Robert Johnson
Robert Leroy Johnson, born in 1911 in Mississippi, is a seminal figure in the history of blues music, known for his profound influence on the genre despite his brief life and limited fame during his time. He grew up in the Mississippi Delta, an area rich in acoustic blues tradition, and learned to play the guitar and harmonica from notable traveling musicians. Johnson's musical journey was marked by personal tragedy, including the early death of his first wife and tumultuous relationships, as well as a career as a wandering performer in juke joints across the South and beyond.
In 1936 and 1937, Johnson recorded a total of 29 songs, including classics like "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" and "Sweet Home Chicago," which showcased his innovative guitar techniques and poetic lyrics. His music blends various influences, and he is particularly celebrated for his slide guitar work and complex arrangements. Johnson's legacy was solidified posthumously when his recordings gained significant recognition, notably through the album *King of the Delta Blues Singers*, which helped introduce his artistry to a wider audience.
Johnson's life is steeped in myth, including the legendary tale of him selling his soul at a crossroads for musical prowess. He died at a young age in 1938 under mysterious circumstances, further enhancing his enigmatic status. Today, he is regarded as one of the most important and influential blues musicians, leaving a lasting impact on both blues and contemporary music, resonating with artists across genres.
Robert Johnson
Musician
- Born: May 8, 1911
- Birthplace: Hazlehurst, Mississippi
- Died: August 16, 1938
- Place of death: Greenwood, Mississippi
American jazz guitarist, singer, and songwriter
With his searing voice, his poetic verse, and his virtuosic guitar playing, Johnson was the quintessential Mississippi Delta bluesman. His innovative use of slide guitar, boogie, and walking bass lines influenced generations of blues and rock-and-roll musicians.
Principal Recordings
albums:King of the Delta Blues Singers, 1961; King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2, 1970; The Complete Recordings, 1990.
singles: “32-20 Blues,” 1936; “Come on in My Kitchen,” 1936; “Cross Roads Blues,” 1936; “Dead Shrimp Blues,” 1936; “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” 1936; “If I Had Possession over Judgement Day,” 1936; “Kind Hearted Woman Blues,” 1936; “Last Fair Deal Gone Down,” 1936; “Phonograph Blues,” 1936; “Rambling on My Mind,” 1936; “Sweet Home Chicago,” 1936; “Terraplane Blues,” 1936; “They’re Red Hot,” 1936; “Walkin’ Blues,” 1936; “When You Got a Good Friend,” 1936; “Drunken Hearted Man,” 1937; “From Four Till Late,” 1937; “Hellhound on My Trail,” 1937; “Honeymoon Blues,” 1937; “I’m a Steady Rollin’ Man,” 1937; “Little Queen of Spades,” 1937; “Malted Milk,” 1937; “Me and the Devil Blues,” 1937; “Milk Cow’s Calf Blues,” 1937; “Stones in My Passway,” 1937; “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues,” 1937; “Traveling Riverside Blues,” 1937; “Love in Vain,” 1938; “Preachin’ Blues (Up Jumped the Devil),” 1938.
The Life
Robert Leroy Johnson was born in 1911 in Mississippi, the eleventh child of Julia Major Dodds. While her first ten children were born of Julia’s marriage to Charles Dodds, Johnson was the illegitimate offspring of a relationship between Julia and Noah Johnson. The boy’s family and living arrangements shifted constantly. When he was about ten, Johnson began living with his mother in the Mississippi Delta region, legendary for country, acoustic blues. Taking up the harmonica and guitar, Johnson learned all he could from traveling bluesmen such as Son House, Willie Brown, and Charley Patton.
Johnson married young in February, 1929, but his wife, Virginia Travis, died in childbirth at only sixteen. In May, 1931, Johnson married again, to Calletta “Callie” Craft, eventually settling in Helena, Arkansas. Johnson soon launched his career as an itinerant blues performer, teaming with guitarists Ike Zinnerman and Johnny Shines. Although he performed mostly in Delta juke joints (spaces set up for dancing, music, and drinking), he traveled as far as Chicago, New York City, and Windsor, Canada (just across the border from Detroit).
