Robert, Jack and Jill, and others
Details culled from Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson’s stepsister.
A teaching moment
One time after I played Robert Johnson’s recording of “Cross Road Blues,” a student in the front row said “You should’ve played Cream.” I smiled and asked, “Where do you think they got it?”
Icicles, shrimp, and tamales
From Mack McCormick’s Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey.
Blue canard
Sorry, Open Culture, there’s no evidence that Robert Johnson’s recordings were intentionally speeded up.
A third Robert Johnson photograph
It appears on the cover of a book published this week, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, by Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach.
Close enough for tarantellas
A wonderful example of musical versatility, with Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines in New York and New Jersey.
A Robert Johnson obituary
In The New York Times. Not great.
Robert Johnson, mortgagor
“She got a mortgage on my body now, and a lien on my soul.”
Listening to Robert Johnson
"The impossibility of reverse-engineering the circumstances of recording puts me in mind of the title of David Shapiro’s poem 'After a Lost Original': we have no reference point for knowing what Johnson sounded like when recording other than his recordings."