August 27, 2025 • 33 mins
At midnight in the Mississippi Delta, a man stood at the crossroads—and American music was never the same.
Join host Robert Barber on the State of the Unknown Podcast as we dive into one of the most chilling and enduring tales in American folklore.
Robert Johnson, a gifted but restless bluesman, vanished for months only to return playing like a man possessed. The legend says he made a deal with the Devil at a lonely crossroads—trading his soul for talent that still haunts the blues today.
In this episode, we unravel Johnson’s mysterious life, his haunting songs, and the folklore that surrounds his untimely death. Was it just a story, or one of those true stories of haunted history that becomes more real with every retelling?
From the cotton fields of Mississippi to the rock stages of the world, Johnson’s influence is undeniable. His tale isn’t just music history—it’s part of the paranormal stories, haunted history, and American folklore that continue to captivate us.
If you love haunted places podcasts, creepy podcasts, and paranormal stories that blur the line between fact and myth, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
State of the Unknown is a documentary-style podcast tracing the haunted highways, forgotten folklore, and unexplained phenomena across America’s 50 states.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
They say midnight hits different in the Delta.
The air thickens, the insectshush and somewhere beneath a
crooked tree, at the edge of anold dirt road, a man waits.
He's holding a guitar.
The strings are silent, buthe's not alone, because this is
(00:28):
a crossroads and in places likethis, old promises echo
Somewhere between myth andmemory.
They say Robert Johnson stoodat the fork of two roads,
offering his soul in exchangefor sound, and what he got in
(00:48):
return was something that stillhaunts the blues to this day.
This is more than just folklore.
It's a story born in the dirtfields of Mississippi.
It's a story born in the dirtfields of Mississippi where a
(01:13):
sharecropper's son vanished intothe night and returned playing
like a man possessed, a manwhose music would outlive him,
whose death would raise morequestions than answers and whose
legend black man, guitar inhand, shadow behind him would
shape America's most hauntedgenre.
(01:47):
I'm your host, robert Barber,and today we journey south, deep
into the cracked soil andswaying fields of 1930s
Mississippi, where music wascurrency and stories were
survival.
This is the tale of crossroadsand curses of a man who may have
(02:11):
sold more than just his talent.
This is the legend of RobertJohnson and this is State of the
Unknown.
Unknown.
(02:36):
The Mississippi Delta in the1930s wasn't the birthplace of
the blues, but it was the cradle, rocked not by gentle hands but
by cotton sacks, jim Crow anddirt road desperation.
This was no gentle delta offlowing rivers and soft meadows.
This was a wedge of landpressed flat between the Yazoo
and Mississippi rivers Hot,heavy and haunted.
(03:00):
The soil was dark and rich,good for cotton, bad for the
people who picked it.
It clung to boots.
It swallowed wheels.
It bred mosquitoes by themillions and soaked up the blood
of anyone foolish enough toforget where they stood.
(03:20):
This was the deep south,sunbaked and superstition soaked
, a place where the devil didn'tneed horns or fire, just a
drought and a whisper in the earof a man with nothing to lose.
To be black here was to behunted by silence, not always by
(03:44):
violence, though there wasplenty of that, but by the quiet
weight of second-classcitizenship.
Laws didn't protect.
Doctors didn't come.
Opportunity didn't knock.
Most lived as sharecroppers,trading their labor for a place
(04:04):
on the very land their ancestorshad once been enslaved on.
They worked from before sunriseto long after sunset.
Backs bent, futures sold.
A good year meant breaking even.
A bad one meant debt thatfollowed you like a ghost.
There was no electricity in thefields, no radios in most homes
(04:30):
, no cars, unless you were richor white.
But there was music, sweet,dirty, aching music.
It came from porches and jukejoints, from harmonicas and
bent-neck guitars strung withtwine and hope.
It came from the church andfrom the barrel house, sometimes
(04:53):
in the same breath.
Saturday nights were sacred,not for God, for release.
After six days of sweat andsilence, people gathered where
they could Ramshackle buildingsstrung with bare bulbs,
moonshine in coffee tins andsawdust on the floors.
(05:15):
And there someone would play,maybe on a guitar with three
strings and no frets.
A guitar with three strings andno frets, maybe on a bottle
turned sideways, didn't matter.
What mattered was the sound.
The blues was more than music,it was medicine, it was memory.
(05:37):
It was the only thing thatcouldn't be taxed or stolen, and
from this this hothouse of painand power grew a music that
shook the nation.
But long before it filledtheaters in New York or clubs in
Chicago, it haunted the Delta.
(06:01):
And somewhere in that hauntedsoil a young man was born, poor,
thin, restless, carrying aguitar and a hunger no meal
could touch.
His name was Robert Johnson andthe music he brought back from
the fields sounded like it camefrom somewhere far deeper.
(06:25):
He was born in Hazlehurst,mississippi, in 1911, or maybe
Robinsonville Even that'sdebated, because Robert
Johnson's life was stitchedtogether from fragments,
half-memories together fromfragments half-memories,
(06:49):
second-hand stories and churchregistries, too faded to read.
He was born illegitimate to afield laborer named Julia Major
Dodds.
