As I sat there alone, contemplating existentialism, my own potential ultimate purpose, or maybe I am just a carbon based creature experiencing random events in a meaningless sea of utter bullsh*t ... there's no life ... there's no love ... but there sure as sh*t IS a Robert Johnson!
Johnson's story is the quintessential music legend ... going to the crossroads to have a meeting with the devil ... trading his soul for a guitar playing mojo hand, and man, you know what, some of those instrumentation's are so damn slick you start to believe that the legend might be fact. King Of The Delta Blues Singers features all the best known Johnson tunes. Thematically the numbers are mostly dark and almost mythological. His sound is very much in the Folk Blues tradition of the time, but has that modern Blues feel in the noodlings, almost like snippets of the future, the birth of modern music.
The man himself sounds like the ultimate badass, drinking, smoking, and lusting after married women, all-the-while he's got the devil on his side. His murder is left in mystery, story goes he accepted a jug of whiskey, the jug was laced with strychnine by a woman's jealous husband, against Sonny Boy Williamson's advice, Johnson drank it, and soon after died. Although I had read it might have been his then girlfriend who shot and killed him out of a jealous rage ... or better yet, maybe it was the devil initiating his first victim of the 27 club ... we'll probably never know, what I do know is thank God for these recordings, too bad someone had to shake hands with the devil first!
