In 1961 John Hammond assembled sixteen of Johnson’s recordings and released them on a Columbia LP bluntly titled King of the Delta Blues Singers. Though there were no facts about Johnson’s life and no photograph or even likeness on the jacket, the album caused a slowly rolling tremor that shook musicians and listeners around the world and has never come to rest. “I was already aware of the ‘myth’ of Robert Johnson, of selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads,” the singer and guitarist Jack White said of encountering Johnson’s music, long after his songs had captivated millions of people in recordings by the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and countless others. “After finally listening to it, I could believe it.”
Three decades after King of the Delta Blues Singers appeared, facts had been gathered, photographs had been published. In 1990 Columbia released the annotated and illustrated Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, which included the twenty-nine songs and twelve alternate takes. It won a Grammy and sold more than a million copies. In 1994 Johnson appeared on a US postage stamp. In 2012 his song “Sweet Home Chicago” was sung at the White House by President Obama. In 2017, in an attempt to capitalize on Johnson’s fame, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump announced that they would open a hotel in Clarksdale as part of the since-abandoned venture they trademarked as “American Idea.”
And yet the fascination Johnson’s music provokes has never lessened, or been contained by knowledge of who, what, when, where, and how—because “why” can never be reduced to a fact. “Robert Johnson shaped an art,” Stanley Crouch wrote in 1994, “that elevated his work from the amorphous world of Delta Ned Buntlines to that of fish stories lining up to march on the universe of Moby Dick.” In his own way, Bob Dylan said much the same thing this past June:
Robert was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time. But he probably had no audience to speak of. He was so far ahead of his time that we still haven’t caught up with him. His status today couldn’t be any higher. Yet in his day, his songs must have confused people.