Blues music is respected now, but, as David Epstein’s explains (in Inside the Box), it was known in its early days as “the devil’s music.”
Pious families learned that blues shouldn’t be played in the house. [Robert] Johnson learned a different lesson: that competent guitar players could attract whiskey, women, and a little spending cash.
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He was so poor that he had to start on a diddley bow—just a wire nailed to the side of a shack. At fifteen, he upgraded to a real guitar, albeit missing two strings.
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Johnson played across the entire fretboard, using complex patterns and chords more typical of jazz. He used repetitive guitar riffs to add structure to a song, and he managed to emulate boogie-woogie piano players by doing two things at once with his right hand: picking out a steady, rhythmic bass line with his thumb while simultaneously playing elaborate melodies with his other fingers. That’s why Keith Richards, decades later, would think he was hearing two guitars.
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During stops in San Antonio and Dallas in 1936 and 1937, Johnson recorded the only twenty-nine songs he left behind. A famous producer heard a recording and went looking for him. The producer meant to invite him to perform at a venue about as alien as possible to a juke joint: Carnegie Hall. He had trouble reaching Johnson, and before he could extend the invitation, the producer learned that Johnson was dead, the first member of what would become known as the “27 Club” of famous musicians who died at that age.
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Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and The Doors all covered his songs. His supposed deal with the devil became a marketing trope.
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Rather than to the crossroads, Johnson had gone back to Hazlehurst, and sought out Zimmerman, a proficient guitarist who was a few years his elder and could teach him how to play. Johnson moved in with Zimmerman and his family in nearby Beauregard, Mississippi. The teacher would take his student to Beauregard Cemetery at midnight, and joked about playing for ghosts, but the real reason was perfectly simple. As Zimmerman’s daughter told a historian in 2007: “He said [he’d go to the cemetery] ’cause he could play better ’cause it was still… real quiet. Real quiet…. And I think when he was carryin’ Robert up there it was so Robert could really concentrate on his guitar…. He was determined not to let him fail.” And why midnight? “I think because it was quiet and nobody around to walk and interfere.” Her father and Johnson would sit on two of the tombstones and carry on their lessons. Johnson’s progress, which seemed so magical that it engendered the most renowned ghost story in music, was the result of something more like the approach Isabel Allende employed to produce forty years of bestsellers.