Season 09 Episode 10: Me and the Devil Blues

to Crimewave at seed dot com for more information. Tickets will go on sale on Friday, February thirteenth, so listen out for more announcements there. Further to that, I'm also hugely excited to say I'll be attending crime Con US and UK this year. So for the US we're going to be in Las Vegas twenty eight to the thirty first of May. Go to Crimecon dot com to buy ticket and use voucher code unexplained for ten percent off.

And in the UK we'll be in Birmingham on April the twenty fifth and London on the third and fourth of October. These are all really special events that do a lot to put survivors of crime front and center, and I'm really honored to be taking part for crime CONUK. Go to Crimecon dot com UK to buy tickets and again use voucher code Unexplained for ten percent off. You can also find all the links on my website at

Unexplained podcast dot com. Forward slash events. In British society, at least, we tend to prefer that people wear their talent lightly. But such attitudes tend to come with a few caveats, largely to do with class and race. For those that we might consider to be in the higher reaches of the British class system, it's all very well speaking quietly about your achievements when you already occupy a

comfortable and privileged place in society. There is no need to boast, for example, because your place, as it were, is self evident and secure. However, should you dare to come from a position of decidedly less established privilege when your talent starts to attract fame and attention, then be prepared to do battle with the court of public opinion at the first sign of weakness, or the moment you

commit a supposed social faux pas. We see it every time we open a tabloid newspaper in the gossip columns detailing the latest celebrity mishap. More often than not, it's hard not to sense the quiet implication that the subject has committed the ultimate sin of forgetting where they came from or failing to know their place. Things become even more complicated and sinister. Even if we believe talent to be something that is not necessarily earned, but bestowed upon us.

For some talent is simply a gift given to the individual by God, and should therefore be encouraged, regardless of the perceived merits of the recipient. As the Bible says in Matthew five point fifteen, one shouldn't light a lamp and hide it under a bushel. Instead, they should put it on a stand where it can give light to everyone in the house. So what then, of those who are prodigiously talented but don't, according to the lords of society, fit the mold of someone who should be you're listening

to unexplained and I'm Richard mc lean smith. It was a bright close evening in May nineteen thirty four, and the stars were flung out across the purple mississippy sky like crumbs on a picnic blanket. The crooked branches of the region's tupelow trees stood out like grasping fingers, and a full moon bled its terrible light across the dusty trail. Unnamed animals could be heard howling into the darkness for miles, and through it all came the footsteps of a young

man plodding tirelessly along the road. Twenty one year old Robert Johnson had endured a tumultuous few days. He'd only been with his wife, Coletta for less than a year, but after it emerged that he'd fathered a child with another woman named Vergie May Smith, Johnson was flung out, and so he hit the road to follow his dream of becoming a traveling bluesman. He'd shown some early promise playing at the various shotgun shacks and illicit shabines that

were dotted around the American South. He could play a mean harmonica, but even after a short apprenticeship to the master of House Blues azayah Ike Zimmerman, older contemporaries like Son House remembered that the young player was hopelessly bad when it came to the guitar. Back when he'd been apprenticed to Zimmerman, there were whispers that his tutor liked to make the young bluesman practice with him in a cemetery.

He claimed that it was because they'd be undisturbed by anyone eavesdropping, But before long, rumors began to circulate that the two men were undertaking something far more nefarious under cover of darkness, something which involved the supernatural and the

conferring of knowledge from worlds beyond our own. Blues music was already beginning to cross over into the white mainstream from a mainly black folk tradition, and Johnson figured that if he could master the guitar the way he'd mastered everything else, there was a solid opportunity to make his

fame and fortune. So, with a bindle slung over one shoulder, a ten dollar guitar strapped to another, and a single dollar bill tucked into his right shoe, Johnson decided to make the roughly two day hike from Cohoma County in his native Mississippi to the bright lights of Memphis, Tennessee. Where and when Johnson appeared next is a matter of some conjecture. It might have been at a humble duke

joint in Memphis, Tennessee, or in Helena, Arkansas. It might have been playing for a select few friends and acquaintances at a tavern or saloon in one of the many one horse towns that Johnson passed through during his years of itinerancy. Either way, what we do know from anecdotal evidence is that wherever it was, Robert Johnson was said to suddenly be possessed of a talent for playing the guitar,

