WHEN THE TRAIN / LEFT THE STATION / IT HAD TWO LIGHTS ON BEHIND / WELL, THE BLUE LIGHT WAS MY BLUES / AND THE RED LIGHT WAS MY MIND / ALL MY LOVE’S IN VAIN. — ROBERT JOHNSON

Son House, the great blues singer and slide guitarist, delighted in telling people that when he first met Robert Johnson, he couldn’t play guitar to save his life. But the young man was persistent and after disappearing for a few months was again pestering House, Willie Brown and the other Mississippi Delta bluesmen in his company to be allowed up on stage.

House relented one Saturday night — the year may have been 1929 or maybe not — and left Johnson to play to the tables and chairs while he and his buddies stepped outside to take in the air. A devastatingly brilliant sound suddenly came from inside the roadhouse unlike anything House had ever heard.

Said House of Johnson: “He sold his soul to the Devil to get to play like that.”

Indeed, there are few stories about Johnson that don’t include references to the Devil. And what stories there are about a man whose extraordinary skills influenced so many musicians are usually short on details (let alone there being only three photographs of him extant; two of which are reproduced here).

Johnson had an ineffably-shadowy life so poorly-documented that there are entire books and a movie or two not about his life but about how little is known about it.

We do know that this life included the recording of 29 landmark tracks under the guidance of Don Law in 1936-1937 before Johnson’s death in 1938 at age 27, possibly by a jealous lover who poisoned, stabbed or shot him. (Pick one.)

As film director Martin Scorsese says in his foreword to Alan Greenberg’s Love In Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson, “The thing about Robert Johnson was that he only existed on his records. He was pure legend.”

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to other appreciations.