HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ROBERT JOHNSON
Of all the different kinds of music that I enjoy, I always seem to come back to the Delta and Country Styles of Blues when I need a good dose of reality, or when my own life seems to be getting me down. Of all the bluesmen that came out of the Mississippi Delta, Robert Johnson is probably the most renowned. Today is Robert Johnson’s birthday. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. Robert Johnson wrote a lot of really good songs and played his guitar in a style no one had ever heard before. Hence, they thought he had sold his soul to the devil. I’ve been to the Delta region of Mississippi quite a few times and the history there still reverberates in the present. I highly recommend travelling the blues highway.
Here is what All Music Guide has to say about Robert Johnson:
If the blues has a truly mythic figure, one whose story hangs over the music the way a Charlie Parker does over jazz or a Hank Williams does over country, it’s Robert Johnson, certainly the most celebrated figure in the history of the blues. Of course, his legend is immensely fortified by the fact that Johnson also left behind a small legacy of recordings that are considered the emotional apex of the music itself. As a singer, a composer, and as a guitarist of considerable skills, he produced some of the genre’s best music and the ultimate blues legend to deal with. Doomed, haunted, driven by demons, a tormented genius dead at an early age, all of these add up to making him a character of mythology who — if he hadn’t actually existed — would have to be created by some biographer’s overactive romantic imagination.
There are a few different ways you can discover the history and music of the Mississippi Delta region here at the J. Paul Leonard Library. The lyrics in the music are oral histories in and of themselves. Here are some suggestions:
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries, produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, is a virtual encyclopedia of the world’s musical and aural traditions. You must be affiliated with SFSU in order to use this library database. Log in with your SFSU ID number and Library PIN.
This database offers a variety of ways to search for traditional music. For example, you can search by genre, country, artist and cultural group. Try going to the blues genre and exploring there.
The library also has a collection of circulating CDs that you might want to check out:
The complete recordings [sound recording] / Robert Johnson.
Mississippi blues [sound recording] : rare cuts 1926-1941.
Delta blues [sound recording].
Mississippi Delta bluesman [sound recording] / Honeyboy Edwards.
And of course we have books about Robert Johnson and the Delta Blues.
Searching For Robert Johnson / Peter Guralnick.
The land where the blues began / Alan Lomax.
And we have books to help teach you how to play guitar like Robert Johnson.
The complete Robert Johnson / [edited] by Woody Mann.
Acoustic country blues guitar : Delta blues before Robert Johnson / [transcribed by Dave Rubin].
Delta blues guitar / edited and transcribed by Stefan Grossman.
There are also some videos and DVDs:
Muddy Waters came up from the Delta to work in Chicago and throughout his career he worked with many other great bluesmen. Here is a video from YouTube from 1963: Muddy Waters - Got My Mojo Working (1963)Sonny Boy Williamson II (Harmonica), Otis Spann (Piano), Matt Guitar Murphy (Guitar), Willie Dixon (Upright Bass), Bill Stepney (Drums)
