You can't talk about blues music for very long without hearing the name "Robert Johnson."  While a real blues musician in the Delta region during his short, 27 year life, Robert Johnson influenced virtually every rock-n-roller and blues player with his songs, "Sweet Home Chicago", "Love in Vain", "Rambling on My Mind" and "Stop Breaking Down." 

You don't think you've been influenced by Robert Johnson?  Hmmm.  Check this out:  Eric Clapton covered "Crossroads" and made it into what we call today a "classic rock song."  Eric Clapton said of Johnson's blues playing and singing, "I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson."  Want some words from another authority on rock and roll?  Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones observed after listening to Robert Johnson's complete set of recordings on Columbia Records, "You want to know how good the blues can get?  Well, this is it."  

Robert Johnson's life sounds like an ancient Delta blues song, born poor, taught to play the guitar by blues legends like Son House, became an itinerant musician, drifting from town to town, bar to bar, playing show after show, but he was more than that.  His guitar technique included complex chords, slide guitar playing up and down the strings, and walking bass notes patterned after boogie piano playing style.  These traits led him into what's now considered an American musical legend--that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil down at a Delta crossroads for his blues playing guitar skills!  This song, memorialized in his song, "Crossroads Blues", was electrified by Eric Clapton in his rendition of it known as "Crossroads". 

• If you click here, on the Memphis Guide web site, a short clip from "Crossroads Blues" gives you a sense of Robert Johnson's music. 
• After you hear that clip, click here on the Barnes & Noble web site to check out a clip from Eric Clapton's version of "Crossroads".  You have to be tone deaf not to notice the Robert Johnson influence on Eric Clapton!

Of course, Robert Johnson's life ended like a mythical blues song--in tragedy.  In 1938, at a juke joint called "Three Forks", Robert Johnson played a little too close to the razor edge of life, infuriating some husband at his attention to the man's wife.  Some hours later, a flask of poisoned whiskey was passed to Johnson who unwittingly drank it.  Three days later, on August 16, 1938, Robert Johnson passed away from the poison and joined the Great Blues Band in the Sky.

In 1998, on what I call my "blues history tour", I visited several places relative to Robert Johnson's life and passing, namely, Dockery Plantation where he visited at times learned some guitar tricks, the famous Crossroads of Highway 49 and 61 in Crackled, the Robert Johnson Memorial Monument and and Robert Johnson's Tombstone.  Here are a few pictures from some of those sites.

Here's the memorial monument erected after the Robert Johnson complete recordings set on Columbia records turned out to be a mega-hit in the early 1990s.  Columbia Records donated a ton of money to this monument and paying the debt of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in whose Morgan City, MS cemetery the stone was erected.  (Notice how the ground is sinking which is so typical in the Delta region.  The picture on the stone is the same one that's often seen of Robert Johnson with the cigarette in his mouth.)

A little farther up the Highway 7 is the Robert Johnson Tombstone lays on what is reported to be his grave in the cemetery of the Payne Chapel Missionary Baptist Church on Highway 512 West in Quito, MS.  Drive fast and you'll breeze right by this place--it looks abandoned! 

And yes, I held true to tradition--I played Eric Clapton's version of Johnson's "Crossroads" as I left--after dropping some pennies on his gravestone!