The King of the Delta Blues, this is from the The Blues Highway:
Robert Johnson went down to the crossroad . . .
. . . where they say he struck a deal with the Devil. Fellow bluesman Tommy Johnson (no relation) said, "If you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where a road crosses that way, where a crossroad is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little 'fore 12:00 that night so you'll know you'll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself. . . . A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want." (As told by LeDell Johnson to David Evans and quoted from Peter Guralnick's Searching for Robert Johnson, copyright © 1982, 1989.)
In 1936 and 1937, Robert Johnson recorded such immortal blues classics as I Believe I'll Dust My Broom, Sweet Home Chicago, Come On In My Kitchen, Cross Road Blues, Traveling Riverside Blues, Love In Vain, Hellhound On My Trail, and Me And The Devil Blues. Johnson was born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, in 1911 and died under still-mysterious circumstances near Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1938.
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