His father, noah Johnson,vanished early and Robert
carried his mother's husband'slast name, spencer, before
(07:10):
taking Johnson later.
He was one of eleven childrenpoor, black, southern, invisible
.
As a boy he was drawn to musicstreet performers, guitar
players with three strings and adollar hat, church hymns
bleeding into juke, jointrhythms.
(07:31):
By the time he was a teenagerhe had picked up the guitar
himself, but according to thosewho knew him then he wasn't good
.
He tried, he practiced, but hisfingers couldn't keep up with
the fire in his mind and thenone day he disappeared.
(07:52):
For months he was gone.
No one saw him, no one heardhim.
He just vanished from the sceneand when he came back he could
play like nobody else.
Son House, a blues pioneer andpreacher, remembered it clearly
(08:17):
Before Robert left, house saidhe drove people nuts.
They'd chase him off stage, butwhen he returned.
He was so good, people's mouthshung open.
It wasn't just skill, it wassomething else, something
(08:40):
uncanny.
His fingers flew down thefretboard, his voice carried the
weight of a man much older andhis songs, they had an edge, a
darkness, a knowledge no20-year-old should have.
He was rail-thin, long-legged,always moving, a drifter.
(09:04):
He played wherever he couldstorefronts, back porches, juke
joints, roadhouses.
He didn't just perform, hehaunted.
People said he played with hisback to the crowd, that his eyes
rolled back in his head when hesang, that he could be in two
(09:27):
places at once in Greenwood onenight.
In Clarksdale the same twotowns, two guitars, one name.
He never settled, not in onetown, not with one woman.
He was married.
Once, as a teenager, his wife,virginia, died giving birth.
(09:53):
After that he wandered.
Some said he was cursed, otherssaid he chose the road.
But whatever he was chasing, itdrove him deeper into the delta
and deeper into legend.
(10:18):
If you know one thing aboutRobert Johnson, you know the
story.
A man goes walking at midnight,a guitar slung across his back,
dust on his boots, somethingdarker in his heart.
He comes to a crossroads, twodirt roads meeting in an empty
(10:40):
field, quiet as a grave, andthere he waits For a man or a
shadow or something in between.
They say the figure thatappears isn't human Tall,
impeccably dressed, eyes likepitch, voice like velvet.
(11:08):
He takes the guitar, tunes itplays a few chords, sweeter and
stranger than anything the manhas ever.
Then he hands it back, the dealis done, and the price the man
walks away, changed, not richer,not wiser, just better.
(11:33):
Too good, unnervingly good.
So good it stops peoplemid-step, so good it can't be
explained.
That's the legend.
And for Robert Johnson it fittoo well Because before he
(11:53):
vanished he was average, decent,unremarkable, trying to play
like Sun House and gettinglaughed off porches.
And then he disappeared,vanished for months no one saw
him.
When he returned he waselectric.
(12:14):
People couldn't believe it wasthe same man.
His guitar didn't justaccompany him, it echoed,
answered, wept.
He could play rhythm, lead andbass line simultaneously, slide
up the neck and down the soul.
(12:35):
His fingers danced, his voicewailed like a man possessed, and
people began to talk, not justadmiration, fear.
How do you go from novice tolegend in a season?
You don't, not without help,not without a price.
(13:00):
It was around this time thecrossroads began to show up, in
whispers, in lyrics in thefevered storytelling of the
Delta.
But here's what most peoplemiss the crossroads legend
didn't start with Robert Johnson.
Decades earlier, blues manTommy Johnson, no relation,
(13:25):
claimed he sold his soul to thedevil to learn guitar.
He even bragged about it onstage.
This wasn't just showmanship,it was currency In a world where
being black and poor meantbeing invisible.
Sounding like a god or a demongot you noticed?
(13:47):
The idea of making deals withdark powers wasn't new.
Not in America, not in theSouth, not in the black
community, not in the blackcommunity.
In African cosmology, traditionscarried through the Middle
Passage and into Hoodoo, voodooand Southern folklore, the
(14:10):
crossroads was a sacred place.
The Yoruba deity Ishu and theHaitian Papa Legba were known as
gatekeepers between the spiritworld and the living, tricksters
, intermediaries Standing at themeeting of two roads, offering
(14:30):
wisdom, but always at a cost.
Over time, these figures weredemonized, morphed into devils
in the eyes of the whitecolonizers, recast in Christian
terms.
And so, by the 20th century,that old spiritual crossroads
(14:52):
wasn't just a place of power.
It became a place of danger, aplace where a poor man with too
much desire and not enoughfuture could try to change his
fate with a tune, a deal, asignature in blood.
So when Robert Johnson returned, with Fingers Like Fire and
(15:16):
Songs that Bled Darkness, no oneneeded to guess what happened.
They knew, and if you listenedclose, the clues are in the
music.
I went down to the crossroads,fell down on my knees, asked the
Lord above, have mercy, now,save poor Bob, if you please.
(15:39):
He wasn't boasting, he waspleading, begging to be saved.
From what, from who?
The crossroads, in the end,isn't just about geography, it's
about choice, it's aboutdesperation.
(16:00):
It's about desperation.
