Searching for Robert Johnson

Music critic, author, and screenwriter Peter Guarlnick illuminates the life and legend of blues guitarist Robert Johnson in this extended essay.

He was probably the most influential of all bluesman. And yet Robert Johnson remained virtually unknown to a wider audience until the release of his complete recordings in 1990, fifty-two years after his death.

Unquestionably the main influence on Muddy Waters and an entire generation of rock 'n' roll and blues musicians including Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, Johnson is known for the ferocity and originality of his work, and for the tormented sensibility that lay behind it. Poisoned by a jealous husband at the age of twenty-seven, widely believed to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical gifts, Robert Johnson has long enjoyed a myth that has at times overshadowed his music.

This brilliant ode to the “King of the Delta Blues” evokes the place and time that gave birth to the man and the myth and gracefully mirrors the world and artistry of Robert Johnson himself.