Robert Johnson: 29 songs, five days of recording and one acoustic guitar | Ultimate Guitarist Reunion

Why fans still care

ROBERT JOHNSON left 29 recorded songs, three known photographs and no interviews. The Rock Hall says he “may be the first ever rock star”.

Many players found him through a record made 23 years after he died. Columbia’s King of the Delta Blues Singers came out in 1961, and the Library of Congress calls it “the most influential blues album for modern popular groups”. It reached the Rolling Stones, Cream and Led Zeppelin.

Early life

He was born on 8 May 1911, possibly 1912, on the northern edge of Hazlehurst, Mississippi. The Mississippi Blues Trail marker notes records giving years from 1907 to 1912. His mother was Julia Majors and his father Noah Johnson, a sawmill worker. As a boy he lived in Memphis with the Dodds family, who later went by Spencer.

He played harmonica and jaw harp before guitar. His stepsister Annye Anderson says his favourite singer was Jimmie Rodgers, who’s in Dean’s Ultimate Classic Country Reunion (330, Who’s Who number 24 in · Ultimate Classic Country Reunion (story coming soon) and that he could yodel.

Career chapters

1. 1911Born near Hazlehurst, Mississippi
2. 1930Son House hears him as a young guitarist
3. 1931Marries Callie Craft
4. 1936First recording sessions, San Antonio, from 23 November
5. 1937Second sessions, Dallas, June
6. 1938Dies near Greenwood, Mississippi, aged 27
7. 1961King of the Delta Blues Singers
8. 1986Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
9. 1990The Complete Recordings
10. 2020A third photograph is published, with Brother Robert

Learning the guitar 1930 to 1936

Around 1930 Son House heard him and thought little of his playing. Then Johnson went away and studied with Ike Zimmerman of Beauregard in the early 1930s. When he came back, House recalled that his playing had improved markedly, the Blues Trail marker says, after he studied with Zimmerman. He travelled the Delta as a working musician through the early and middle 1930s.

San Antonio and Dallas 1936 and 1937

Don Law supervised his sessions for the American Record Corporation: San Antonio from 23 November 1936, and Dallas in June 1937. That’s five recording days in all. Cross Road Blues was cut in San Antonio on 27 November 1936.

He wrote his songs to fit the three minutes or so of a 78 rpm side. On Kind Hearted Woman Blues the first take ran long, so on the second he dropped a guitar break. Terraplane Blues was his first release, and the only one that sold well while he was alive.

His death 1938

He died on 16 August 1938 near Greenwood, Mississippi, aged 27.

The revival 1961 onwards

Frank Driggs compiled King of the Delta Blues Singers for Columbia in 1961. The Complete Recordings followed in 1990, won the Grammy for Best Historical Album and was certified Platinum by the RIAA in 1994.

In 1998 a Mississippi court found that Claud Johnson, born in December 1931, was his son and heir, and the state Supreme Court confirmed it in June 2000. In 2020 Annye Anderson’s book Brother Robert brought a third photograph of him into public view.

Craft, sound and style

Two guitars in one

Andy Aledort, writing in Guitar World, says Johnson could sound “like two guitar players”. He kept a driving rhythm going on the low strings while he played melody on the top ones. The rhythm, the bass part and the lead were all in one acoustic guitar.

Keith Richards, Who’s Who number 31 heard it that way too. In his liner notes to The Complete Recordings (1990), he recalled first hearing Johnson at Brian Jones’s place and asking who the other guitarist was.

Tunings

Aledort lists standard tuning, open G, open D and drop D in his playing. Elijah Wald suggests open A as a possibility, and a capo change as the reason some takes sit a half step apart. He puts both forward as arguments, not facts.

Wald also takes on the claim, first made in 2004, that the records run 20 per cent fast. He calls one consistently wrong speed “wildly improbable (bordering on impossible)”.

The guitars in the photographs

The Hooks Bros. studio portrait in Memphis shows a 1929 Gibson L-1, identified by its seven dot markers, unbound fingerboard and slanted “The Gibson” logo. Gibson’s Ren Ferguson says it was probably a studio guitar, not the one he actually played.

The first photo-booth portrait to be published (the one with the cigarette) shows a Kalamazoo KG-14, Gibson’s budget brand, with 14 frets clear of the body and five dot markers. Kalamazoo started making the KG-14 in the autumn of 1936, so that picture can’t be earlier. Johnny Shines said Johnson liked Kalamazoo and Stella guitars.

Gibson later built a Robert Johnson Signature L-1, from 1994, with X-bracing in place of the original ladder bracing. Ferguson points out that 1930s guitars like these have notes that die away fast, and that’s part of the sound on the old records.

The voice

Wald hears Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson and Peetie Wheatstraw in his singing, with the falsetto yodel coming from Wheatstraw and Weldon.

Who picked it up

The 1961 album shaped the Stones, Cream and Led Zeppelin, the Library of Congress says, and Led Zeppelin’s guitarist was Jimmy Page, Who’s Who number 32. Guitar.com names Eric Clapton, Who’s Who number 3, Keith Richards, Who’s Who number 31, Jimi Hendrix, Who’s Who number 6, Jack White, Who’s Who number 26, John Mayer and Joe Bonamassa among the players he influenced. He inspired Muddy Waters too, Guitar.com says. Richards, Who’s Who number 31 told the Guardian the Stones went back to Charley Patton and Johnson to fill a gap in their education.

Stories people still tell

1. The crossroads.

   The best-known story about him is the legend that he sold his soul at a crossroads to play the way he did. It’s folklore. NPR, reporting on Annye Anderson’s book, calls it a racist caricature, and the record shows he learned from teachers like Ike Zimmerman. Cross Road Blues, Me and the Devil Blues and Hellhound on My Trail are the songs the legend grew from.

2. Not just sitting and playing.

   Annye Anderson pushes back on the picture of him as a lone figure with a guitar. “He didn’t just sit and play like they showed him,” she told NPR in 2020.

Legacy

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in 1986. His total Spotify streams passed 175 million by May 2026, with Cross Road Blues on top. Almost nine decades after Dallas, players still sit down with those 29 songs to work out how one man did it.