It's about what you'll give upto become something more.
Robert Johnson may not haveinvented that legend, but he
made it real.
And once the myth had his name,it never let go.
(16:22):
Robert Johnson recorded only 29songs, two sessions, one in San
Antonio in 1936, the other inDallas the following year.
That's all the world was given.
But within that small body ofwork is something vast, haunting
, unfinished, like chapters tornfrom a diary written too close
(16:47):
to the fire.
The recordings are raw,crackling under the weight of
time.
You can hear the room, thebreath between verses, the ghost
of a man caught on shellac.
The sound isn't polished, itdoesn't care to be.
It claws its way out of thespeakers, dragging you back to
(17:09):
some unlit room where a man in arumpled shirt leans over a
steel-stringed guitar like it'sthe only thing keeping him alive
.
Johnson's guitar work wasdecades ahead of its time.
He used alternate tunings thatlet him create bass, lines,
rhythm and melody all at once.
(17:29):
At times it sounds like twoplayers, at others like a duel
between man and instrument, aconstant tension, one leading
the other resisting.
His right hand never stopped,steady, hypnotic.
His left danced between chordsand slide runs, ringing a motion
(17:54):
from the strings like they owedhim something.
This wasn't learned in school.
This was learned in fields, infuneral processions, in juke
joints where sweat dripped fromthe ceilings.
It was born from pain, polishedin isolation.
His voice too was different.
(18:16):
It was high, nasal, strained,yet unshakable.
When he sang, it wasn'tperformance, it was testimony,
and what he testified to wasrarely hopeful.
More often it was haunted.
(18:37):
In the song Hellhound on myTrail you can hear the terror,
not just fear of death, but fearof pursuit Of something unseen
that's always closing in.
I got to keep moving.
I got to keep moving.
Blue's fallen down like hailand the days keep on worrying me
(19:00):
.
There's a hellhound on my trail.
There's a desperation in therhythm, like he's running and
singing at the same time.
(19:20):
Crossroad blues is even moreexplicit.
I went down to the crossroads,fell down on my knees.
He's not bragging, he's begging.
This isn't about rebellion,it's about salvation.
It's a prayer disguised as ablues riff.
Then there's me and the devilblues, the one that leaves the
(19:45):
most chills.
Early this morning, when youknocked upon my door and I said
Hello, satan, I believe it'stime to go.
There's no metaphor here, nosubtlety.
The devil isn't a symbol, he'spunctual.
But Robert didn't just writeabout darkness, he wrote about
(20:08):
love, longing, loss In love andvain.
The imagery softens.
A train leaving the stationbecomes a symbol of heartbreak,
of helplessness.
When the train left the stationwith two lights on behind, the
blue light was my blues and thered light was my mind, that's
(20:33):
not myth, that's mourning.
It's easy to focus only on thedevil, the deals and the
darkness, but Johnson's lyricswere human, deeply so.
He wasn't just building alegend, he was burying his
feelings beneath metaphor,encoding grief in chords,
(20:56):
concealing truth in verses.
Each song feels like aconfession, but never a full one
.
He gives us fragments, enoughto haunt, never enough to
resolve.
And that's the genius of it,not the virtuosity, not the myth
(21:16):
, the ambiguity.
You can listen a hundred timesand still not know whether he
was crying out for redemption orsimply documenting what he saw
in the mirror every night.
In those 29 recordings, robertJohnson left behind more than
melodies.
He left riddles, warnings,wounds.
(21:40):
He left riddles, warnings,wounds and maybe, if you listen
closely enough, a map back tothe crossroads.
Robert Johnson died young, only27,.
The same age later claimed byHendricks, joplin and Cobain.
(22:02):
But Johnson, he was the first.
And the way he died, that'swhere the story thickens.
The official records Sparse.
The official records Sparse.
Some say he died on August 16,1938 in Greenwood, mississippi,
but there's no death certificate, no autopsy, no funeral photos,
(22:26):
just word of mouth.
Stories passed from mouth toear like gospel.
The most accepted version goeslike this he was playing at a
juke joint outside Greenwood,flirting with a married woman
(22:46):
Too much whiskey, too manysmiles.
And her husband noticed.
Someone offered Johnson abottle that night, a glass of
poisoned whiskey.
Some say it was laced withstrychnine, others say it was
mercury or arsenic.
Whatever it was, he drank andhe started to shake.
(23:08):
Witnesses said he fell ill, fast, vomiting, convulsing, crawling
on all fours, not for hours,for days, vomiting, convulsing,
crawling on all fours.
Not for hours For days, threefull days Wailing, howling,
scratching at the walls like adog.
When Sun House was told Johnsonhad died, he didn't ask how, he
(23:32):
just nodded yeah, he said thedevil got his due.
That's what stuck, not thepoison, not the murder, the
payment.
Because when a man writes songsabout deals with the devil and
dies screaming in the dirt at 27, no one remembers the bar fight
(23:54):
, they remember the bargain.
Some say his soul was collected, others claim the devil never
gave him talent, just took whatwas already his.
There are even stories,whispers from those who saw him
in those final hours, thatRobert Johnson spoke to someone
(24:20):
as he died, not to a doctor, notto a preacher, to something
else.