which he'd never shown before. To many who saw it, his fingers seemed to slide across the frets of his battered old guitar in a way that suggested they'd been possessed by some other agency. And it wasn't only Johnson's

playing that raised eye. It was the sudden caliber of his songs who On November twenty third, nineteen thirty six, Robert Johnson appeared at the general store of one Henry Columbus Spear, who'd become legendary in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, as a talent scout and broker for some of the biggest names on the burgeoning blue circuit of the day. William Harris, Ishman Bracy, Charlie Patton, and Evans Son House.

After playing only a few tunes for him, Spear was speechless. Immediately, he put Johnson in contact with an English record producer named Don Law. Law brought Johnson to Room four one four of the gun To Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, and for the next two days, the young musician recorded several of what would later become absolute standards of the genre.

I Believe, I'll Dust my Broom, Sweet Home Chicago, Terraplane Blues, and an especially mysterious track known as cross Road Blues, which Johnson seemed reticent to furnish with any added context or illuminating detail. A few months later, in June nineteen thirty seven, Law arranged for Johnson to finish his recording

at a makeshift studio in Dallas. He set down a total of twenty nine tracks, most of which seemed to emerge perfectly, formed in little more than two or three takes, and for someone so inexperienced, Law was a little taken aback when Johnson insisted did the songs not exceed three minutes in length, almost as though some kind of spell might be broken, should he deviate from it, given how

slap dash the recording process had been. The first single released by Johnson, Terraplaine Blue, who did remarkably well commercially, selling over ten thousand copies. Most, if not all, of the tracks Johnson taped between November nineteen thirty six and June nineteen thirty seven still survived today. When a young Keith Richards first heard the record in the early nineteen sixties, which had been introduced to him by bandmate Brian Jones,

Richards was spellbound. Richards would later tell interviewers, when I first heard it, I said to Brian, who's that Robert Johnson? He said, yeah, but who's the other guy playing with him? Because I was hearing two guitars, it took me a long time to realize he was actually doing.

several competing theories as to what actually happened. No formal autopsy is known to have taken place, and because of the inherent racism of the American South at that time, it is likely that the authorities decided instead to make do with a pro former examination of his body to file the death certificate quickly. Some have speculated that he

died from complications related to untreated congenital syphilis. Others have focused their attention on events immediately preceding Johnson's death, where it was known that he'd secured a residency for a few weeks at the Three Forks Club in the village of Itabina, about fifteen miles west of the city of Greenwood, Proper. According to another contemporary of Johnson's, David Honeyboy Edwards, Johnson's predilection for the company of women may have contributed to

his untimely death. In this version of the story, Johnson was seen flirting with a married woman one evening after finishing one of his sets. The woman had been drinking, and in a quiet interlude between songs, a bottle of whiskey materialized and was offered up to Johnson, seeing that the bottle had been tampered with before it was placed in front of him. When Johnson went to take a swig from it, the young honey boy Edwards, who claimed to be with him at the time, knocked it out

of his hand. Already drunk from a long night of drinking on stage with its band, Johnson admonished Edwards. Then the woman's husband is said to have arrived and encouraged Johnson to drink. He accepted the invitation graciously and set about knocking the whiskey back. Not long afterwards, it said that Johnson began to feel ill. He was escorted back to his room in the early hours of the morning.

Over an excruciating three day period, Johnson's condition worsened before he finally died in a convulsive state of severe pain, having supposedly been poisoned by the jealous husband. Many years later, American musicologist and folklorist Robert mac McCormick claimed to have tracked down the elusive husband and elicited a confession from him that he poisoned Robert Johnson with strychnine. He refused to reveal the man's name, saying that the confession was

given to him in confidence. But the mystery of Robert Johnson's tumultuous life and death didn't end there. I went to the cross road, fell down on my knees, asked the Lord above, have mercy now, save poor Bob if you please, sings Robert Johnson on the startling cross Road Blues.