In November, 1936, Johnson was invited to record in the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, for the Vocalion label of the American Record Company (ARC). He recorded sixteen songs, most in two takes. He was probably paid a few hundred dollars. When his recording of “Terraplane Blues” sold a profitable four thousand copies, he was invited to record another thirteen songs for ARC in Dallas in June, 1937.
Johnson was alleged to have engaged in numerous love affairs, using various last names to hide his identity. One girlfriend, Estella Coleman, was the mother of bluesman Robert Lockwood, who became Johnson’s protégé.
Johnson’s death certificate indicates that he died in Greenwood, Mississippi, on August 16, 1938. At the time some cited syphilis as the cause of death; others cited pneumonia. A persistent story, repeated by Sonny Boy Williamson and others, was that Johnson died from the effects of poisoned whiskey, supplied to him at a Three Forks juke joint by a husband whose wife Johnson was courting. Whatever the cause of his death, Johnson was a relatively obscure, itinerant bluesman, his grave unmarked and his passing little noted.
The Music
There are no contemporaneous descriptions of Johnson’s numerous performances as he played on the street, at parties, and at makeshift juke joints up and down the Mississippi Delta in the 1930’s. Facts about Johnson’s music come from two sources: the retrospective interviews with his contemporaries conducted by historians and the twenty-nine songs Johnson recorded for ARC, most of which were released at the time as Vocalion race records and all since reissued by Columbia Records.
In the wake of Johnson’s death, blues historians traveled to the Delta to interview those who knew or who had heard him. From these reminiscences, it appears that Johnson was a successful, but not the most popular, blues musician. Other musicians appreciated his innovative guitar work, especially on slide (also known as bottleneck) guitar. Johnson was also respected for his ability to assimilate the influences of successful bluesmen such as House, Patton, Leroy Carr, and Skip James, as well as the urban influences and popular songs that he heard on the radio and on jukeboxes, although this was likely lost on a rough-hewn audience. Johnson’s small frame and singing voice would not easily stand out in the din and dancing of a juke joint; his well-crafted lyrics were less important than his ability to sustain verse upon verse, as needed.
Vocalion Singles. With the release of twenty-two of his singles under the Vocalion label in 1937 and 1938, Johnson acquired more of a reputation. He attracted the interest of legendary producer John Hammond, who wanted him to perform in his landmark Spirituals to Swing concert in New York, to be held in December, 1938. Folklorist Alan Lomax visited Mississippi in 1941 to learn more about Johnson and his environment. Johnson was noted in jazz historian Rudy Blesh’s 1946 book Shining Trumpets and in blues historian Samuel Charters’s 1959 book The Country Blues.
Three of Johnson’s songs—“I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues,” and “Sweet Home Chicago”—became blues standards in the 1940’s and 1950’s. The boogie guitar Johnson plays on these songs, in which he strums a one-two shuffle beat on the bottom strings, clearly adapted from the left hand of boogie-woogie piano, became a staple of the burgeoning Chicago electric blues. Johnson intersperses fast high-note triplets into his boogie bass on “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” doing the same with a slide on “Rambling on My Mind.” Blues guitarist Elmore James popularized this slide triplet riff on his 1952 hit version of “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” which became a signature blues sound.
King of the Delta Blues Singers.In 1961 Columbia Records, influenced by Hammond, released sixteen of Johnson’s ARC songs on the album King of the Delta Blues Singers as part of its Thesaurus of Classic Jazz series.
The effect of making Johnson’s songs widely available was dramatic. Johnson’s voice and guitar playing were perfectly suited for the makeshift but high-quality studio ARC had arranged. Although his voice retains a spontaneous quality, it is apparent from comparing the alternative takes that Johnson’s songs were carefully constructed and polished for the three-minute constraints of 78-rpm records. The recordings allowed a diverse audience to leisurely appreciate the genius of his vocal displays, his virtuosic guitar technique, and the terse, even poetic quality of his lyrics.
