From: "Dik de Heer" Date: Wed May 8, 2002 1:14 am Subject: Born To Be With You : Robert Johnson ROBERT JOHNSON (By Dave Penny) Born Robert Leroy Dodds, 8th May 1911, Hazlehurst, Mississippi. Died 16 August 1938, Greenwood, Mississippi. Like Hank Williams and Charlie Parker after him, the mythology of Robert Johnson's short life is a legend of Arthurian proportions; a self-destructive, demon-haunted musical genius who largely reforged his own genre and inspired countless blues men and millions of faithful fans. The myth says that Johnson sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for supernatural musical skills, but in reality he had been born the illegitimate son of Julia Dodds and Noah Johnson, and ended up in Robinsonville MS as a teenage plantation worker who, desperate to improve his lot, struggled to master the harmonica and doggedly pestered older musicians like Son House and Charlie Patton to allow him to accompany them. He married young and left town, but his wife tragically died in childbirth and he returned after several years to astound his former detractors with his dazzling guitar wizardry, leading them to jealously suspect satanic intervention. Between November 1936 and June 1937, Johnson recorded five sessions in Texas for ARC, resulting in 29 different songs, including the myth-fuelling "Hell Hound On My Trail" and "Me And The Devil Blues", but also setting down standards-to-be such as "Kind Hearted Woman", "Sweet Home Chicago", "Come On In My Kitchen", "Walkin' Blues", "Ramblin' On My Mind", "Cross Road Blues", "Love In Vain" and, of course, "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom". In the Fall of 1938, producer John Hammond, hugely impressed by the ARC recordings, tried to track Johnson down to appear at the first From Spirituals To Swing concert in Carnegie Hall, only to discover that he had died a few weeks earlier; poisoned, it is generally believed, by a jealous lover. Johnson may have been mildly influential during his lifetime, but his real legacy kicked in during the years and decades following his untimely death; he was arguably the first guitarist to use the boogie woogie bass figure made popular by pianist Pinetop Smith, since used on innumerable blues, r&b, jazz, rockabilly, country and rock 'n' roll records. His star continued to rise throughout the 1940s and 1950s (through recordings by disciples like Muddy Waters, Johnny Shines, Robert Jr Lockwood and Elmore James) until his rediscovery in 1961 when the compilation LP "The King Of The Delta Blues Singers" was issued by Columbia. This LP made his best recordings available to a young generation of new, blues-influenced pop musicians who would use Johnson's arcane magic to inspire the early- to mid-1960s white r&b boom. Recommended listening: Nothing less than "The Complete Recordings" (C2K-46222); Sony's 2CD set of Johnson's entire legacy. There are also many budget releases of Johnson's work, as his recordings have been in the public domain for many years. Website: http://www.deltahaze.com/johnson/bio.html Forthcoming biography: Robert Wolf, Hellhound on my trail : the life of Robert Johnson, bluesman extraordinaire. Mankato, Minnesota : Creative Editions, August 2002