Robert Johnson Page

Here are some Robert Johnson tracks om mp3 format from 1936, his best!!

Preaching Blues|Terraplane Blues|Walking Blues

Get Mp3 player Winamp 2.10

ROBERT JOHNSON

One of the most powerful numbers Johnson recorded at his first session for ARC was 'Walkin' Blues'. It was a combination of two blues that Son House had recorded six years earlier, and Johnson starts singing and playing it like a pupil, faithful to the older man's deliberate pacing. But soon the tempo quickens and the voice changes. He throws in abrupt accents, falsetto leaps, as if he cannot contain his impatience with the old style. It's easy to imagine House and his contemporaries hearing it with a shiver. They were seeing the future, and there was no place in it for them.

The hit from his first session was 'Terraplane Blues'. It sold well enough to earn Johnson a second trip to Texas, to record at the company's Dallas warehouse over a weekend in June 1937. The 13 songs recorded at this session reveal sides of Johnson that the earlier recordings didn't hint at. His performance on 'Malted Milk' and 'Drunken Hearted Man' echoes the lugubrious delivery of Lonnie Johnson, while several numbers have a more gentle, reflective mood, such as 'Honeymoon Blues' and the beautiful 'Love in Vain'.

Balancing that aspect of Johnson's personality were some darker songs. 'He was close to a split personality, I'd say,' Johnny Shines recalled. 'Sometimes he'd be the most mild-mannered, quiet person you'd ever meet. At other times he would get so violent so suddenly, and you couldn't do nothing with him.'

THE KING'S NEW COURTIERS

The release of the album King of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia), in 1962 reopened the Johnson archive. Several of his songs slipped into the repertoires of blues bands and the blues-influenced rock groups, and his guitar phraseology could be heard echoing in the different dialects of Jimi Hendrix and Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards.

Then in 1990 came the CD collection of The Complete Recordings. A new generation of admirers has been captured by Johnson's spirit: a spirit which survives and waits on, maybe at a crossroads, to catch a bus and ride. The bus still runs, and Robert Johnson is still riding it.

Back to Wid's Music Page