Robert Johnson (1911-1938) is also known as “the mystery man of blues”. For a long time there wasn’t even a picture of him known (right now there are two, plus a dubious little film). He only left 29 songs, but the impact of this oeuvre is huge.
According to
legend Johnson once met the
devil on some famous
crossroads in
Mississippi at
midnight, and sold him his
soul in exchange for his enormous
talent. This doesn’t only explain his early death at age 27, but also songtitles like “
Me and the devil blues” and “
Hellhound on my trail”. Johnson was a restless soul, whose life was dominated by
music,
women and
alcohol. These passions eventually led to his death. After a performance in a
juke joint, where he openly flirted with a woman in the crowd, he suddenly had a stroke. It turned out that the jealous husband of the woman had put rat poison in Johnson’s
whiskey.
It wasn’t untill the late sixties, when the Rolling Stones covered his “Love in vain”, that Johnson's name became famous and his first record appeared: “King of the delta blues singers”. Johnson’s singing with regular head-voice drawing-outs is of an unknown intensity, while his (slide-)guitar sounds alternately aggressive and bittersweet. Like no other Robert Johnson deserves the title godfather of Rock and Roll.