Robert Johnson was often referred to as the “king of delta blues.” His landmark recordings from 1936 to 1937 portray a remarkable combination of singing, guitar skills, and song writing talent that have influenced generations of musicians. He took the intense loneliness, terrors and tortuous lifestyle that came with being an African-American in the South during the Great Depression and transformed that specific and very personal experience into music of universal relevance and global reach. His mastery of the guitar as a fully articulated complement to the singing voice, not merely a rhythmic background accessory to it, inspired his contemporaries and influenced generations of later musicians including: Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The White …show more content…
It was the first recording that showed his proficient skill of his mentor Son House’s style, mainly his slide guitar technique. Johnson, however, progressed House’s relaxed approach with a more forceful one known as blues harp style. This intense guitar style uses loud percussive emphases on the bass strings and allows Johnson to explore diverse chordings and fills. Though he is not known for inventing these techniques, Johnson manages to intensify and add his own twist on them making it quite difficult for others to imitate. The song highlights his use of a slide, which is emphasized as blatantly in the song as the vocal. Johnson uses the “call-and-response” technique, where the slide parts serve more as a vocal sounding “response” than an instrumental accompaniment. This is one small example as to how Johnson separates himself from other musicians. He simultaneously plays a bass line on the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings, and lead on the higher strings all the while singing at the same time. He makes it sound as if there could be three separate people playing when in reality there is only himself. To add to the intensity of the song, Johnson also goes beyond the typical 12-bar blues guitar arrangement and instead ranges from 14 to 15 bars showing off his incredible guitar solos. As said by Spin Magazine and Rolling Stone, “Crossroad Blues” displays Robert …show more content…
He was instructed to take his guitar to the crossroads near Dockery Plantation at midnight. There he was met by a large black man thought to be the devil, who took the guitar from Johnson, tuned it so that he could play anything he wanted and gave it back to him in return for his soul (Blues 1). This famous myth has become the iconography for Robert Johnson. On top of saying that he sold his soul at the crossroads, people say he was poisoned, stabbed and shot. He was known to be wild and was often associated with his obsession with women and drinking. He would often disappear from a room unnoticed and was even caught using different names in different towns. These rebellious habits and the ‘do as I please’ attitude of Robert Johnson along with his accompanying devil myth attracted many future rock and roll musicians and people of younger generations who wanted to stray away from the mainstream