While watching a performance of Six Strings Down by Jimmie Vaughan it got me thinking and I was also reminded of an article I was reading on a web site I 'stumbled' upon about Sean Costello and I thought I would compose a series of posts for this blog about other blues artists whose lives were also tragically cut short.This is the third in the series of these posts and please check back in with this blog regularly as I will be composing a further posts on this subject.
Robert Johnsonb. Hazlehurst, Mississippi: 8 May, 1911 or 1912
d. 16 August, 1938
Robert Johnson is perhaps the most famous of Delta (if not all) blues musicians. His records from 1936–1937 are a remarkable combination of singing, guitar playing and songwriting and have influenced generations of musicians.
Robert Johnson's poorly documented life and death have given rise to the most famous legend in music.
According to that legend, Robert Johnson was a young man in rural Mississippi with a burning desire to become a great musician, and he was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight.
There he was met by the Devil who took the guitar from Robert Johnson and tuned it.
After tuning the guitar, the devil played a few songs and then returned it to Robert Johnson, and thereby giving him absolute mastery of the guitar, being able to play, sing, and create the greatest blues anyone had ever heard and in return Robert Johnson had sold his soul.
Robert Johnson's recordings have recently become the source of conjecture, and so suggesting that they recording we accept as Robert Johnson's genius have in fact been sped up by maybe as much as 20%.
And some even doubt the influence of Robert Johnson and authors such Elijah Wald ask why "Robert Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet is now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history".
(Please check back in with this blog regularly as I will be composing some further posts on these subjects).
There are a number of accounts and theories regarding the events of Robert Johnson's death.
Leading up to his death he had been playing for a few weeks at a country dance in a town near Greenwood and one evening Robert Johnson began flirting with a woman at a dance.
One version of the account is that the woman was the wife of the juke joint owner who unknowingly provided Johnson with a bottle of poisoned whiskey from her husband, while another account suggests she was a married woman he had been secretly seeing.
Johnson was offered open bottle of whiskey and accepted it, and the bottle was laced with strychnine.
Honey Boy Edwards, another blues musician was present, and essentially confirms this account.
Robert Johnson is reported to have started to feel ill into the evening after drinking from the bottle and had to be helped back to his room in the early morning hours.
Over the next three days, his condition steadily worsened and witnesses reported that he died in a convulsive state of severe pain—symptoms which are consistent with poisoning.
His death occurred on August 16, 1938, at the age of 27.
