Seven months of sessions remade the blues forever
Robert Johnson (1911–1938) cut his landmark sides in just two Don Law sessions—San Antonio 1936 and Dallas 1937—yielding 29 issued takes. Street corners and juke joints never made him famous; later guitarists treated those discs as scripture.
Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, possibly on 8 May 1911, the son of Julia Dodds and a man named Noah Johnson rather than her husband. He spent eight or nine early years in Memphis, where city schooling and the blues set him apart from most rural players, then joined his mother on a Delta plantation near Robinsonville after she remarried. Schoolmates remembered him on harmonica and jaw harp. In 1929 he married Virginia Travis, just fourteen, who died in childbirth soon afterwards.
Grieving, he vanished for about 18 months, probably to the Martinsville area near his birthplace, where he studied with Ike Zimmerman, rumoured to have learned guitar in graveyards at midnight. Son House had judged the young Johnson an embarrassing guitarist, and was astonished by his skill on his return. Virginia’s relatives called his turn to secular songs selling his soul to the devil, a phrase later welded to the crossroads legend.
From 1932 he roamed between Memphis, Helena, and Delta towns, playing for tips outside barbershops and giving crowds pop standards as readily as blues. With Johnny Shines he travelled as far as Chicago, New York, and Canada, and he used at least eight surnames along the way. His entire recorded legacy came from two sessions with producer Don Law, in San Antonio in 1936 and Dallas in 1937: 29 songs plus 13 surviving alternate takes, mostly issued on 78s.
He died on 16 August 1938. John Hammond, looking for him for Carnegie Hall later that year, and Alan Lomax, searching Mississippi in 1941, both learned too late. Columbia’s 1961 album King of the Delta Blues Singers finally reached a wide audience and fed the British blues boom, and Eric Clapton called him the most important blues singer who ever lived.
Source: Robert Johnson
