Above: A photo booth portrait of the blues musician Robert Johnson. It was taken around 1930 and is one of two confirmed photographs of him.Credit…© 1986 Delta Haze Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
This article by is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.Johnson gained little notice in his life, but his songs — quoted by the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin — helped ignite rock ‘n’ roll.
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Little about the life Robert Leroy Johnson lived in his brief 27 years, from approximately May 1911 until he died mysteriously in 1938, was documented. A birth certificate, if he had one, has never been found.
What is known can be summarized on a postcard: He is thought to have been born out of wedlock in May 1911 in Mississippi and raised there. School and census records indicated he lived for stretches in Tennessee and Arkansas. He took up guitar at a young age and became a traveling musician, eventually glimpsing the bustle of New York City. But he died in Mississippi, with just over two dozen little-noticed recorded songs to his name.
And yet, in the late 20th century, the advent of rock ’n’ roll would turn Johnson into a figure of legend. Decades after his death, he became one of the most famous guitarists who had ever lived, hailed as a lost prophet who, the dubious story goes, sold his soul to the devil and epitomized Mississippi Delta blues in the bargain.
In the 1990s, a lightning-in-a-bottle compilation of Johnson’s music — “The Complete Recordings,” released by Columbia Records in 1991 — revived interest in the blues for yet another generation, selling more than two million copies and winning a Grammy for best historical album. In 1994, a United States postage stamp in Johnson’s likeness memorialized him as a national hero.
The chasm between the man Johnson was and the myth he became — between mortal reach and posthumous grip — has marooned historians and conscientious listeners for more than a half-century. It would have made fertile terrain for one of Johnson’s own songs, many of which frankly and masterfully tilled the everyday hopelessness and implausibility of segregated African-American life.
Indeed, his story is no more or less than the handiwork of the country in which it was written; a country where the legacy of African-Americans has often been shaped by others.
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