Neither man looked like B. B. King, but as Schein studied the figure with the guitar, noticing in particular the extraordinary length of his fingers and the way his left eye seemed narrower and out of sync with his right, it occurred to him that he had stumbled across something significant and rare.
If there was one thing that Schein was as passionate about as guitars, it was the blues, particularly the Delta blues, that acoustic, guitar-driven form of country blues that started in the Mississippi Delta and thrived on records from the late 1920s to almost 1940. Not long after he’d begun working at Matt Umanov, Schein’s customers and co-workers had turned him on to this powerful music form, and, once hooked, he had studied the genre—its music and its history—with the same obsessive attention to detail that he brought to his work. And the longer Schein looked at the photograph on his computer monitor, the more convinced he became that it depicted one of the most mysterious and mythologized blues artists produced by the Delta: the guitarist, singer, and songwriter whom Eric Clapton once anointed “the most important blues musician who ever lived.”
That’s not B. B. King, Schein said to himself. Because it’s Robert Johnson.
If his hunch was correct, he’d made quite a find. Johnson is the Delta-blues guitarist who on one dark Mississippi night “went to the crossroad,” as he wrote in one of his most famous songs, to barter his soul to the Devil for otherworldly talent. At least that’s how the legend that’s become ingrained in popular culture has it. (In the song, “Cross Road Blues,” Johnson is actually pleading with God for mercy, not bargaining with the Devil.) A short life, a death under murky circumstances, and a body of recorded work consisting of but 29 songs only added to that legend. So did the preternatural quality of his guitar playing, the bone-deep sadness of some of his music and lyrics, the haunting quaver of his smooth, high voice, and the dark symbolism of his songs. In some respects, you could say that Johnson is the James Dean of the blues, an artist whose tragically foreshortened life and small if brilliant body of work make him a figure of great romantic allure. This was especially true in the 60s and early 70s, when little was known about Johnson, and his music was being taken up by the likes of Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. By the early 1990s, 50 years after his death, he was a platinum-selling artist, and since then he has influenced a whole new generation of guitar players, among them John Mayer and Jack White.