ROBERT JOHNSON BLUES by Joel Sattler

I hear them singing in the hotel

Sounds like somebody’s having fun 

The hookers look into the sky

For a warning of the sun  

And on the other side of town

Someone just shot off a gun 

He was born a black dirt farmboy

Hear the steamboat whistle wail

Grown a Mississippi picker

Left riding on the rails

Running from the Crossroads

With a hellhound on his trail

Said he sold his soul to Satan

That much is surely plain

Said he had bad luck with women

And it drove him near insane

Hard to tell it’s hard to tell

When all you love’s in vain 

O they must have seen you coming

You were such an easy mark

Murdered in the city

Swallowed by the city sharks

Barking on you hands and knees

A dog dying in the dark

Hear them crying on the jukebox

with a 12-piece orchestra

Hear them crying on the jukebox

Blue-eyed hypochondria

Rich kid wailing out the blues

Like he had amnesia

The blues were born inside a slave

From the ending of a belt

Blues were rooted in the Delta

In the music that he felt

On a hot and heavy morning

When he couldn’t get no help 

Robert Johnson, Robert Johnson

I will remember you

Robert Johnson, Robert Johnson

I want to sing a song for you

You never made a hundred dollars

Off those million-dollar blues 

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The following is taken from the Wikipedia
[and, thus, is in the public domain]:

Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938) was an American blues musician,
 among the most famous of Delta blues musicians.
His landmark recordings from 1936–1937 display a remarkable combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent
 that have influenced generations of musicians.
 Johnson's shadowy, poorly documented life and death at age 27 have given rise to much legend.

Johnson's songs, vocal phrasing and guitar style have influenced a broad range of musicians,
 including Muddy Waters, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Johnny Winter, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton;
 Clapton has called Johnson "the most important blues singer that ever lived".
 Johnson was among the first musicians to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's "early influence" category in 1986.
 He was ranked fifth in Rolling Stone's list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.....

....Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, probably on May 8, 1911 or 1912,
to Julia Major Dodds (born October, 1874) and Noah Johnson (born December, 1884).
Julia was married to Charles Dodds (born February, 1865),
a relatively prosperous landowner and furniture maker to whom she had borne ten children.
Dodds had been forced by a lynch mob to leave Hazlehurst following a dispute with white landowners.
Julia herself left Hazlehurst with baby Robert, but after some two years,
 sent him to live in Memphis with Dodds, who had changed his name to Charles Spencer.

Around 1919, Robert rejoined his mother in the area around Tunica and Robinsonville, Mississippi.
Julia's new husband was known as Dusty Willis; he was 24 years younger than she.
Robert was remembered by some residents as "Little Robert Dusty."
 However, he was registered at the Indian Creek School in Tunica as Robert Spencer.
He is listed as Robert Spencer in the 1920 census with Will and Julia Willis
in Lucas, Arkansas, where they lived for a short time.
Robert was at school in 1924 and 1927 and the quality of his signature on his marriage certificate
 suggests that he studied continuously and was relatively well educated for a boy of his background.
One school friend, Willie Coffee, has been discovered and filmed.
He recalls that Robert was already noted for playing the harmonica and jaw harp.

After school, Robert adopted the surname of his natural father,
signing himself as Robert Johnson on the certificate of his marriage to sixteen-year-old Virginia Travis in February 1929.
She died shortly after in childbirth.

Around this time, the noted blues musician Son House moved to Robinsonville
where his musical partner, Willie Brown, already lived.
Late in life, House remembered Johnson as a boy who had followed him around and tried very unsuccessfully to copy him.
Johnson then left the Robinsonville area, reappearing after a few months with a miraculous guitar technique.
 His boast seems to be credible; Johnson later recorded versions
of "Preaching the Blues" and "Walking Blues" in House's vocal and guitar style.
However, House's chronology is questioned by Guralnick.
When House moved to Robinsonville in 1930, Johnson was a young adult, already married and widowed.
The following year, he was living near Hazelhurst, where he married for the second time.
 From this base Johnson began travelling up and down the Delta as an itinerant musician.

According to a legend known to modern blues fans,
Robert Johnson was a young black man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi. Branded with a burning desire to become a great blues musician,
he was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight.
 There he was met by a large black man (the Devil) who took the guitar and tuned it.
 After tuning the guitar, the Devil played a few songs and then returned it to Johnson, giving him mastery of the guitar.
This was, in effect, a deal with the Devil;
 in exchange Robert Johnson was able to create the blues for which he became famous......

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