Robert Johnson

Robert Leroy Johnson was born May 8, 1911, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, and spent much of his youth in Memphis and later Robinsonville, Mississippi, in a household reshuffled by his mother's remarriage^[1]. In February 1929, at seventeen, he married fourteen-year-old Virginia Travis. She died in childbirth soon after, a loss that reportedly devastated him and preceded his disappearance from the area for roughly a year and a half^[1].

That absence is central to Johnson's legend. He is believed to have spent the time studying guitar intensively under Ike Zimmerman near Martinsville, Mississippi, and when he resurfaced in Robinsonville, musicians who had known him as a mediocre player, including Son House, were startled by how dramatically his technique had improved^[1]. House's half-joking remark that Johnson must have sold his soul to the devil helped seed what became American music's most famous supernatural legend: that Johnson traded his soul at a rural crossroads in exchange for his guitar mastery^[2]. Johnson himself never claimed any such bargain, and people who knew him considered the idea absurd; the crossroads story is now understood to have originally belonged to a different, unrelated blues musician named Tommy Johnson before folklore reassigned it^[2].

Johnson's entire recorded legacy consists of twenty-nine songs, captured across two sessions produced by Don Law: one in San Antonio in November 1936, the other in Dallas the following June^[1]. Those recordings, including "Sweet Home Chicago" and "Cross Road Blues," earned him almost no recognition during his lifetime. He died August 16, 1938, near Greenwood, Mississippi, at twenty-seven, from causes still debated by historians, possibly poisoning or complications tied to congenital syphilis^[1].

Johnson's influence was almost entirely posthumous. His recordings sat largely unheard outside blues collector circles until Columbia Records compiled sixteen of them on the 1961 album "King of the Delta Blues Singers," which reached a young Bob Dylan and, through the 1960s British blues revival, guitarists like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, who treated the record as foundational^[3]. A musician who died essentially unknown became, a generation later, one of the most cited fountainheads of modern blues and rock guitar.