Three unmarked graves inMississippi claim to hold his
body.
No one knows which, if any, istrue.
And maybe that's the point,because legends don't rest easy,
especially not when they diescreaming, and especially not
(24:43):
when they die at 27.
When Robert Johnson died, therewas no obituary, no funeral of
note, just a pine box, a patchof dirt and silence.
His name faded quickly, tooquickly for what he left behind.
(25:04):
But something strange happenedEven in death.
Especially in death, hewouldn't stay buried Because the
recording survived.
Crackling 78s, brittle andnarrow, carried his voice like a
phantom in the grooves.
They were grainy, primitive.
(25:25):
But beneath the static wassomething unmistakable the
blueprint.
Robert Johnson's music wasn'tjust a landmark in the blues, it
was the foundation of modernAmerican sound.
His phrasing, his storytelling,his guitar work these became
(25:47):
the bones of rock and roll, offolk of country, of hip-hop,
soul, funk and everything inbetween.
In the 1960s, when white Americaand Europe rediscovered the
blues, they traced it back pastthe radio, past the Chicago
(26:08):
clubs, and they found Johnsonwaiting.
Eric Clapton called him themost important blues musician
who ever lived.
Keith Richards thought therehad to be two guitarists on the
record because no man could dothat alone.
Bob Dylan said hearing Johnsonfor the first time was like
(26:30):
meeting a ghost.
And from there the threadunspooled.
You don't get the RollingStones without Robert Johnson.
You don't get Led Zeppelin orthe White Stripes, you don't get
Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash, oreven Jimi Hendrix, who rewired
Johnson's raw energy intopsychedelic voltage.
(26:53):
But it doesn't stop with guitars.
Jay-z has referenced him.
So has Kendrick Lamar, the mythof the crossroads, the artist
who trades peace of mind for thepower of voice echoes through
every verse, every loop, everyhaunted beat.
Robert Johnson plantedsomething, not a genre, a seed,
(27:18):
and that seed grew into themusical language of America the
tension between pain and pride,beauty and grit, art and
survival.
When Columbia Records releasedKing of the Delta Blues Singers
in 1961, it was more than acompilation, it was a
(27:40):
resurrection.
And in 1990, the completerecordings sold over a million
copies, from unknown to platinum, from juke joints to the
Library of Congress.
Today there are statues in tothe Library of Congress.
Today there are statues in hisname, plaques, museums, essays.
(28:04):
Three separate graves claim tohold his bones.
But his real legacy, it's notin the ground, it's in the air.
Every time someone picks up aguitar and tells the truth, raw,
unfiltered and aching, robertJohnson is there.
He didn't just influenceAmerican music, he authored it.
(28:36):
Not with volume but withvelocity, not with visibility
but with gravity.
A man who had nothing, who madesomething eternal.
And if you trace the music backfar enough, all roads lead to
the same place Not a studio, nota stage, but a crossroads.
So what really happened at thatcrossroads?
(28:58):
Was there a deal, was there adevil, or was Robert Johnson
just brilliant Music historianssay it's simple he practiced, he
studied tunings, learnedrhythmic precision, copied
players like Ike Zimmerman, anelusive blues man rumored to
(29:18):
give lessons in graveyards atmidnight yes, graveyards, they
say.
Johnson didn't sell his soul.
He honed it Day after day,night after night, in places
where only the dead could hear.
And when he came back to townit sounded like sorcery because
(29:39):
no one had heard playing likehis before.
But others argue this viewflattens the myth that it
ignores what black southernartists were really doing.
See the crossroads.
It wasn't just superstition, itwas survival.
It was a symbol, a place whereyou confront choice, risk,
(30:03):
sacrifice.
It's where two paths meet andonly one lets you leave with
something worth keeping.
Johnson's legend didn't growjust because of what he played.
It grew because of what itmeant.
He was a poor black man in theJim Crow South and yet he made
something transcendent,something people couldn't
(30:27):
explain.
So they made it magical, theymade it myth.
And that myth did somethingpowerful.
It preserved him.
It made sure that the nameRobert Johnson wouldn't just
fade into dusty jukeboxes orscratched vinyl.
It gave him immortality.
(30:48):
The devil in this story mightnot be evil.
He might be freedom.
He might be the price everyartist pays when they reach too
far, want too much and burn toobright.
And Robert Johnson?
He burned hot Fast and left therest of us squinting at the
(31:11):
smoke.
He only lived 27 years.
He left behind just 29 songs,and yet Robert Johnson looms
over music like a shadow at dusk.
He wasn't the first blues man,he didn't start the Crossroads
(31:31):
myth, but somehow his storybecame the one we remember,
because it's not just about aman and a guitar.
It's about transformation,about the fear and beauty of
being too good, too fast, toosoon.
Maybe he made a deal, maybe hedidn't, but one thing's for sure
(31:55):
he left something behind In thedust, in the music, in that
dark delta air.
Today his name lives in linernotes, in statues, in rock and
blues halls of fame.
But if you ask the old folks,the ones who grew up on that red
(32:16):
clay land, they'll tell yousomething else.
