69 Fun Facts About Robert Johnson

According to the most famous legend about him, what did Robert Johnson trade for his musical talent?

His soul. The tale grew up to explain how a middling player could come back from about a year away as a master; historians credit long hours of practice under an older guitarist instead.

Which singer is in the '27 Club' with Robert Johnson?

Janis Joplin. She, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Brian Jones all died at 27 between 1969 and 1971, and once Kurt Cobain followed in 1994 the 'club' was traced back to Johnson's death in 1938.

The hall of fame that inducted Robert Johnson in 1986 calls him perhaps the first ever what?

Rock star. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's biography gives its reasons in a single line: he was 'steeped in mystery, killed mysteriously, his legend eclipsed only by his skill'.

Robert Johnson first recorded in what makeshift studio?

A hotel room. The engineers set up their machines in one room and recorded the performers in another; for his second and last session, seven months later, they used an empty warehouse floor instead.

Where did Robert Johnson mostly perform to earn his living?

Street corners and juke joints. He drifted from town to town playing for tips, and to hold a crowd he would play the pop hits of the day as readily as his own dark blues.

Which Grammy award did Robert Johnson receive in 2006, almost seventy years after his death?

Lifetime Achievement. The Recording Academy gave its career prize to a man whose entire recording career had lasted only seven months.

Which British group's 1968 album Wheels of Fire popularised 'Crossroads'?

Cream. The trio taped its version live at San Francisco's Winterland in March 1968, and that fiery four-minute take turned Johnson's song into a standard that rock bands have covered ever since.

Which was Robert Johnson's most commercially successful record in his lifetime, selling up to 10,000 copies?

It uses a car that will not start as an extended metaphor for a girlfriend's suspected infidelity.

Roughly how many songs make up Robert Johnson's entire recorded output?

About 30. He cut just 29 songs in five days of recording spread over 1936 and 1937, yet generations of musicians have gone on playing and praising that sliver of work ever since.

In which Texas city did Robert Johnson make his first recordings in November 1936?

San Antonio. The site is now so revered that in 2009 John Mellencamp went back to the very spot where Johnson had played, to record a song written for the occasion.

Robert Johnson's final recording session, in June 1937, took place in which city?

Dallas. A modest hit from his first session got him invited back to Texas, and over one June weekend there he cut 'Love in Vain' and 'Me and the Devil Blues', among other songs.

Which English-born producer recorded Robert Johnson and later ran Columbia's country division?

Don Law recalled Johnson as so shy that he played facing the wall, a picture that shaped the myth. Others think he was hiding his fingering or bouncing his sound off the corner.

Which record label first issued Robert Johnson's 78s in 1937 and 1938?

Vocalion pressed eleven Johnson 78s in his lifetime and one more after his death. CBS bought the label's parent company in 1938, which is how Columbia came to hold his recordings.

Which 1961 Columbia album finally brought Robert Johnson's music to a wide audience?

King of the Delta Blues Singers appeared when Columbia had no photograph of Johnson to use, so its cover is a painting of a guitarist whose face is never shown.

Which young Columbia signing was mesmerised by an advance copy of Robert Johnson's 1961 LP?

Bob Dylan had never heard of Johnson when he was handed an acetate before its release. He later wrote that without that record, hundreds of his own lines would never have been written.

Which Delta bluesman remembered the young Robert Johnson as an embarrassingly bad guitarist?

Son House recalled crowds begging him to make the boy put the guitar down. When Johnson came back a dazzling player, House's talk of a pact with the devil fed the legend.

Which guitarist, said to practise in graveyards at night, became Robert Johnson's main teacher?

Ike Zimmerman is the plain answer to the devil story: Johnson's sudden mastery came from a long apprenticeship with him. Their graveyard sessions are said to have been chosen simply for the quiet.

The crossroads deal-with-the-devil story was originally told about which other, unrelated bluesman?

Tommy Johnson's brother LeDell said Tommy told of a stranger at a crossroads who tuned his guitar and handed it back. The Coen brothers gave a guitarist of that name the same tale in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

A note on the back of Robert Johnson's death certificate records a plantation owner's opinion that he died of what?

