The Man at the Crossroads: The Mystery of Robert Johnson

In Mississippi, in the early 1930s, a young man with a guitar kept hanging around the blues musicians of the Delta.

He wanted to play with them. They weren’t so keen to let him.

Son House, one of the most respected bluesmen in the region, later remembered the young man as eager, persistent and, frankly, not very good. When he grabbed a guitar during the breaks, people in the juke joint complained. The older musicians treated him like a kid getting in the way.

His name was Robert Johnson.

And at some point, he vanished.

The return

Nobody knows exactly how long he was gone. Maybe a year, maybe a little more.

When he came back, he walked into a juke joint where Son House and the others were playing and asked for a guitar again. The musicians smiled, ready for another embarrassing night.

Then he started to play.

The story goes that the room fell silent. The young man who had barely known a few chords now played with a confidence nobody could explain. His hands seemed to carry the bass line, the rhythm and the melody all at once, and some listeners swore they were hearing two guitarists instead of one. His voice had something restless in it, almost menacing.

How could a man change so much in so little time?

The legend

The people of the Delta had an answer ready.

There was an old folk belief: if you take your guitar to a crossroads at midnight, a tall, dark man will come, take it from your hands, tune it and give it back. From then on, you can play anything. The price is your soul.

The legend began to attach itself to Robert Johnson’s name. And he, it seems, was in no hurry to deny it. Some of his songs speak of crossroads, of the devil, of hellhounds on his trail. To his audience, the evidence seemed to be piling up.

The truth, which is just as strange

Researchers later found a more down-to-earth explanation.

During the time he was gone, Johnson seems to have learned from a lesser-known musician named Ike Zimmerman, an excellent guitarist. And here is the detail that makes the story even stranger: Zimmerman was said to practise at night in graveyards, because it was quiet there and nobody bothered him.

So the lessons really did happen at midnight, among the tombstones. The teacher was just a man.

What’s more, the crossroads legend had circulated earlier around another bluesman, Tommy Johnson, no relation to Robert. Over time, the myth drifted to the more famous name.

Twenty-nine songs

Robert Johnson recorded only 29 songs in his entire life, across two sessions in 1936 and 1937, in makeshift studios set up in hotel rooms and buildings in San Antonio and Dallas.

In 1938, at just 27 years old, he died. The circumstances are shrouded in mystery too. The most widespread version says he was poisoned with whiskey, perhaps by a jealous husband after he flirted with a woman at a juke joint. There is no clear proof.

Not even his burial place is certain. In Mississippi, there are three grave markers bearing his name.

And for decades, the world knew very little of his face. Only a handful of authenticated photographs are known to exist.

The music outlived the man

After his death, Robert Johnson was almost forgotten.

Then, in 1961, his recordings were reissued on an album. It found its way to young musicians in England who listened to American blues with an almost religious devotion. Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and many others played those 29 songs over and over, trying to understand how one guitar could sound like that.

Through them, the echo of Robert Johnson entered rock music.

A man who lived 27 years and left behind a few photographs, three possible graves and less than an hour of music shaped a great deal of twentieth-century guitar playing.

Maybe there was never any deal at the crossroads.

But there was a young man who disappeared ordinary and came back extraordinary. And the real mystery remains the same: what actually happened during that year?