They'll tell you not to walkthe crossroads at night, not
with a guitar, not alone,because deals still get made and
music still has a price.
And music still has a price.
(32:40):
This has been State of theUnknown.
Every other week we walk thehaunted highways of America
where legends breathe and thedead sometimes hum a tune.
Don't let this story vanish inthe dark.
Right now, tap the stars andleave a quick review, if you
dare.
That's how the algorithm knowsto spread these tales before
(33:01):
they're forgotten.
And don't forget next time youhear something strange in the
wind, listen close.
It might be the devil, or itmight just be the blues.
They say midnight hits different in the Delta.
The air thickens, the insectshush and somewhere beneath a
crooked tree, at the edge of anold dirt road, a man waits.
He's holding a guitar.
The strings are silent, buthe's not alone, because this is
(00:28):
a crossroads and in places likethis, old promises echo
Somewhere between myth andmemory.
They say Robert Johnson stoodat the fork of two roads,
offering his soul in exchangefor sound, and what he got in
(00:48):
return was something that stillhaunts the blues to this day.
This is more than just folklore.
It's a story born in the dirtfields of Mississippi.
It's a story born in the dirtfields of Mississippi where a
(01:13):
sharecropper's son vanished intothe night and returned playing
like a man possessed, a manwhose music would outlive him,
whose death would raise morequestions than answers and whose
legend black man, guitar inhand, shadow behind him would
shape America's most hauntedgenre.
(01:47):
I'm your host, robert Barber,and today we journey south, deep
into the cracked soil andswaying fields of 1930s
Mississippi, where music wascurrency and stories were
survival.
This is the tale of crossroadsand curses of a man who may have
(02:11):
sold more than just his talent.
This is the legend of RobertJohnson and this is State of the
Unknown.
Unknown.
(02:36):
The Mississippi Delta in the1930s wasn't the birthplace of
the blues, but it was the cradle, rocked not by gentle hands but
by cotton sacks, jim Crow anddirt road desperation.
This was no gentle delta offlowing rivers and soft meadows.
This was a wedge of landpressed flat between the Yazoo
and Mississippi rivers Hot,heavy and haunted.
(03:00):
The soil was dark and rich,good for cotton, bad for the
people who picked it.
It clung to boots.
It swallowed wheels.
It bred mosquitoes by themillions and soaked up the blood
of anyone foolish enough toforget where they stood.
(03:20):
This was the deep south,sunbaked and superstition soaked
, a place where the devil didn'tneed horns or fire, just a
drought and a whisper in the earof a man with nothing to lose.
To be black here was to behunted by silence, not always by
(03:44):
violence, though there wasplenty of that, but by the quiet
weight of second-classcitizenship.
Laws didn't protect.
Doctors didn't come.
Opportunity didn't knock.
Most lived as sharecroppers,trading their labor for a place
(04:04):
on the very land their ancestorshad once been enslaved on.
They worked from before sunriseto long after sunset.
Backs bent, futures sold.
A good year meant breaking even.
A bad one meant debt thatfollowed you like a ghost.
There was no electricity in thefields, no radios in most homes
(04:30):
, no cars, unless you were richor white.
But there was music, sweet,dirty, aching music.
It came from porches and jukejoints, from harmonicas and
bent-neck guitars strung withtwine and hope.
It came from the church andfrom the barrel house, sometimes
(04:53):
in the same breath.
Saturday nights were sacred,not for God, for release.
After six days of sweat andsilence, people gathered where
they could Ramshackle buildingsstrung with bare bulbs,
moonshine in coffee tins andsawdust on the floors.
(05:15):
And there someone would play,maybe on a guitar with three
strings and no frets.
A guitar with three strings andno frets, maybe on a bottle
turned sideways, didn't matter.
What mattered was the sound.
The blues was more than music,it was medicine, it was memory.
(05:37):
It was the only thing thatcouldn't be taxed or stolen, and
from this this hothouse of painand power grew a music that
shook the nation.
But long before it filledtheaters in New York or clubs in
Chicago, it haunted the Delta.
(06:01):
And somewhere in that hauntedsoil a young man was born, poor,
thin, restless, carrying aguitar and a hunger no meal
could touch.
His name was Robert Johnson andthe music he brought back from
the fields sounded like it camefrom somewhere far deeper.
(06:25):
He was born in Hazlehurst,mississippi, in 1911, or maybe
Robinsonville Even that'sdebated, because Robert
Johnson's life was stitchedtogether from fragments,
half-memories together fromfragments half-memories,
(06:49):
second-hand stories and churchregistries, too faded to read.
He was born illegitimate to afield laborer named Julia Major
Dodds.
His father, noah Johnson,vanished early and Robert
carried his mother's husband'slast name, spencer, before
(07:10):
taking Johnson later.
He was one of eleven childrenpoor, black, southern, invisible
.
As a boy he was drawn to musicstreet performers, guitar
players with three strings and adollar hat, church hymns
bleeding into juke, jointrhythms.
(07:31):
By the time he was a teenagerhe had picked up the guitar
himself, but according to thosewho knew him then he wasn't good
.
He tried, he practiced, but hisfingers couldn't keep up with
the fire in his mind and thenone day he disappeared.
