Robert Johnson was by no means the first of the great Delta blues singers--Leadbelly was born in 1888, Charley Patton in 1891--and Son House (1902-1988) remembered "Little Robert" as an annoying kid who hung out at juke joints around Robinsonville, Miss., near present-day Tunica. There he insisted on playing the guitar but didn't know how. Then he disappeared. A few months later, the pest showed up again, and "when the boy started playing," House said, "all our mouths were standing open." Johnson had mastered the instrument, and it was House who said that Johnson "must have sold his soul to the devil" to have improved so much in so short a time. Some of Johnson's songs ("Hellhound on My Trail," "Me and the Devil Blues," and of course, "Crossroads") seemed to support the notion.

But killjoys and party-poopers offer more prosaic explanations for the improvement in Johnson's abilities. They point out that he had learned to play the piano before ever taking up the guitar and was an accomplished harmonica player, which suggests that he had some musical ability already. They also report that--during those months when Son House hadn't seen him--he lived with a guitarist named Ike Zimmerman, some 250 miles away in Beauregard. For more than a year, he studied with the older and more accomplished musician, and they sometimes practiced their instruments in the local graveyard, where it was quiet and they would be left alone.

This, plus the fact that the blues was considered "the Devil's music," contributed to the legend that generations of blues, R&B, and rock 'n' roll enthusiasts have cherished. That Johnson died young--at 27, the same as Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse--and under mysterious circumstances also contributed. Despite only two recording sessions and a total of 29 songs (and 13 "alternative takes") he was a huge influence on Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Johnny Winter. He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, released in 1990, has sold more than a million copies.

Clapton calls Johnson "the most important blues musician who ever lived." This might be the case, but why that would be so is revealing, all the same--and for reasons that even those of us who are fans might find uncomfortable, if not cringe-y. While he was a capable Delta blues guitarist, adept with the slide and by some accounts using four different tunings when his contemporaries relied on one, Johnson might not have been the trailblazer we like to think. Even the belief that the dusty plantations of the Mississippi Delta that produced him and most of the others gave birth to the blues is undergoing some revision.

The chief killjoy and party-pooper here is a second-generation blues guitarist and singer Chris Thomas King, born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1962, whose own recordings have sold more than 10 million copies and won him a Grammy. An actor as well as musician, King played a character named Tommy Johnson--based on Robert--in the Coen brother's 2000 movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" King argues--most notably in his 2021 book The Blues: The Authentic Narrative of My Music and Culture--that the 12-bar musical form we call the blues, with its characteristic bends and b5 "blue notes," did not emerge from the plantations of the Delta at all. The blues was being played in New Orleans at least 20 years earlier and, King contends, migrated from the city to the country, and not vice versa.

The first blues players were not illiterate, downtrodden farm workers at all, who turned their field hollers into an art form, but sophisticated, often educated, men and women in New Orleans who had taken music lessons and could read music. Some of them came from middle-class families who took their children to performances at the French Opera House in the Vieux Carre. (King also argues that the word blues itself derives from the French "bleu," evoking a sense of the risqué rather than of misery and heartache.)

Of course, some New Orleans musicians--Sidney Bechet, for example--did not read music, so the story is complicated.