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The Day Robert Johnson Died • James Campion American Lore & the Curse of Virtuosity   I don’t think you have to sign the deal. You just have to know it’s there.                                                        Keith Richards

Seven months is all Robert Johnson needed. Two sessions. Twenty-nine songs. In unquestionably the shortest run to become a legend, he emerged America’s gift and curse, our lasting tall tale of virtuosity and mystery wrapped in jealousy and violence. He lived how he died, searching, as in our continued scramble to define our national misery born in sin and raised in anger. Because, in the end, despite our self-destruction, our greatest resource will be our music, and Robert Johnson lived in all those worlds composing our pain, anguish, and redemption. Then he died. And that is what made him immortal.     
     
Robert Johnson was first famous for being the finest guitarist and most original composer of Delta Blues of his era, or maybe ever, if you listen to those who followed in his footsteps, the entirety of the British blues movement of the 1960s for one, and those who continue to keep the blues alive in the public imagination. But his lasting fame came with his death at 27, becoming the first of the macabrely celebrated 27-Club. That is when Robert Johnson transmogrified into the King of the Delta Blues. During those crucial seven months when he laid down his recorded gospel, he was an anomaly, but death managed to neatly wrap up an otherwise messy story of his place in the American South, the African American transition from post-Civil War slavery into the great migration to urban poverty and the primacy of expression in song equal to that of memoir.  
     
Johnson’s journey starts with the guitar, which he played like an orchestra of one, accompanying a voice of cross-plains thunder. With those tools, he penned some of the most stirring songs of the dustbowl era this side of Woody Guthrie, who took to folk and politics the way Johnson circled evil. Because the way the story goes the young musician left his home in Hazlehurst, Mississippi to make a deal with the devil. Not the dreaded white man or some conniving record exec or the crushing systemic racism of a nation divided, but the Devil – Fallen Angel, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, Satan. Yeah, that devil. The reason for this was displaying an immense talent that seemed to many, including seminal bluesman Son House, to come from nowhere.
     
One day Johnson was a sharecropper’s offspring, stumbling around the dirt-poor dusty backroads of a desolate existence and the next he was imbued with ungodly talent. House describes a day in the summer of 1936 when Johnson strode into a roadhouse where his band was playing and shooed them off the stage, sat down, and exhumed a beat up acoustic from his case. It was then he began to unravel the future of modern music with a new sonic and lyrical language yet unheard. Johnson sang of hell hounds, dusting brooms, trains carrying the lonely, drunkards with pistols, and a whole lot of rambling. He did not invent the blues but reinvented the blues experience. He may not have been the first in the tradition of music that rose from Black suffering, but he may have nailed with strange clarity the whole of human suffering. 
     
The Faustian bargain that brought him to this apex was to have happened at a Mississippi crossroads at midnight where the Devil – cobalt eyes and silver hair –took his guitar, and, as the story goes, revealed to Johnson the darkest corners of his soul in the searing notes. Handing the instrument back, as it glowed with promise, Johnson took it, they say, and blazed fury. He played like a man possessed, an out-of-body assault on the senses. He came to understand the blues, yes, sir, translating its basest terrors to spin it into art.
     
During the spring of those seven months Robert Johnson turned out the Devil’s prophecy, recording his interpretations of earlier riffs and pervasive progressions with unerringly original asides that turned him from mere musician into alchemist, schooling generations on the fusion of fate and determined purpose conjured in those songs. Two sessions in two places – the first held over three days in November of 1936 in room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas yielding, among others, “I Believe I'll Dust My Broom,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” and "Cross Road Blues,” “Terraplane Blues,” and “Last Fair Deal Gone Down,” the last two of which were released on 78s and sold 10,000 copies. The second was in a makeshift studio at the Vitagraph Building in Dallas over two days in June of 1937, unveiling the timeless classics, “Hell Hound on My Trail,” “Me & the Devil” “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues,” and “Love in Vain.” 
     