(07:52):
For months he was gone.
No one saw him, no one heardhim.
He just vanished from the sceneand when he came back he could
play like nobody else.
Son House, a blues pioneer andpreacher, remembered it clearly
(08:17):
Before Robert left, house saidhe drove people nuts.
They'd chase him off stage, butwhen he returned.
He was so good, people's mouthshung open.
It wasn't just skill, it wassomething else, something
(08:40):
uncanny.
His fingers flew down thefretboard, his voice carried the
weight of a man much older andhis songs, they had an edge, a
darkness, a knowledge no20-year-old should have.
He was rail-thin, long-legged,always moving, a drifter.
(09:04):
He played wherever he couldstorefronts, back porches, juke
joints, roadhouses.
He didn't just perform, hehaunted.
People said he played with hisback to the crowd, that his eyes
rolled back in his head when hesang, that he could be in two
(09:27):
places at once in Greenwood onenight.
In Clarksdale the same twotowns, two guitars, one name.
He never settled, not in onetown, not with one woman.
He was married.
Once, as a teenager, his wife,virginia, died giving birth.
(09:53):
After that he wandered.
Some said he was cursed, otherssaid he chose the road.
But whatever he was chasing, itdrove him deeper into the delta
and deeper into legend.
(10:18):
If you know one thing aboutRobert Johnson, you know the
story.
A man goes walking at midnight,a guitar slung across his back,
dust on his boots, somethingdarker in his heart.
He comes to a crossroads, twodirt roads meeting in an empty
(10:40):
field, quiet as a grave, andthere he waits For a man or a
shadow or something in between.
They say the figure thatappears isn't human Tall,
impeccably dressed, eyes likepitch, voice like velvet.
(11:08):
He takes the guitar, tunes itplays a few chords, sweeter and
stranger than anything the manhas ever.
Then he hands it back, the dealis done, and the price the man
walks away, changed, not richer,not wiser, just better.
(11:33):
Too good, unnervingly good.
So good it stops peoplemid-step, so good it can't be
explained.
That's the legend.
And for Robert Johnson it fittoo well Because before he
(11:53):
vanished he was average, decent,unremarkable, trying to play
like Sun House and gettinglaughed off porches.
And then he disappeared,vanished for months no one saw
him.
When he returned he waselectric.
(12:14):
People couldn't believe it wasthe same man.
His guitar didn't justaccompany him, it echoed,
answered, wept.
He could play rhythm, lead andbass line simultaneously, slide
up the neck and down the soul.
(12:35):
His fingers danced, his voicewailed like a man possessed, and
people began to talk, not justadmiration, fear.
How do you go from novice tolegend in a season?
You don't, not without help,not without a price.
(13:00):
It was around this time thecrossroads began to show up, in
whispers, in lyrics in thefevered storytelling of the
Delta.
But here's what most peoplemiss the crossroads legend
didn't start with Robert Johnson.
Decades earlier, blues manTommy Johnson, no relation,
(13:25):
claimed he sold his soul to thedevil to learn guitar.
He even bragged about it onstage.
This wasn't just showmanship,it was currency In a world where
being black and poor meantbeing invisible.
Sounding like a god or a demongot you noticed?
(13:47):
The idea of making deals withdark powers wasn't new.
Not in America, not in theSouth, not in the black
community, not in the blackcommunity.
In African cosmology, traditionscarried through the Middle
Passage and into Hoodoo, voodooand Southern folklore, the
(14:10):
crossroads was a sacred place.
The Yoruba deity Ishu and theHaitian Papa Legba were known as
gatekeepers between the spiritworld and the living, tricksters
, intermediaries Standing at themeeting of two roads, offering
(14:30):
wisdom, but always at a cost.
Over time, these figures weredemonized, morphed into devils
in the eyes of the whitecolonizers, recast in Christian
terms.
And so, by the 20th century,that old spiritual crossroads
(14:52):
wasn't just a place of power.
It became a place of danger, aplace where a poor man with too
much desire and not enoughfuture could try to change his
fate with a tune, a deal, asignature in blood.
So when Robert Johnson returned, with Fingers Like Fire and
(15:16):
Songs that Bled Darkness, no oneneeded to guess what happened.
They knew, and if you listenedclose, the clues are in the
music.
I went down to the crossroads,fell down on my knees, asked the
Lord above, have mercy, now,save poor Bob, if you please.
(15:39):
He wasn't boasting, he waspleading, begging to be saved.
From what, from who?
The crossroads, in the end,isn't just about geography, it's
about choice, it's aboutdesperation.
(16:00):
It's about desperation.
It's about what you'll give upto become something more.
Robert Johnson may not haveinvented that legend, but he
made it real.
And once the myth had his name,it never let go.
(16:22):
Robert Johnson recorded only 29songs, two sessions, one in San
Antonio in 1936, the other inDallas the following year.
That's all the world was given.
But within that small body ofwork is something vast, haunting
, unfinished, like chapters tornfrom a diary written too close
(16:47):
to the fire.
The recordings are raw,crackling under the weight of
time.
You can hear the room, thebreath between verses, the ghost
of a man caught on shellac.