Syphilis was only the plantation owner's guess. The front of the certificate, tracked down by researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow in 1968, gives no cause at all, because no doctor ever saw Johnson.

In David 'Honeyboy' Edwards's telling, how was Robert Johnson killed?

He drank poisoned whiskey, Edwards said, laced by a jealous husband at a country dance. Edwards watched him try to play on while already ill, and Johnson died a few days later.

Near which Mississippi town did Robert Johnson die?

Greenwood. News of his death travelled so slowly that months later a New York producer was still trying to book him for a concert at Carnegie Hall.

Led Zeppelin borrowed the lemon-squeezing line of 'The Lemon Song' from which Robert Johnson song?

Traveling Riverside Blues sat unreleased for 23 years after Johnson's death. Led Zeppelin then lifted its bawdiest line and taped their own version of the song for the BBC in 1969.

Which album carries the Stones' country-tinged version of Robert Johnson's 'Love in Vain'?

Let It Bleed gave the song extra chords and a country lilt. The cover grew so popular that it set off a long court fight over who owned Johnson's song.

In which city did Robert Johnson live as a small boy, before his years in the Delta?

Memphis is where he lived as a boy in the household of his mother's husband. An older half-brother is said to have shown him his first guitar chords.

Which blues guitarist, son of Robert Johnson's partner Estella Coleman, learned guitar directly from him?

Robert Lockwood Jr. was barely four years younger than Johnson, who all but adopted him. The link stuck for life: he performed as Robert Jr. Lockwood.

Which bluesman travelled the road with Robert Johnson as far as New York and Canada?

Johnny Shines recalled that Johnson would walk off in the middle of a set while the money was pouring in, and not be seen again for two or three weeks.

Which Mississippi bluesman recast Robert Johnson's 'Dust My Broom' as an electric Chicago-style hit in 1951?

Elmore James had played alongside Johnson in the late 1930s. His electric remake became a national hit, and he reused its opening slide riff on record after record.

Which magazine first published a photograph of Robert Johnson, in 1986?

Rolling Stone ran it almost in passing, more than a dozen years after a researcher found it in the keeping of Johnson's family. Until then even his album covers had hidden his face.

How did retired truck driver Claud Johnson come to inherit Robert Johnson's music royalties?

Courts ruled him Johnson's son after a woman of 80 testified that she had seen his parents together in the woods in 1931. The 1998 ruling, upheld in 2000, was worth over $1 million.

Which British guitarist, on first hearing Robert Johnson, asked who the other guy playing with him was?

Keith Richards was hearing two guitars where there was one: Johnson played bass line, rhythm and melody at once. It was bandmate Brian Jones who had put the record on.

Which guitar virtuoso plays the devil's champion in the duel that ends Crossroads, the 1986 film inspired by Robert Johnson?

Steve Vai wrote and played nearly all of the duel himself, including the fast classical piece his on-screen rival uses to beat him, which is built on a Paganini caprice.

Robert Johnson's jaunty 'They're Red Hot' is a street vendor's pitch for which food?

Tamales were a Delta street food, and the song is a ragtime romp with none of the gloom he is known for. Red Hot Chili Peppers put a cover of it on a 1991 album.

In 'Me and the Devil Blues', Robert Johnson asks to be buried by the highway so his spirit can ride what?

A Greyhound bus, so his 'old evil spirit' can ride on. The song, which opens with Satan knocking at his door, helped to feed the devil legend.

A physician suggested Robert Johnson's long fingers and 'one bad eye' pointed to which condition?

Marfan syndrome was a Scottish family doctor's guess in a 2006 medical journal letter. It would explain the long fingers that helped Johnson's playing, and a sudden death from a torn aorta.

Which future Chicago blues star, who modelled his early playing on Robert Johnson, was first recorded on a Mississippi plantation in 1941?

Muddy Waters was driving a tractor when a Library of Congress team recorded him at home. Hearing his own voice played back convinced him he could do it, and in 1943 he left for Chicago.

