Robert Johnson

As the story goes, night was falling on an old plantation road near Dockery and young Robert Johnson was scared. A black man with no job and no home should not in those days in Mississippi be caught out after dark. Yes he was scared, and he clutched his guitar. With a solicitor smile Old Scratch stepped forward and made an offer. Robert nodded and signed on to a very major label. He handed up his guitar and the genial stranger tuned it, turned it back over. Robert put slide to string and out came the blues. He played the blues and made his name and one night in 1938 his whiskey was poisoned by a jealous husband and three days later Old Scratch came for him. He was a charter member of the 27 Club.

It is possibly the best story in all our Americana, and we love to hear it. Cream retold it in 1966, as did Tenacious D in 2001, as did Adult Swim's Metalocalypse in the 2006 episode Bluesklok. What fortune that a blues novice like me can still hear that boy's ethereal voice and his well-tuned guitar on 29 extant recorded songs, and wonder at his enigmatic smirk in two extant photographs. The thin quality of the recordings couldn't be more perfectly suited to myth. Here is the Citizen Kane of the blues &mdash although the musical elements had been heard before here and there, Johnson synthesized them into a new and lasting paradigm. I've started here hoping to find more kinship with the blues roots of rock and roll, with the White Stripes (Stop Breakin' Down Blues), Led Zeppelin (Travelling Riverside Blues), and the Rolling Stones (Love In Vain), just to scratch the surface. Next up is Muddy Waters. I'm looking forward to getting back to the South Side, to listen with new ears.

Oh, Baby don't you want to go...