ROBERT JOHNSON
The mythic figure who shaped so much of the 20th Century’s guitar music
Arguably no musician has ever been the subject of such incredible mythology as Robert Johnson. Would rock ’n’ roll ever have given us Sympathy For The Devil and Highway To Hell and if not for rumours of Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads? Would metal fans be scrawling pentagrams on guitars and throwing the horns if Johnson hadn’t sung Me And The Devil Blues?
Beyond the incredible imagery, there’s a sophistication and variety to Johnson and his delta contemporaries that modern blues often lacks. The art form is often reduced to endless 12-bars, while Johnson’s own work embraced jazz and country. His blues compositions did not limit themselves to the 12-bar format, and his debut recording, They’re Red Hot, was an uptempo ragtime number. Playing unaccompanied allowed Johnson and his contemporaries the freedom to play with time and tempo, and his songs have odd-length bars in unexpected places. With his singing and slide playing, he even explored microtonality in subtle ways that Jeff Beck and Derek Trucks are showered with praise for achieving today.
Musical immortality is mostly about having great songs. Beyond the legend, Johnson’s name still looms so large because he wrote tunes that slap. Dust My Broom, Crossroad
Blues and Sweet Home Chicago are the blues’s biggest standards. The Rolling Stones covered
Love In Vain and Stop Breaking Down, Led Zeppelin had Traveling Riverside Blues and The Lemon Song, while Steve Miller and Duane Allman both took a bite at Come On In My Kitchen. Guitarists like Ike Turner and Chuck Berry evolved Johnson’s template into rock ’n’ roll, and from that came a slew of hits.
It’s not quite right to give the credit solely to Johnson. Delta blues musicians shared their creativity with each other more freely than today’s copyright-driven music industry. Johnson’s music carries plenty of influence from his and forebears and peers, some of whom are now forgotten. Johnson might be the most important musician in the development of 20th Century popular music, but he’s also emblematic of dozens of black folk musicians who developed the genre without the pay or credit they deserved. Still, if you want to learn acoustic blues fingerstyle, Johnson’s turnarounds are still the benchmark. If you want to play slide, you’ll need to learn his licks. And if you’re writing songs, you can only hope to capture an element of the human experience so profoundly as he did.