The sound isn't polished, itdoesn't care to be.
It claws its way out of thespeakers, dragging you back to
(17:09):
some unlit room where a man in arumpled shirt leans over a
steel-stringed guitar like it'sthe only thing keeping him alive
.
Johnson's guitar work wasdecades ahead of its time.
He used alternate tunings thatlet him create bass, lines,
rhythm and melody all at once.
(17:29):
At times it sounds like twoplayers, at others like a duel
between man and instrument, aconstant tension, one leading
the other resisting.
His right hand never stopped,steady, hypnotic.
His left danced between chordsand slide runs, ringing a motion
(17:54):
from the strings like they owedhim something.
This wasn't learned in school.
This was learned in fields, infuneral processions, in juke
joints where sweat dripped fromthe ceilings.
It was born from pain, polishedin isolation.
His voice too was different.
(18:16):
It was high, nasal, strained,yet unshakable.
When he sang, it wasn'tperformance, it was testimony,
and what he testified to wasrarely hopeful.
More often it was haunted.
(18:37):
In the song Hellhound on myTrail you can hear the terror,
not just fear of death, but fearof pursuit Of something unseen
that's always closing in.
I got to keep moving.
I got to keep moving.
Blue's fallen down like hailand the days keep on worrying me
(19:00):
.
There's a hellhound on my trail.
There's a desperation in therhythm, like he's running and
singing at the same time.
(19:20):
Crossroad blues is even moreexplicit.
I went down to the crossroads,fell down on my knees.
He's not bragging, he's begging.
This isn't about rebellion,it's about salvation.
It's a prayer disguised as ablues riff.
Then there's me and the devilblues, the one that leaves the
(19:45):
most chills.
Early this morning, when youknocked upon my door and I said
Hello, satan, I believe it'stime to go.
There's no metaphor here, nosubtlety.
The devil isn't a symbol, he'spunctual.
But Robert didn't just writeabout darkness, he wrote about
(20:08):
love, longing, loss In love andvain.
The imagery softens.
A train leaving the stationbecomes a symbol of heartbreak,
of helplessness.
When the train left the stationwith two lights on behind, the
blue light was my blues and thered light was my mind, that's
(20:33):
not myth, that's mourning.
It's easy to focus only on thedevil, the deals and the
darkness, but Johnson's lyricswere human, deeply so.
He wasn't just building alegend, he was burying his
feelings beneath metaphor,encoding grief in chords,
(20:56):
concealing truth in verses.
Each song feels like aconfession, but never a full one
.
He gives us fragments, enoughto haunt, never enough to
resolve.
And that's the genius of it,not the virtuosity, not the myth
(21:16):
, the ambiguity.
You can listen a hundred timesand still not know whether he
was crying out for redemption orsimply documenting what he saw
in the mirror every night.
In those 29 recordings, robertJohnson left behind more than
melodies.
He left riddles, warnings,wounds.
(21:40):
He left riddles, warnings,wounds and maybe, if you listen
closely enough, a map back tothe crossroads.
Robert Johnson died young, only27,.
The same age later claimed byHendricks, joplin and Cobain.
(22:02):
But Johnson, he was the first.
And the way he died, that'swhere the story thickens.
The official records Sparse.
The official records Sparse.
Some say he died on August 16,1938 in Greenwood, mississippi,
but there's no death certificate, no autopsy, no funeral photos,
(22:26):
just word of mouth.
Stories passed from mouth toear like gospel.
The most accepted version goeslike this he was playing at a
juke joint outside Greenwood,flirting with a married woman
(22:46):
Too much whiskey, too manysmiles.
And her husband noticed.
Someone offered Johnson abottle that night, a glass of
poisoned whiskey.
Some say it was laced withstrychnine, others say it was
mercury or arsenic.
Whatever it was, he drank andhe started to shake.
(23:08):
Witnesses said he fell ill, fast, vomiting, convulsing, crawling
on all fours, not for hours,for days, vomiting, convulsing,
crawling on all fours.
Not for hours For days, threefull days Wailing, howling,
scratching at the walls like adog.
When Sun House was told Johnsonhad died, he didn't ask how, he
(23:32):
just nodded yeah, he said thedevil got his due.
That's what stuck, not thepoison, not the murder, the
payment.
Because when a man writes songsabout deals with the devil and
dies screaming in the dirt at 27, no one remembers the bar fight
(23:54):
, they remember the bargain.
Some say his soul was collected, others claim the devil never
gave him talent, just took whatwas already his.
There are even stories,whispers from those who saw him
in those final hours, thatRobert Johnson spoke to someone
(24:20):
as he died, not to a doctor, notto a preacher, to something
else.
Three unmarked graves inMississippi claim to hold his
body.
No one knows which, if any, istrue.
And maybe that's the point,because legends don't rest easy,
especially not when they diescreaming, and especially not
(24:43):
when they die at 27.
When Robert Johnson died, therewas no obituary, no funeral of
note, just a pine box, a patchof dirt and silence.
His name faded quickly, tooquickly for what he left behind.
(25:04):
But something strange happenedEven in death.
Especially in death, hewouldn't stay buried Because the
recording survived.
