Around 1919, Johnson rejoined his mother in the Mississippi Delta area near Tunica and Robinsonville, residing on the Abbay & Leatherman Plantation. Julia left Hazlehurst as well, and two years later sent Johnson, a toddler, to Memphis, TN to live with Dodds, who had by that point changed his name to Charles Spencer. Due to a fiery dispute between Dodds and white landowners, he was chased and forced out of Hazlehurst by a lynch mob. His mother Julia was formerly married to Charles Dodds, a fairly successful landowner with whom Julia had ten children with. He was born Robert Leroy Johnson in Hazlehurst, Mississippi to Julia Major Dodds and Noah Johnson on May 11, 1911. This great combination of artfully drawing upon his surroundings and adding his own stories to them (with lyrics sung with his harrowing vocals) he was able to craft his own unique style out of it all. Also, travelling to Texas quite a bit (perhaps being the reason why), he'd also use Texas style single-note, monotone basslines, as shown on 32-20 Blues.īeing a product of his time, having the advantage of learning from these skilled predecessors, Johnson was a great amalgamator of these styles, weaving them into his own guitar sound, slanted by his fascination for devilish themes. That descending bass-run turnaround he played, though inspired by Brown, was his own - he added in a treble-side octave note, and phrased it uniquely. On the other hand, unlike that trifecta of players, Johnson had his own licks. So, it's quite clear where his influence lied. On top of that, many of the Spanish tuning shapes Johnson used (whether for chords or single note lines), on songs like Crossroads, Travelling Riverside Blues, Walkin' Blues and others, are quite traceable (if not starkly similar) to ones used by Patton, House, and Willie Brown for instance, the chord shapes he chooses to strum the V chord on those Spanish tuning songs. As well, Rollin' & Tumblin' by Hambone Willie Newbern would later inspire Johnson's riff played on Travelling Riverside Blues. For example, that classic Robert Johnson turnaround which is featured in so many of his songs (the intro of 32-20 Blues, the ending of Kindhearted Woman, and so on) actually uses the same descending bass-run as the lick used in Willie Brown's Future Blues. Highly influenced by his Dockery peers, Johnson learned and adapted the licks of Patton, Son House, and Willie Brown to a tee, while also incorporating other sounds. Johnson’s small body of recordings, to many, serve as a textbook example of 1930s blues, as well as a musical virtuoso who transformed a multitude of styles into his own. While highly lauded for his idiosyncratic, complex guitar stylings, he was also a wonderful singer and lyricist with a brilliant ear for music he was highly influenced by and mastered the styles of Peetie Wheatstraw, Lonnie Johnson, Kokomo Arnold, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, Bumble Bee Slim, and many of the best/most popular blues artists of the day, as well as local influences like Son House. Robert Johnson, known by many as the very archetype of a “bluesman,” is to both musicians and listeners highly influential for his recorded body of unique and highly powerful songs.
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