Johnson

Not long before the album became available to the public, Hammond had given a young Bob Dylan an early acetate copy of the LP. Near the end of his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan recounts the rather intense effect King of the Delta Blues Singers had on him. If he hadn’t heard the album at such an early, formative stage in his career, Dylan writes, “there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn’t have felt free or upraised enough to write.”

King of the Delta Blues Singers had an arguably larger impact across the Atlantic in Britain, where a new generation of rock ’n’ rollers were learning their chops and finding their influences. One of them was a shy, alienated teenager named Eric Clapton, who was given the Johnson album by one of his early bandmates. “At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play,” Clapton writes in his recently published memoir, Clapton: The Autobiography.

The chance of this music’s having such an immediate and visceral effect on an aspiring rock star today is, frankly, pretty slim. To ears accustomed to modern, computer-generated effects that can make almost anyone sound like a guitar god or a vocal powerhouse, Johnson’s music can sound thin and primitive at first spin, even though it’s remarkably complex and polished for its time. As Clapton explains in his autobiography, Johnson employed a fingerpicking style that had him “simultaneously playing a disjointed bass line on the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings, and lead on the treble strings while singing at the same time.” Occasionally, Johnson worked in some bottle-slide playing, too, which involves placing a small glass bottle or sleeve over the left pinkie, then sliding it up and down the guitar’s neck to create the pitch-bending wail that is a signature of the blues. Even accomplished guitarists can have a hard time re-creating Johnson’s sound, let alone mastering it. Says Dave Rubin, an author for the music publisher Hal Leonard Corporation who led the team of musicians who transcribed Johnson’s songs for the guitar instructional Robert Johnson: The New Transcriptions, “When you get to ‘Crossroads’ and ‘Preachin’ Blues’—oh my God, forget it. It sounds like three guys playing.”

Johnson's son, Claud Johnson, lives in Holly Springs and is featured in the piece:

About four months after our first meeting, Schein agrees to let me take a copy of the picture to Mississippi to see if I can make any progress in determining whether it’s authentic or fake. I fly to Memphis and drive to Crystal Springs, Mississippi, the town a man named Claud Johnson calls home.

In 1989, a protracted and, at times, strange legal battle to determine Robert Johnson’s heir had begun in Mississippi. The proceeding was set into motion by two heirs of the bluesman’s half-sister Carrie Thompson. In 1980, she had attempted to rescind the 1974 agreement she had signed permitting Steve LaVere to make copies of the Hooks Bros. and photo-booth portraits and to profit from them. She died in 1983, but her will transferred any rights she still had to those pictures—and any money she was due from them—to her heirs, who turned to the Mississippi judicial system in hopes of gaining control of the estate and eventually recovering the Johnson photos. But after a nine-year legal scrum during which at least two other potential Johnson heirs joined the fray, and the case bounced between the Mississippi Chancery Court, the Mississippi Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court (which twice refused to hear the case), the Chancery Court ruled on October 15, 1998, that a truckdriver named Claud Johnson, who, according to his lawyer, had long heard that the blues legend was his father, was “the biological son and sole heir” of Robert Johnson; he was thus entitled to an initial inheritance of more than $1.3 million with future revenues. The court’s decision, which is irreversible because it was appealed and reaffirmed, was based not on DNA evidence but on an unusual bit of sworn testimony by the elderly Eula Mae Williams, a childhood friend of Claud Johnson’s mother, Virgie Jane Smith Cain. In what sounds more like a scene from Boston Legal than an actual court case, Williams testified that she had watched Cain and Robert Johnson having sex in a wooded area in the spring of 1931, which, nine months later, led to the birth of Claud.

In June 2000, a few days after the Mississippi Supreme Court had reaffirmed the Chancery Court’s decision, Claud gave an interview to The New York Times in which he talked about glimpsing Robert Johnson from the doorway of his grandparents’ house one day in 1937 when the blues artist showed up to visit his mother and the child he had purportedly sired. But a father-and-son reunion did not take place—Claud’s grandparents would not allow it. “They said he was working for the devil, and they wouldn’t even let me go out and touch him,” Claud told theTimes. “I stood in the door, and he stood on the ground, and that is as close as I ever got to him.… I never saw him again.”