Crackling 78s, brittle andnarrow, carried his voice like a
phantom in the grooves.
They were grainy, primitive.
(25:25):
But beneath the static wassomething unmistakable the
blueprint.
Robert Johnson's music wasn'tjust a landmark in the blues, it
was the foundation of modernAmerican sound.
His phrasing, his storytelling,his guitar work these became
(25:47):
the bones of rock and roll, offolk of country, of hip-hop,
soul, funk and everything inbetween.
In the 1960s, when white Americaand Europe rediscovered the
blues, they traced it back pastthe radio, past the Chicago
(26:08):
clubs, and they found Johnsonwaiting.
Eric Clapton called him themost important blues musician
who ever lived.
Keith Richards thought therehad to be two guitarists on the
record because no man could dothat alone.
Bob Dylan said hearing Johnsonfor the first time was like
(26:30):
meeting a ghost.
And from there the threadunspooled.
You don't get the RollingStones without Robert Johnson.
You don't get Led Zeppelin orthe White Stripes, you don't get
Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash, oreven Jimi Hendrix, who rewired
Johnson's raw energy intopsychedelic voltage.
(26:53):
But it doesn't stop with guitars.
Jay-z has referenced him.
So has Kendrick Lamar, the mythof the crossroads, the artist
who trades peace of mind for thepower of voice echoes through
every verse, every loop, everyhaunted beat.
Robert Johnson plantedsomething, not a genre, a seed,
(27:18):
and that seed grew into themusical language of America the
tension between pain and pride,beauty and grit, art and
survival.
When Columbia Records releasedKing of the Delta Blues Singers
in 1961, it was more than acompilation, it was a
(27:40):
resurrection.
And in 1990, the completerecordings sold over a million
copies, from unknown to platinum, from juke joints to the
Library of Congress.
Today there are statues in tothe Library of Congress.
Today there are statues in hisname, plaques, museums, essays.
(28:04):
Three separate graves claim tohold his bones.
But his real legacy, it's notin the ground, it's in the air.
Every time someone picks up aguitar and tells the truth, raw,
unfiltered and aching, robertJohnson is there.
He didn't just influenceAmerican music, he authored it.
(28:36):
Not with volume but withvelocity, not with visibility
but with gravity.
A man who had nothing, who madesomething eternal.
And if you trace the music backfar enough, all roads lead to
the same place Not a studio, nota stage, but a crossroads.
So what really happened at thatcrossroads?
(28:58):
Was there a deal, was there adevil, or was Robert Johnson
just brilliant Music historianssay it's simple he practiced, he
studied tunings, learnedrhythmic precision, copied
players like Ike Zimmerman, anelusive blues man rumored to
(29:18):
give lessons in graveyards atmidnight yes, graveyards, they
say.
Johnson didn't sell his soul.
He honed it Day after day,night after night, in places
where only the dead could hear.
And when he came back to townit sounded like sorcery because
(29:39):
no one had heard playing likehis before.
But others argue this viewflattens the myth that it
ignores what black southernartists were really doing.
See the crossroads.
It wasn't just superstition, itwas survival.
It was a symbol, a place whereyou confront choice, risk,
(30:03):
sacrifice.
It's where two paths meet andonly one lets you leave with
something worth keeping.
Johnson's legend didn't growjust because of what he played.
It grew because of what itmeant.
He was a poor black man in theJim Crow South and yet he made
something transcendent,something people couldn't
(30:27):
explain.
So they made it magical, theymade it myth.
And that myth did somethingpowerful.
It preserved him.
It made sure that the nameRobert Johnson wouldn't just
fade into dusty jukeboxes orscratched vinyl.
It gave him immortality.
(30:48):
The devil in this story mightnot be evil.
He might be freedom.
He might be the price everyartist pays when they reach too
far, want too much and burn toobright.
And Robert Johnson?
He burned hot Fast and left therest of us squinting at the
(31:11):
smoke.
He only lived 27 years.
He left behind just 29 songs,and yet Robert Johnson looms
over music like a shadow at dusk.
He wasn't the first blues man,he didn't start the Crossroads
(31:31):
myth, but somehow his storybecame the one we remember,
because it's not just about aman and a guitar.
It's about transformation,about the fear and beauty of
being too good, too fast, toosoon.
Maybe he made a deal, maybe hedidn't, but one thing's for sure
(31:55):
he left something behind In thedust, in the music, in that
dark delta air.
Today his name lives in linernotes, in statues, in rock and
blues halls of fame.
But if you ask the old folks,the ones who grew up on that red
(32:16):
clay land, they'll tell yousomething else.
They'll tell you not to walkthe crossroads at night, not
with a guitar, not alone,because deals still get made and
music still has a price.
And music still has a price.
(32:40):
This has been State of theUnknown.
Every other week we walk thehaunted highways of America
where legends breathe and thedead sometimes hum a tune.
Don't let this story vanish inthe dark.
Right now, tap the stars andleave a quick review, if you
dare.
That's how the algorithm knowsto spread these tales before
(33:01):
they're forgotten.
And don't forget next time youhear something strange in the
wind, listen close.
It might be the devil, or itmight just be the blues.
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