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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
A symbolic date for blues music is 1936, when Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson cut his first record. A legend who lived only 27 years and recorded only 29 songs, but enough to establish a new (passionate and melodic) standard of delivery and accompaniment, Johnson perfected the styles of Charley Patton and Son House (and the guitar style of Lonnie Johnson) in the harrowing Terraplane Blues Cross Road Blues, the bleak Stones In My Passway, Come On In My Kitchen (with his best bottleneck workout), Love In Vain (modeled after Leroy Carr's When The Sun Goes Down), Dust My Broom, and the lyrical Hellbound On My Trail (all recorded in 1936-37),
Full bio.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Robert Johnson is the archetype of the wandering bluesmanrestless, sensual, paranoid, and devoted to self-destructionso much so that he was nicknamed the Rimbaud of the blues.
Born in Mississippi in 1911 or 1912, he learned directly from the Delta masters Skip James, Charley Patton, and Son House, whom he had the good fortune to accompany at a very young age during the early years of his career. His style thus developed as a synthesis of theirs, eventually becoming a sumptuous and lyrical summa of Delta blues. His biography fades first into the plantations of his native places and then into the slums of Southern cities. The only certainty is that, between November 23 and 27, 1936, in San Antonio, Texas, and between June 19 and 20, 1937, in Dallas, the twenty-five-year-old Johnson recorded his entire outputfewer than thirty songsincluding classics later performed by countless other musicians such as Cross Road Blues, Love In Vain (Leroy Carrs When The Sun Goes Down), Sweet Home Chicago, Preachin' The Blues, Me and the Devil Blues, Dust My Broom, the bleak Stones In My Passway and Come On In My Kitchen, and chilling autobiographical confessions such as the lyrical Hellhound On My Trail (typical of his obsessive premonitions) and the somber Terraplane Blues (his abysmal song of solitude). These songs trace a melancholy path through the timeless rites of the rural microcosm and its folk legends (notably the many demonic apparitions). A year later he died, perhaps poisoned by a jealous husband, and entered the legend of the blues. Johnsons introverted and desperate singing stands as the highest of its era, remarkable for its sensitivity, intensity, and poetry, as well as for his extraordinary vocal and guitar skills. He must be recognized as the greatest poet-singer of solitude in the history of the blues.
The compilation King of the Delta Blues Singers (1961) caused a
sensation and jumpstarted the blues revival of the 1960s.
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