The Ultimate Jazz Archive Vol.47 – Robert Johnson [1936-1937] [2005]

01.When You Got A Good Friend
02.Come On In My Kitchen
03.I Believe I4ll Dust My Broom
04.Phonograph Blues
05.Terraplane Blues
06.Come On In My Kitchen
07.Kindhearted Woman Blues
08.When You Got A Good Friend
09.Rambling On My Mind
10.32-30 Blues
11.Dead Shrimp Blues
12.I4m A Steady Rollin4 Man
13.Little Queen Of Spades
14.From Four 4Til Late

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) was a U.S. blues singer, guitarist, and songwriter, among the most famous of Delta blues musicians. His landmark recordings from 1936 to 1937 display a remarkable combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that have influenced generations of musicians. Johnson’s shadowy, poorly documented life, and death at the age of twenty-seven have given rise to much legend.

The most widely known legend surrounding Robert Johnson says that he sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of U.S. Highway 61 and U.S. Highway 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in exchange for prowess in playing the guitar. Actually, the location Johnson made reference to is a short distance away from that intersection. The legend was told mainly by Son House, but finds no corroboration in any of Johnson’s work, despite titles like “Me and the Devil Blues” and “Hellhound On My Trail”. This said, the song “Cross Road Blues” is both widely and loosely interpreted by many as a descriptive encounter of Johnson selling his soul.

The older Tommy Johnson (probably no relation, although it is speculated that they were cousins), by contrast, also claimed to have sold his soul to the devil. The story was that if someone went to the crossroads a little before midnight and began to play the guitar, a large black man would come up to him, retune his guitar, and hand it back. At this point (so the legend goes) the guitarist had sold his soul to become a virtuoso (a similar legend even surrounded virtuoso violinist Niccolò Paganini a century before).

His death remains a matter of controversy. Some accounts state that he was given poisoned whisky at a dance by the husband of a woman he had been secretly seeing. Others claim that it was just the devil collecting his debt.

However, the latest, less dramatic, and more plausible theory (published by David Connell in the British Medical Journal) is that Robert Johnson suffered from Marfan’s Syndrome. Marfan’s is a genetic disorder characterized by disproportionately long limbs, long thin fingers, and a tall stature - all of which can be seen in the two photos of Johnson that survive. Marfan’s Syndrome is a cause of heart defects, and a complication such as an aortic dissection could lead to Johnson’s excruciatingly painful death. ---last.fm

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