![]() ![]() It is known he was born Robert Leroy Johnson in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, but the date of May 1911 is merely a best guess. What then, in a life trapped in the mire of monumental mystery can be discerned as irrevocable truth for the sceptic’s perusal, aside from the 29 compositions and 2 photographs that exist of the man we now know as the definitive luminary of modern music?Īny attempt to track to down the facts immediately gets off to a rocky start. As Keith Richards alludes, you only have to hear him howl “I went to the crossroads” once, to know that there is something jinxed about Johnson. It is a legend of modern mythology with roots that delve back all the way to the origins of the Deep South, but in life as mystified and devoid of tangible truths as Robert Johnson’s, it’s hard to discard the fiction for fear that it is actually a fact. He returned to the bluesy booze joints a year later like a champion prodigal son a songsmith virtuoso, the crowned king of delta blues and the forefather of rock & roll… till the Devil took back what was rightfully his. For the cost of Robert’s soul, Beelzebub would bestow upon him musical greatness. ![]() ![]() Unlike the tale of Tenacious D, Satan wasn’t offering the sort of songs you’d forget in a hurry. He stretched out his guitar and up rose Lucifer with a bargain in tow. At the crossroads where 4 dusty black roads met, Robert dropped to his knees summoning the might to meet with his maker. Not quite the downcast pariah he had been seen as, he was now a man on a mission, the despair of his past lay behind him, and his future stretched out on the warped paths ahead. Through the mist drove Robert Johnson, bidding a solemn farewell to town and civility, “with a $10 guitar strapped to his back, looking for a tune”. The moon rose over the bayou, setting beasts and blues players howling alike, and the crooked hands of tupelo trees clawed at the illuminated clay ball, trying to drag it back down to swampy depths. The tale persists that the blue chords of day were bleached in the dark iridescence of the Mississippi nightfall and the stars were flung out, like crumbs from a picnic blanket onto the purple-black cloth of dusk. As the legend goes it was an evening that held a metaphysical air, quite how something so nebulous can be remembered up to this day is open to conjecture, but then there’s much about the delta blues and the mystic American South that holds out a stern but fair finger and asks how you’d know otherwise. ![]()
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