Four things we know about Robert Johnson for sure:
His only recordings were made in hotel rooms in Texas over an eight month period beginning November 1936.
He died two months after the last session, aged 27.
Only a few of his songs were released before he died and none of them sold well. The biggest hit, ‘Terraplane Blues’ sold less than 5,000 copies.
However, one listen to the 29 songs from those sessions reveals that they are the most remarkable and remarkably consistent body of recorded work of any of the many remarkable pre-war Blues artists.
So remarkable, so ahead of their time, so genre-defining, so genre-defying in fact that Blues historians in the 40s and 50s and 60s seem to have needed to invent a creation myth to explain their appearance.
A myth that goes something like…Robert was just another averagely talented, busking and unrecorded Blues guitarist from the South when one evening on a dark high way he met the Devil and promptly sold his soul for the gift of being able, suddenly, to sing and play the guitar-based Blues better than practically anyone before or since.
The fact that Robert died a slow and painful death as a result of poisoning soon after he’d proved that he possessed his newly acquired talents and that, spread throughout his more melancholy and haunting output, there are multiple references to the Devil and his associates, seemed to support the idea that the story was more than just myth.
But it wasn’t. In the 70s and 80s when Blues historians started to examine Blues history a little more carefully they realised that the soul/Blues trade-off story had actually been around for some time before Robert appeared on the scene. It was previously the property of earlier Blues genius, Tommy Johnson, who had mastered the Blues almost as profoundly as Robert did later and had also succumbed to a painful and (in his case) even slower death (see ABON 0187). And of course, by the time Robert’s music appeared, Tommy had disappeared from the Blues scene, leaving behind two things: a story begging for a new main character and, of course, a very convenient surname.
So in the more rational times we now live in, ‘Robert the Devil dealer’ has been relegated to the status of fanciful myth from a more gullible age.
To be replaced with the (much more palatable to 21st century ears) fact that Robert was a brilliantly talented artist who sprung from nowhere to become the most influential artist in the entire history of the pre-war Blues. Robert the ‘King of the Delta Blues’ in fact.
Except. In reality, Robert and his music were more or less unheard of in the Delta before the war. Or for the next 25 years after his death.
It wasn’t until 1961 in fact that the bulk of his recordings were even released for the first time. By then of course the centre of gravity of the Blues and Rock world had shifted from the Mississippi Delta to the other side of the Atlantic where budding musicians Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and Eric Clapton became not only members one to six of the newly-discovered Robert Johnson’s fan club but also the six musicians that Robert Johnson and his music would actually influence most.
Just a pity that ’King of the Thames Valley Blues’ hasn’t quite got the same mythological ring to it.
‘Walking Blues’ is from Robert’s first, 1936 sessions. Recorded in a hotel room in San Antonio, Texas on November 27,1936. Almost exactly 75 years ago to the day.
Available on endless Robert Johnson compilations but the best in terms of sound quality is ‘The Centennial Collection’: Amazon