Hazlehurst to the Delta
Robert Leroy Johnson was born on 8 May 1911 in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, and grew up between Memphis and the plantations of the Mississippi Delta around Robinsonville. As a teenager he hung around the older bluesmen who played the jukes and fish fries there, above all Son House and Willie Brown. House's later account became part of the legend: Johnson was a nuisance with a harmonica and a clumsy guitar player. He left the area, and when he came back he could outplay all of them.
Where he went matters more than any myth. Johnson went back south towards Hazlehurst and studied with a guitarist named Ike Zimmerman (also spelled Zinnerman). The story that they practised at night in a graveyard has stuck to both men ever since. By the early 1930s Johnson was a travelling professional. He played street corners, levee camps and juke joints, carried a repertoire wide enough for any crowd and could pick up a song after hearing it once.
The men he learned from
Johnson's sound is a synthesis, and his sources can be traced. Son House gave him the slide guitar and the preacher's intensity. Willie Brown and Charley Patton, the founding figure of Delta blues, set the style of the region. House and Brown had recorded with Patton for Paramount in Grafton, Wisconsin in 1930. Tommy Johnson (no relation) had already told the story of selling his soul at a crossroads, according to his brother LeDell.
Johnson also learned from records. Kokomo Arnold's 'Old Original Kokomo Blues' became 'Sweet Home Chicago', and Arnold's 'Milk Cow Blues' became 'Milkcow's Calf Blues'. Skip James's '22-20 Blues' became '32-20 Blues', and James's 'Devil Got My Woman' is heard in 'Hellhound on My Trail'. The melody of 'Love in Vain' follows Leroy Carr's 'When the Sun Goes Down'. Lonnie Johnson's sophistication and Peetie Wheatstraw's vocal tricks are in there too. Johnson was a sponge and an editor: he took whatever was best on the records and the porches around him and made it sharper, stranger and more personal.
Two sessions: San Antonio and Dallas
In November 1936, in a makeshift studio at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, Johnson recorded for the American Record Corporation with Don Law producing. Over three days he cut 'Kind Hearted Woman Blues', 'I Believe I'll Dust My Broom', 'Sweet Home Chicago', 'Come On In My Kitchen', 'Terraplane Blues', 'Cross Road Blues', 'Walkin' Blues', 'Preachin' Blues' and more. In June 1937 he recorded again in Dallas, at 508 Park Avenue. That session produced 'Hellhound on My Trail', 'Love in Vain', 'Me and the Devil Blues', 'Stop Breakin' Down Blues' and 'Traveling Riverside Blues'.
That is the whole catalogue: 29 distinct songs, and 42 surviving takes once the alternates are counted. 'Terraplane Blues' was the only one that sold reasonably well in its day. The records were released on 78 and aimed at the Black Southern market, and outside it almost nobody noticed them. What is on them is still extraordinary. His guitar plays a walking bass, rhythm and slide fills at once, so that listeners famously asked who the second guitarist was. His voice moves from falsetto to growl, and his lyrics turned the blues into personal, haunted confession.
On the road: Shines, Lockwood, Honeyboy and the rest
Johnson did not work alone. Johnny Shines travelled with him through much of the mid-1930s. Shines described trips that went far beyond the Delta, to St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit and over the border into Canada, and he later recorded Johnson's songs for decades. Robert Lockwood Jr. was the only musician Johnson taught directly. Johnson lived for a time with Lockwood's mother, and the teenage Lockwood learned his guitar style at first hand. Lockwood went on to play on the 'King Biscuit Time' radio show in Helena, Arkansas with Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller), and he carried Johnson's music into the electric era.
David 'Honeyboy' Edwards travelled and played with Johnson in the last years of his life, and he lived long enough to tell the story into the 21st century. Calvin Frazier went north with Johnson and Shines and recorded for Alan Lomax in 1938. Howlin' Wolf said he played with Johnson around the Delta. Elmore James, by most accounts, knew him there too. Their memories, recorded decades later, are much of the reason anyone knows what Johnson was like in person: quiet, watchful and charming, always watching the women in the room, and gone before anyone expected him to be.
The crossroads and the death
The story everyone knows is that Johnson met the devil at a crossroads at midnight and traded his soul for his skill. Songs like 'Cross Road Blues', 'Me and the Devil Blues' and 'Hellhound on My Trail' give the legend plenty to feed on. But the full crossroads story was mostly assembled after his death, and much of it came from Tommy Johnson's family and from the 1960s revival's love of a dark myth. Ike Zimmerman's lessons and a lot of practice explain the change Son House heard better than a deal with the devil does.
Johnson died on 16 August 1938 near Greenwood, Mississippi, aged 27. The most repeated account is that a jealous husband poisoned his whisky at a juke joint. Honeyboy Edwards and Sonny Boy Williamson II both later said they were around that night. His death certificate was not found until 1968, and it simply says 'No Doctor'. Three different markers in Greenwood-area churchyards claim to be his grave. Months later, John Hammond sent for him to play the 'From Spirituals to Swing' concert at Carnegie Hall in New York in December 1938. Hammond learned he had died and played two of Johnson's records from the stage instead.
How the records crossed the Atlantic
The second life began in 1961, when Columbia issued the LP 'King of the Delta Blues Singers'. In Britain it was a revelation. Copies passed between young players in London and the Home Counties: Keith Richards remembered first hearing it through Brian Jones, and Eric Clapton has called Johnson the most important blues musician who ever lived. Cream's live 'Crossroads' (1968) and the Rolling Stones' 'Love in Vain' (1969) and 'Stop Breakin' Down' (1972) put his songs onto the British rock stage. Through the British blues boom, Johnson's guitar ideas went into the DNA of rock.
Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson II had meanwhile carried the Delta sound to Chicago and electrified it. Muddy's 1941 Library of Congress recordings at Stovall Plantation were made by Alan Lomax, who had first gone to Mississippi looking for Johnson. Elmore James's 1951 'Dust My Broom' turned Johnson's boogie-shuffle into the most copied slide riff in the blues. The Chicago records also crossed to England and lit the same young players. In 1986 Johnson was among the first early influences inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Columbia's 1990 box 'The Complete Recordings' won a Grammy and sold more than its makers ever expected.
Why a London DJ cares
Pull any thread in this history series far enough and you reach the Mississippi Delta. Rock, rhythm and blues and soul all draw on Johnson's twelve bars. The British bands who learned from him passed that ear for raw records on to every UK scene since. The companion playlist is built the way his own repertoire was: all of Johnson's recordings at the core, and around them the men he learned from, travelled with and taught, then the Chicago players who carried it on. It is not dancefloor music. It is where the dancefloor's grammar came from.
The playlist
All of Robert Johnson's recordings, plus Son House, Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Johnny Shines, Robert Lockwood Jr., Honeyboy Edwards, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Elmore James and the records Johnson learned from.
214 tracks a public Spotify playlist Open on Spotify