That was it. Johnson said his piece. He was to live on those recordings, some of them released to minor acclaim and meager residuals during his short run in the “spotlight,” and many others unearthed years later, long after he was gone, when Alan Lomax came down with a government grant to record America’s sins weaved into song, looking for the great Robert Johnson and instead running into McKinley Morganfield. He recorded the man known as Muddy Waters, sending the young blues singer on a course to Chicago, Illinois, where he would electrify the Delta Blues, invent the modern rock band, and make hits with another disciple of Johnson’s named Willie Dixon, the man who wrote the Tales of Chi-Town which were duly ripped off by the white man for decades. Not long after, Columbia Records famed producer, John Henry Hammond, who would go onto discover Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, found a similar dead end when looking to book Johnson for his Carnegie Hall “From Spirituals to Swing” concert in NYC. On learning of Johnson's death, Hammond replaced him with Big Bill Broonzy, another disciple of the Delta Blues King, who went onto help transform popular music in the latter half of the 20th century. Broonzy played two of Johnson's songs that evening.
  
   One of them was later turned into a hit for the great Elmore James in 1951. 
     History just missed Johnson. He was gone but remembered. Mainly because no one really knows what happened to him. Rumors and theories abound, exasperated by dueling biographies or battling family members. Everyone seems to agree on the day he died – August 16, 1938, and that he was 27 when he breathed his last. The rest is up for grabs. There is no newspaper reference of his death at the time, but it is accepted that it was near Greenwood, Mississippi.
     Then things get hazy. 
     
The most salacious and wide-spread theory involves a residency at a local joint in which Johnson had repeatedly flirted with the owner’s husband, who spiked his whiskey with poison (either strychnine, not likely as it is easily detected, or naphthalene, a “popular” poison in the American South at the time). Some accounts have Johnson stumbling around the club as if possessed and others that he left clutching his stomach assisted by some “friends” back to his hotel room, where he eventually succumbed after convulsing in agonizing pain. One biographer claims to have a deathbed confession from the jealous husband, although there was no name revealed.
     
His age, 27, has become synonymous with early deaths of musical icons, most notably in chronological order of demise, Rolling Stones founder, Brian Jones, electric guitar master, Jimi Hendrix, dynamic blues singer, Janis Joplin, Doors singer, Jim Morrison, Grateful Dead founder, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, Big Star cofounder, Chris Bell, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, and British pop star, Amy Winehouse, along with dozens of lesser known talents. The 27 Club, as it is ghoulishly referred, began the day Robert Johnson died.
     
To put the finest point on it, Johnson’s “career” that spanned those seven months of recording his life and ultimately his epitaph has led to some of our best and worst instincts about the music that moves us. That has always been the draw for people like me, who enjoy finding out more about where this music comes from and who creates it. More than anyone, Robert Johnson has defined the mystery of youth and virtuosity – how a mediocre harmonica playing kid could disappear for a spate and return a god. Or devil. And how that god/devil is remembered for his purported “deal,” because the boring story of possessing raw talent with a sense of purpose and refining it through discipline doesn’t cut it. 
     
Sometimes the reasons for aptitude are not so Biblical or ethereal, and sometimes death could be embarrassingly mundane like some who figured the wild and wooly Johnson died of a bout of untreated syphilis from his predatory lifestyle. Being murdered for seducing another man’s wife and stumbling in a ghastly fog gives new life to an otherwise brilliant and flawed musician in a time when the death of a Black man in the South was as much news as a missing horse or the stifling heat. 

© James Campion 4.10.25
     
Follow at https://www.facebook.com/jamesbartolommeocampion/ X (@FearNoArt) and Instagram (@jamescampion).
 
James Campion is the the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, "Midnight For Cinderella" and “Y”. +, “Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon” + “Accidently Like a Martyr – The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon” and “Take a Sad Song…The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude" and coming in *April 2025, “Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era.”

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