374. Robert Johnson, "King of the Delta Blues Singers"

 

For lack of a better word, this album is just spooky.  Recorded in 1936 and 1937 when Johnson was just 25 and 26 years old, it's really just a scratchy recording of the man and his guitar, but it would go on to become the foundation for a lot of what we think of as "rock" today.  Even if you don't know anything about early blues or know what a I-IV-V sequence is, if you listen to this you'll immediately go "Oh! That's the blues sound!"  It's that recognizable.

The recordings languished in obscurity for many years until John Hammon persuaded Columbia Records to issue them as a set in this album in 1961.  There is probably no way to overstate the impact this collection had on popular music.  Everyone from Bob Dylan to Keith Richards to Eric Clapton was immediately galvanized by what they heard on this record.  Of course they were.  Johnson's voice, which varies from a plaintive whine to an anguished growl, sounds like it's issuing straight from a darkened door to a forgotten, misty past, accompanied only by a squeaky guitar.  It's eerie, almost a direct connection to the unimaginably difficult lives of blacks in the American South in the early 20th century.  

Johnson was only 27 years old when he died, of unknown causes, in Greenwood, Mississippi.  Because "unknown causes" is not nearly interesting enough for such a towering figure in popular music, legends sprang up to explain his death, like he was poisoned by the jealous husband of a woman he was having an affair with or taken by the Devil as part of a bargain for gifting him with his musical powers.  Or it could have been syphilis.  Nobody knows.  (Johnson is widely regarded as the founding member of the "27 Club" of rock stars who died at that age, a group that includes Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, and Kurt Cobain.  I imagine you could pick any age and find a bunch of famous musicians who died at that age but let's not spoil it.)

I was thinking about how ancient and historical these recordings sound, literally like relics from a long-forgotten age, and then I realized they were made about 30 years before I was born.  That's it, 30+ years.  So they were as distant to my birth as Nevermind is to now.  "The past is never dead.  It's not even past."

(Quote thanks to another famous Mississippian, William Faulkner.)