Johnson’s deeply expressive singing frequently breaks into moans, growls, and falsetto to reinforce the metaphors and drama of his verse. His guitar playing is not a mere accompaniment but a well-composed musical arrangement with distinct lead, rhythmic, and bass lines. Johnson often employs an independent walking bass line to reinforce his lyrics. Both his vocals and his slide-guitar work make masterful use of microtonal intervals. In “Hellhound on My Trail,” a song that contributed to Johnson’s legendary link to dark forces, Johnson’s images are haunting. In “Come on in My Kitchen,” Johnson’s complex guitar chords and progressions intensify his plaintive moaning and spoken lines.
“Love in Vain.”Columbia included Johnson’s 1938 “Love in Vain” and fifteen other of his ARC songs in its 1970 album King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2. “Love in Vain,” adapted from Carr’s 1935 hit “When the Sun Goes Down,” is a complete integration of vocal, lyric, and guitar, with not a note to spare. After a striking guitar introduction, Johnson sings three verses about his pain watching his loved one depart on a train. In the fourth verse, he has become too “lonesome” for words and moans and howls. Each verse is concluded with the near-biblical phrase, “All my love’s in vain,” reinforced by a walking bass line. His images are memorable. In the third verse, he finds that the colors of the departing train lights reflect his sadness and despair. His propulsive rhythmic chords evoke the sound of the train.
Johnson’s ability to play a melodic lead in the high strings without seeming to interrupt his rhythmic playing on the lower strings led Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones to think he was hearing two guitars when he first listened to Johnson’s records. The Rolling Stones, who had acquired a bootleg version of “Love in Vain” in 1967, covered the song on their 1969 Let It Bleed album; on two of their live albums, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! and Stripped; and in their concert film Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones! (1972). Rock guitarist Eric Clapton did the same on his 2004 album, Me and Mr. Johnson.
Musical Legacy
Johnson is one of the most acclaimed country blues musicians of all time. Dying young, his life barely documented, Johnson epitomized the mystery of the early blues. This mystery was magnified by the story of Johnson going to a Mississippi crossroads to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for supernatural musical abilities, a legend repeated in books and films, including Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).
Johnson synthesized the best of the country blues artists and traditions while laying the groundwork for rhythm-and-blues and British rock with his revolutionary slide-guitar playing, complex chords, high-triplet riffs, walking bass patterns, and piano-style boogie shuffle. Columbia’s 1990 release of the two-compact-disc box set The Complete Recordings of Robert Johnson sold a startling two million copies. It was certified platinum and received a Grammy for Best Historical Recording. One of only two photographs of Johnson known to be in existence, an elegant studio shot posed with his guitar, was used in the U.S. postage commemoration of Johnson. Numerous documentaries—such as The Search for Robert Johnson (1992), Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1997), and Hellhounds on My Trail: The Afterlife of Robert Johnson (2000)—made his music and legend known to a broader audience.
Johnson’s most important legacy was his twenty-nine recorded songs, with their impassioned vocals, stark imagery, and moving guitar harmonies. Clapton described Johnson’s music as “deeply soulful…the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice.”
Further Reading
Bennighof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic Value in Delta Blues.” American Music 15, no. 2 (Summer, 1997): 137-158. Critical analysis of “Rambling on My Mind,” addressing its cultural and technical appeal.
Charters, Samuel. Walking a Blues Road: A Selection of Blues Writing, 1956-2004. New York: Marion Boyars, 2005. Contains Charters’s historic 1959 essay on the blues as well as his thoughts on Johnson.
Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the “King of the Delta Blues Singers.” New York: Plume, 1998. Places Johnson in the context of the Delta blues.
Komara, Edward. The Road to Robert Johnson: The Genesis and Evolution of Blues in the Delta from the Late 1800’s Through 1938. Milwaukee, Wis.: Hal Leonard, 2007. Includes historical photographs, maps, and musical examples.
Mann, Woody. The Complete Robert Johnson. New York: Oak Publications, 1991. Transcriptions of Johnson’s twenty-nine recorded songs with a note on his musical technique.
Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCullogh. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Assesses critical writings on Johnson and his music.
Rothenbuhler, Eric. “For-the-Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26, no. 1 (2007): 65-81. Johnson learned from and adapted his music for records, providing his blues aesthetic with a unique appeal for modern audiences.
Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. New York: Amistad, 2005. Traces the blues musicians who inspired Johnson, with an accompanying Yazoo records compact disc, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson.