records to an empty spot.

   John Hammond wanted him for the 1938 From Spirituals to Swing concert in New York. Johnson was already dead, so Hammond booked Big Bill Broonzy and played two of Johnson's records from the stage.

9. There are three gravestones.

   Three churchyards near Greenwood each have a marker, and at most one of them is over his body.

10. His heir was named in 1998.

    The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that Claud Johnson of Crystal Springs was his son and sole heir.

11. A box set sold a million.

    Columbia's 1990 The Complete Recordings, a two-disc set of 1930s blues, sold more than a million copies and won a Grammy.

Life in brief

From Hazlehurst to Greenwood

1. 1911Born May 8 in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, to Julia Dodds. His early childhood is split between Memphis, where his mother's husband Charles Dodds lived as Charles Spencer, and the Delta.
2. c. 1920Robinsonville, in the northern Delta. He grows up with his mother and stepfather Dusty Willis near Tunica County's plantations, and follows Son House and Willie Brown around the local jukes.
3. 1929Marries Virginia Travis, a teenager. She dies in childbirth in 1930, along with the baby.
4. c. 1930–32Apprenticeship in the south. He returns toward Hazlehurst, learns from Ike Zimmerman, and marries Calletta "Callie" Craft in 1931.
5. c. 1932Back in the Delta, transformed. From here he travels constantly, often with Johnny Shines, playing jukes, street corners and lumber camps from Mississippi to Chicago, Detroit and possibly New York.
6. 1936San Antonio, November 23, 26 and 27. H. C. Speir, a Jackson record-store owner, passes him to Ernie Oertle of ARC, and the producer Don Law records sixteen songs.
7. 1937Dallas, June 19 and 20. Thirteen more songs, including "Hell Hound on My Trail" and "Love in Vain", in a Warner Bros. film-exchange building on Park Avenue.
8. 1938Dies August 16 near Greenwood, Mississippi, aged 27. No doctor saw him.
9. 1938From Spirituals to Swing, December 23. His records are played at Carnegie Hall in his absence.
10. 1961King of the Delta Blues Singers, a sixteen-song Columbia LP, brings him to a new audience.
11. 1986Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted as an early influence at the first ceremony.
12. 1990The Complete Recordings is released, sells over a million copies and wins the 1991 Grammy for Best Historical Album.

San Antonio and Dallas

Twenty-nine songs in five days

Talent-scouting in the 1930s ran through middlemen. H. C. Speir, who ran a music store in Jackson and had already sent Charley Patton and Skip James to record, heard Johnson and passed his name to Ernie Oertle, a travelling salesman for the American Record Corporation. Oertle brought Johnson to San Antonio, where ARC's producer Don Law, an Englishman, had set up a portable studio in the Gunter Hotel.

Over November 23, 26 and 27, 1936, Johnson recorded sixteen songs, including "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom", "Sweet Home Chicago", "Terraplane Blues", "Come On in My Kitchen", "Cross Road Blues", "Walkin' Blues" and "Preachin' Blues". The following June, Law recorded him again in Dallas, in the building at 508 Park Avenue where Warner Bros. distributed films. Those two days produced "Hell Hound on My Trail", "Me and the Devil Blues", "Stop Breakin' Down Blues", "Traveling Riverside Blues" and "Love in Vain Blues".

• The story

  Don Law later said that Johnson was so shy, or so nervous, that he turned to face the wall with his back to the room, and to a group of Mexican musicians waiting to record. It became part of the legend: a genius too private to be watched.

• The record

  Nobody else who was there confirmed it, and later researchers have doubted the whole facing-the-wall account. Whether Johnson was shy, nervous or chasing a particular sound in the corner of the room cannot now be known.

August 1938

A death, three graves and two photographs

In the summer of 1938 Johnson was playing around Greenwood, at a country juke that David "Honeyboy" Edwards remembered as Three Forks. The most often told version of his death, from Edwards and others, is that he had been paying attention to the wife of the man who ran the place, and that the husband had a bottle of whiskey poisoned for him. Sonny Boy Williamson II later claimed he had knocked an open bottle from Johnson's hand that night. Johnson fell ill and died on August 16, three days later by most accounts.

The death certificate, found by the researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow in 1968, records no doctor. On its back, the Leflore County registrar noted that the white owner of the plantation thought Johnson had died of syphilis. Later writers have proposed strychnine, pneumonia, congenital syphilis, Marfan syndrome and, in Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow's 2019 biography, naphthalene from mothballs. Accounts differ, and there is no autopsy to settle them.