Which Robert Johnson song, recorded first at his final session in June 1937, is often called his greatest performance?

He played it in an open E minor tuning; Peter Guralnick called the record 'the apogee of the blues'.

In which Robert Johnson song does his slide guitar imitate a howling winter wind?

Come On in My Kitchen has him whisper 'Can't you hear that wind howl?' and answer on the strings. That hush would never carry in a noisy dance hall, a sign he was shaping songs for the microphone.

Raised as a Dodds, a Spencer and a Willis, why did Robert Johnson change his surname?

He learned who his father was: Noah Johnson, a local labourer his mother had known after her husband left town. The earlier names came from that husband and a later stepfather.

Which singer handed Barack Obama the microphone to sing Robert Johnson's 'Sweet Home Chicago' at the White House?

Mick Jagger passed it over at a 2012 blues night after Buddy Guy and B.B. King urged the president on. Obama, a Chicagoan, sang a few lines of what had become his home city's anthem.

Robert Johnson's 'Sweet Home Chicago' reworked an older blues whose refrain headed for which Indiana city instead?

Kokomo was the goal in Scrapper Blackwell's 'Kokomo Blues' and in Kokomo Arnold's remake. Johnson kept the tune and swapped in Chicago, and it was his version that later singers took up.

H. C. Speir, the talent scout Robert Johnson approached in 1936, ran a music store in which Mississippi city?

Jackson was where blues hopefuls came to audition for Speir. He owned no label, so he cut test discs in his shop and sent them to the record companies; Charley Patton and Skip James were among his finds.

A 2000 court ruling over 'Love in Vain' and 'Stop Breakin' Down Blues' gave the songs to whom?

Robert Johnson's estate won when an appeals court ruled that selling his 78s decades earlier had not legally 'published' the songs, so they had never slipped into the public domain.

Which film has its heroes play Robert Johnson's 'Sweet Home Chicago' at the climactic concert?

The Blues Brothers dedicate the song to 'the late great Magic Sam', the Chicago bluesman whose 1967 recording had done much to make it a standard.

Which rock and roll pioneer adapted the chugging boogie bass pattern that Robert Johnson popularised on guitar?

Chuck Berry drove 'Roll Over Beethoven' and 'Johnny B. Goode' with it. Another bluesman put the pattern on record first, but it was Johnson's harder version that guitarists copied.

In 'Cross Road Blues', the song tied to the devil legend, whom does Robert Johnson beg for mercy?

God, not the devil: the singer falls to his knees and asks the Lord above for mercy, then stands trying to flag a ride while everyone passes him by. The pact is nowhere in the words.

Which singer died on August 16, the same date as Robert Johnson, 39 years after him?

Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977, to headlines around the world. Johnson's death on that date in 1938 passed so quietly that no record of it was found for 30 years.

Which producer praised Robert Johnson in print in 1937 under a pen-name, then tried to book him for Carnegie Hall?

John Hammond wrote the rave for a left-wing magazine under a false name. He never met the singer: by the time his scout went looking, Johnson was dead, so Hammond played two of his records to the hall instead.

Who played Robert Johnson in the reconstructed scenes of the documentary Can't You Hear the Wind Howl?

Keb' Mo' acts out the scenes while Danny Glover narrates. In the same film, an old friend who travelled with Johnson flatly denies that he ever claimed a deal with the devil.

Which actor plays the young guitarist hunting for a lost Robert Johnson song in the 1986 film Crossroads?

Ralph Macchio had a guitar coach for the part, but the slide playing you hear is Ry Cooder's. The 'lost song' is invented too, as his character finally learns.

A smiling photo of Robert Johnson fronts Brother Robert, a 2020 memoir written by which relative in her nineties?

His stepsister Annye Anderson grew up in the same household as Johnson. She wrote the memoir to set her family's memories against decades of tall tales about a devil's bargain.

Which long-running TV series opened its episode 'Crossroad Blues' with an actor playing Robert Johnson?