But in the wake of his untimely death, some began to wonder if, instead of the Lord, it was some one else entirely whom Robert Johnson had pleaded to for help while on his knees at those cross roads, had as some began to wonder, he died so young because that was the price of some kind of bargain that

he'd made. A few years after Johnson's death, a strange story began to take shape regarding an apparent detour that Johnson took after he set out all those years ago as a budding but limited twenty one year old musician to find fame and fortune in Memphis, Tennessee. Some say it was his old mentor, Ike Zimmerman, who gave him the instructions. On the next full moon, he was to head out to the crossroads near the Dockery plantation in

the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Whereat midnight a visitor would appear that would finally help him realize his ambition

to become the greatest blues player of his generation. And perhaps Johnson did just that, and made his way out to that perfectly ordinary, nondescript crossroads at the next full moon, only to find suddenly, at the stroke of midnight that all the nocturnal ambients that had so filled the air, the cicadas, singing, owl's hooting, the wind blowing, had disappeared completely.

Perhaps it was then that the figure he'd been told to expect made him self known, a peculiar looking man dressed smartly, put in unusual clothes for the age, who, on seeing Johnson with his guitar, offered to show him some licks of his own, before handing the instrument back to the young man with a wry smile, And perhaps on taking it from him, it was only then that Johnson noticed how peculiarly long the man's fingers were, or the strange fire that seemed to glow in his eyes.

And maybe Johnson asked the strange man to teach him everything he knew, to which the man said he would be more than happy to on one condition that Johnson sell him his soul in return, And perhaps it was then that Johnson happily signed it away. Many will be familiar with Christopher Marlow's classic Elizabethan drama Doctor Faustus, in which the eponymous Faustus sells his soul to the devil

in return for knowledge and power. However, the notion of the devil's bargain or Faustian pact as its roots in much earlier cautionary tales about mortals making unwise covenants with divine beings. Perhaps the most famous example is the Greek myth of Orpheus and his Descent into the underworld, where the hero makes an agreement to retrieve the soul of his love Eurydicy, on condition that he doesn't once look behind him as they ascend back into the mortal realm.

But as Orpheus approaches the surface, he is suddenly overcome with doubt, turning at last only to see the soul of his beloved being pulled away from him forever. But what if there were some truth to the idea. Perhaps the most well known historical example of a deal with the devil is the case of Bavarian born seventeenth century painter Johann Christoph Heitzmann, who claimed to have signed not one, but two pats for his soul in sixteen sixty eight.

After Heitzman became an orphan and was left destitute at the age of seventeen, he claimed that the devil appeared to him and offered him a contract signed in ink and another signed in his own blunt. For nine agonizing years, Heisman apparently subsisted as the devil's bounden son. When the date finally arrived in sixteen seventy seven for the relinquishment of his soul, Heitzmann took sanctuary at a monastery in

the Austrian town of Mariotsel. There a series of exorcisms was said to have been performed, culminating in the devil giving back the contracts and Heightsman taking vow to join the brotherhood of Saint John of God. The artist would eventually die in seventeen hundred, leaving behind a famous triptych depicting his ordeal. Of course, we only have Heitzman's word to take on this, and even if we are to

believe that such a fabulous story played out. There are a number of other explanations for what actually took place. Sigmund Freud revisited the case in nineteen twenty three, and it was his belief that what Heisman experienced was a lifelong affliction with what he termed demonological neurosis or an advanced form of schizophrenia in today's modern parlance. But there are more modern examples of the Faustian pact at work, which defy and even supersede the publication of Freud's study

into Heizmann. We are not so sophisticated that we have jettisoned the old mythologies entirely. They still linger in the high way. We speak about talented people who have flown too close to the sun and burned out before their time.

