Recommendations of the Editorial team
The best songwriters of all time (23): Robert Johnson
Many blues musicians sang of sin and forgiveness, but Robert Johnson went one step further. On “Me And The Devil Blues” he walks side by side with the devil. Rewrites the biblical book of Revelation on “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.” Seek protection from the Horned One’s captors in “Hell Hound On My Trail.” Or stages his own crucifixion in “Cross Road Blues”.
His songwriting was vivid, fantastic, even surreal (and this was 30 years before the first big acid boom!). And should show the way for various rock greats: Bob Dylan, for example (who holds Johnson’s “King Of The Delta Blues” album in his hand on the cover of “Bringing It All Back Home”), the Rolling Stones (who covered his “Love In Vain” and “Stop Breaking Down”) as well as Eric Clapton, who adapted “Ramblin’ On My Mind” and “Cross Road Blues” and was pursued by Johnson’s hounds of hell for a while.
Robert Johnson – “Cross Road Blues”:
“When I first heard him,” like this Clapton“I had the impression that he was singing only for himself. And now and then perhaps for God too. It was the purest, most wonderful music I had ever heard. I instinctively trusted its flawless purity. And know that I can always fall back on it in the future.”
The country bluesman, who was born in Hazelhurst on the Mississippi in 1911 and died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 27, is considered a pioneer of all dangerous and sinister tendencies in rock’n’roll. Perhaps it is precisely because the biographical facts in the case of Robert Johnson are quite poor that the legends surrounding him are particularly lush.
High-pitched, almost existentially tormented singing
For today’s listeners, the technically primitive, dull and tinny-sounding original recordings of the lonely singer and his guitar from the 1930s are not easy fare. But what Johnson, who is said to have been a student of the Mississippi bluesman Son House, does with his instrument turns out to be anything but primitive upon closer listening.
Johnson sometimes plays around his vocal melodies with tricky picking, sometimes with percussive riffing, sometimes with contrapuntal lines to contrast with his high, almost existentially tormented singing. In the sparseness of their instrumentation and harsh expressivity, Johnson’s tracks provide musical evidence of the bitter time of depression in the States that is just as coherent as John Steinbeck’s famous novel “The Grapes of Wrath.” On the other hand, it is precisely this pure, sometimes disturbing emotional power that gives Robert Johnson’s music its timelessness.