Supernatural cast La Monde Byrd as Johnson and played the bluesman's own recording of the title song over the scene of his deal with a demon.

Which guitarist called Robert Johnson 'the most important blues musician who ever lived'?

Eric Clapton found the record so intense at first that it almost repelled him. In 2004 he cut a whole album of the songs, Me and Mr. Johnson, and said his debt to Robert was finally paid.

Robert Johnson made all his recordings during which era?

The Great Depression still gripped the South when he recorded in 1936 and 1937. He was paid cash for each song and no royalties, though a reissue of those songs would one day sell over a million copies.

Which instrument was the young Robert Johnson known for playing well before he mastered the guitar?

Harmonica came first. Older Delta bluesmen thought the boy handy on it while they mocked his guitar playing, the very thing that would make his name.

What was the very first song Robert Johnson recorded?

Kind Hearted Woman Blues was no raw Delta piece. Johnson modelled it on recent city hits by pianist Leroy Carr, a sign of how closely he studied what sold on record.

Robert Johnson entered a leading music hall of fame at its first ceremony, in 1986, in which category?

Early influence: Johnson went in at the hall's very first ceremony, almost half a century after his death, in the same year the public first saw a photograph of his face.

For his slide playing, what did Robert Johnson wear on a finger of his fretting hand?

A bottleneck: slid along the strings, the glass bends each note into a wail. Players who took Johnson's slide style electric in Chicago made it one of the founding sounds of rock guitar.

In which Mississippi town was Robert Johnson born, possibly on May 8, 1911?

Hazlehurst lies in Copiah County, outside the Delta that claims him. He went back to the area around 1930, and it was there, not in the Delta, that he turned into a master guitarist.

Why did Charles Dodds, husband of Robert Johnson's mother, flee his home town?

A lynch mob drove him out after he quarrelled with white landowners. He had been a prosperous furniture maker; he started again in another city under a new name.

Robert Johnson's first wife, Virginia Travis, died in 1930 in what circumstances?

In childbirth, along with the baby. Johnson, then about 19, left the Delta soon afterwards, and it was in the months that followed that he became a serious guitarist.

When word came that Robert Johnson had died, which Chicago bluesman took his place at Carnegie Hall in 1938?

Big Bill Broonzy, the show's producer wrote, had been coaxed away from his Arkansas farm and mule. In truth he had been a professional Chicago recording artist for over a decade.

Robert Johnson was sought for which 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, months after he had died?

From Spirituals to Swing traced Black music from its roots to the big bands before a sold-out, integrated house. Its success brought a second edition on Christmas Eve 1939.

Which garage-rock duo covered Robert Johnson's 'Stop Breaking Down' on their 1999 debut album?

The White Stripes were following the Stones, whose 1972 version on Exile on Main St. helped set off the court fight over who owned Johnson's music.

At which country dance spot was Robert Johnson playing in the weeks before his death?

Three Forks was his last stand. Honeyboy Edwards, a fellow bluesman who was there that night, lived until 2011 and gave what became the standard account of it.

What explains Robert Johnson's tombstones in three Mississippi churchyards?

An unknown grave: his death certificate names only a 'Zion Church', and witnesses' memories have pointed researchers to three different graveyards, each of which now has a stone.

Which friend does Robert Johnson name in a famous lyric, asking that he be told 'I'm sinkin' down'?

Willie Brown was a real Delta guitarist who outlived Johnson by 14 years. The 1986 film Crossroads borrowed his name for its old bluesman with a devil's bargain of his own.

Which Mississippi town claims Robert Johnson met the devil where its Highways 1 and 8 cross?

Rosedale isn't in the song the legend hangs on. A British rock band stitched its name in from a different Johnson lyric for a hit 1968 version, and crossroads seekers followed.

A 1937 magazine review claimed Robert Johnson made which famous folk-blues singer seem 'an accomplished poseur'?

Lead Belly had been a press sensation in New York since 1935. The review backing an unknown against him appeared just as Johnson's first record came out, signed with a false name.

Which Johnson release was added to the National Recording Registry in 2003?

He had entered the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980 and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.