It is no accident, for example, that rock and roll is still referred to as the Devil's music, or that we link the term so closely with the so called twenty seven Club, a term linking musicians as diverse as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse, all of whom died at the tender age of twenty

seven and first among them was Robert Johnson. Blues historian Pete Welding had the opportunity to sit down with one of Johnson's contemporaries, Son House, for a Rolling Stone profile in nineteen sixty six. When he asked the elderly legend about his brief association with the traveling bluesman during the depression year of the nineteen thirties, House seemed to have no doubt where the talent had come from. He sold his soul to the devil to play like that, House

said to Welding, to his mind and many others. It was the only explanation for Johnson's sudden mastery over the sliding blues scale, which just a short time before had eluded him so perceptibly. Perhaps there was an element of professional jealousy that hot young players from the UK like John Mayle, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were beginning to

tout Johnson as an influence. Indeed, the fact that the likes of House had struggled for decades to support themselves, only for mainstream white audiences to suddenly pay attention to the art form after it had been adapted by men who looked like them must have been a source of great frustration. Now there was an opportunity to have some

fun with Johnson's legend. He had, after all, left pressure little behind in terms of his history, and it's plausible to think that the likes of House was putting his tongue firmly in his cheek at his gullible new white audience's expense. Whatever the truth of House's intentions may have been, there is no doubt that it must have come as a shock when the relatively unknown Johnson suddenly made his appearance as a fully fledged, accomplished blues guitarist sometime in

nineteen thirty four or thirty five. We can almost imagine Son House sitting there nursing a glass of tepid beer, smoke swirling around his weather beaten face in an old shotgun shack as the evening kicks into gear. Perhaps he's taken his woman out for the evening, the two of them just waiting for the next high energy jive to begin. A hush descends over the room as a young Robert Johnson shuffles onto the clapboard platform and takes his seat

on the stool. Then he takes his guitar out of its tattered wooden case, leans forward toward the microphone and starts to play a set of which no one has

ever heard the like before. Given that so little about Johnson's actual life was committed to the written record, getting to the bottom of whether he truly learned his trade at the lap of a mentor who taught him in a graveyard, or whether he sold his soul to the devil at midnight on a barren crossroads near Docking, Mississippi, or whether he really was murdered by a jealous husband

is nihon impossible. What we do know is that its imprint can be found on so much, from delta blues inflected records like the Rolling Stones is Let It Bleed and Exile on Main Street, to less obviously conventional modes of influence, like how it is now a standard that

a pop song should be only three minutes long. And although there is something undoubtedly appealing about referring to rock and roll, both to those who play it and those who listen to it as the Devil's music, with Johnson its devil son in chief, it's worth pausing for a moment to think about what that idea really does. Because the myth of Robert Johnson's selling his Soul was not

something that meaningfully followed him in life. He played mostly in black establishments, places already viewed with suspicion by churches and white authorities alike. To many in mainstream America, blues musicians were considered itinerant, immoral, and dangerous. The music itself was already seen as transgressive. The devil didn't need to be invoked to make it suspect. But after Johnson's death, the story takes on a different function. It begins to

do a kind of cultural work. The myth reinforces something that many people were already comfortable believing, that this kind of brilliance emerging from a poor young black man in the Jim Crow South couldn't possibly be the product of discipline, intellect, or intention. It had to come from somewhere else, somewhere darker, somewhere other. In some ways, you might say, the legend

doesn't elevate Johnson, it diminishes him. It strips away the hours of practice, the mentorship, the travel, the listening, the pioneering innovation of combining various musical forms. All of that is replaced with a supernatural shortcut. His talent was no longer earned, it was given to him, and maybe for white audiences encountering Johnson's music decades later, this framing was often easier to accept, not through conscious malice, but through

something slipperia and more ingrained. It preserved hierarchy, It exoticized black creativity. It cast the blues as primal, mystical, and dangerous, as opposed to modern, innovative and authored. In all likelihood, although he clearly had an aptitude for it, Johnson simply practiced obsessively. He traveled constantly, absorbing the different styles of different regions. He learned from older musicians like Iike Zimmermon. He innovated with structure and narrative lyricism. It was genius

and in that sense perhaps even supernatural. But it isn't magic. Its work well, that's my two cents. At least in truth. We'll never know for sure exactly how Robert Johnson came to possess the talent he did, or indeed why he died at such a tragically young age. That will remain forever tantalizingly unexplained. This episode was written by James Connor Patterson and Richard mc clean Smith. Thank you as ever for listening Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created

by Richard mc lean Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard mc clan smith. Unexplained The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the

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