The certificate says he was buried at Zion Church. There are three candidates. Columbia paid for a tall obelisk at Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Morgan City in 1990. The same year an Atlanta band called the Tombstones placed a small marker at Payne Chapel near Quito. A third stone stands under a pecan tree at Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church, north of Greenwood, where in 2000 Rosie Eskridge said her husband had dug Johnson's grave. Most researchers, and the Mississippi Blues Trail, now favour Little Zion.

Start here

Songs to hear, and where they went

• 1936 Cross Road Blues A man alone at a crossroads at sundown, trying to flag a ride and praying for mercy. No devil appears in it. Cream recorded it live in 1968 as "Crossroads". Read the legend. Cream 1968
• 1936 I Believe I'll Dust My Broom A leaving song built on a rolling boogie figure. Elmore James turned that figure into the most copied slide riff in the blues on his 1951 record. Elmore James 1951Canned Heat 1967
• 1936 Sweet Home Chicago Reworked from Kokomo Arnold's "Old Original Kokomo Blues", it became the anthem of Chicago blues, then of the Blues Brothers. Magic Sam 1967The Blues Brothers 1980
• 1936 Ramblin' on My Mind Restless, slide-driven and lonely. John Mayall's Bluesbreakers recorded it in 1966, with Eric Clapton singing. Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton 1966
• 1937 Love in Vain Blues A farewell at a railway station, as quiet as Johnson ever got. The Rolling Stones recorded it for Let It Bleed (1969). The Rolling Stones 1969Eric Clapton 2004
• 1937 Stop Breakin' Down Blues A stomping complaint about a troublesome woman. The Stones put it on Exile on Main St.; the White Stripes on their first album. The Rolling Stones 1972The White Stripes 1999
• 1937 Traveling Riverside Blues Slide guitar and a road trip through the Delta towns. Led Zeppelin cut it for the BBC in 1969; it was released in 1990. Led Zeppelin 1969
• 1937 Hell Hound on My Trail A hunted man who cannot stop moving, in an eerie, minor-sounding tuning that recalls Skip James. Eric Clapton recorded it in 2004. Eric Clapton 2004

Borrowed and built

Where his songs came from

Johnson was a magpie, and a brilliant one. He listened hard to records as well as to the men around him, and much of his songbook is built on earlier recordings, rebuilt so thoroughly that his versions replaced the originals in most listeners' minds.

• Kokomo Arnold, the Chicago slide player, gave him the tune of "Old Original Kokomo Blues" (1934), which became "Sweet Home Chicago"; his "Milk Cow Blues" became "Milkcow's Calf Blues"; and Arnold's "Sagefield Woman Blues" contains the phrase "dust my broom".
• Skip James recorded "22-20 Blues" in 1931; Johnson turned it into "32-20 Blues". James's haunted "Devil Got My Woman" is widely heard as an ancestor of "Hell Hound on My Trail".
• Son House supplied the raw material for "Walkin' Blues" and "Preachin' Blues", and the slide-guitar intensity behind both.
• Hambone Willie Newbern's "Roll and Tumble Blues" (1929) is the skeleton of "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day", and the same tune later became Muddy Waters's "Rollin' and Tumblin'".
• Leroy Carr, the most popular blues singer of the early 1930s, shaped his phrasing and the melody of "Love in Vain"; Peetie Wheatstraw lent him lines and vocal mannerisms.

Why he matters

The record that crossed the ocean

John Hammond never stopped championing him, and in 1961, at the height of the folk revival, he pushed Columbia to issue sixteen of the recordings as King of the Delta Blues Singers, compiled by Frank Driggs. The LP reached young musicians on both sides of the Atlantic.

Eric Clapton recorded "Ramblin' on My Mind" with John Mayall in 1966, "Crossroads" with Cream in 1968, and in 2004 a whole album of Johnson songs, Me and Mr. Johnson, plus a filmed companion, Sessions for Robert J, partly shot in the Dallas building where Johnson made his last records. The Rolling Stones recorded "Love in Vain" and "Stop Breaking Down", Led Zeppelin "Traveling Riverside Blues", the Red Hot Chili Peppers "They're Red Hot", the White Stripes "Stop Breaking Down". Elmore James, Muddy Waters and Johnson's own protégé Robert Lockwood Jr. had already carried his music into postwar Chicago.

Historians have pointed out that the crown came late: in his lifetime Johnson was one good regional musician among many, and Black record buyers of the 1930s preferred Leroy Carr, Tampa Red or Peetie Wheatstraw. The idea of Johnson as "king of the Delta blues" was largely made by the 1961 LP and its listeners. That does not make the music any smaller. He was in the first class of the Blues Hall of Fame and the first class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and The Complete Recordings was added to the National Recording Registry in 2003.