THE DEVIL AND ROBERT JOHNSON

Two days before he died in February 1981, Michael Bloomfield was interviewed by a pair of San Francisco radio producers, Tom Yates and Kate Hayes, who were gathering information from rock 'n' roll guitarists for a syndicated radio series on the evolution of rock guitar.

"Robert Johnson is a brand-new thing," Yates began his question, which swiftly became a statement that spelled out some of his notions about the origins of rock guitar. "When we first came up with the concept of the show, I ran into my library and I grabbed two Robert Johnson albums and a Charlie Christian record, and tried to find Django Reinhardt, and said, 'This is probably where we'll start.' And what's happened, because we've been talking to people who are all rock- and blues-based, [is] that Robert Johnson comes through like a bell. Amazing people. You expect it from Clapton; I didn't expect it from Ted Nugent."

"Oh, I would," Bloomfield replied, to Yates's obvious surprise. "I would expect it from Teddy, or from [Eddie] Van Halen. Sure, of course. They know. Why wouldn't they know? Ted, he's a Detroiter; he must have come up through Clapton. If he had gotten the first John Mayall record with Clapton playing on it, the Blues Breakers record, he does Robert Johnson songs on it. It's in the liner notes. Why wouldn't he know that? I'm not saying that he was a folkie, or even a bluesman. But I'm not surprised."

Hayes gamely continued to question Bloomfield about Johnson: "What was it about Robert Johnson that makes him so vital?" she asked.

"I'll tell you a bunch of things about him, all right?" Bloomfield said. "First, musically: Robert invented some of the guitar licks that are still used today. It was like [bluegrass musician] Earl Scruggs invented a style of banjo out of nowhere. I mean, guys who played before him just didn't sound like that. He was a banjo player who — out of I don't know what, out of his mind, with no antecedents — discovered this style of banjo.

"Robert Johnson had many influences, but he discovered certain guitar licks that were uniquely his, and that are still used today. That sort of boogie-bass guitar [Bloomfield sang the lick from Elmore James's "Dust My Broom"] — that's his! No one did it before him. He just thought it up one day. It's not a big thing. But it became a style that's all Elmore James ever played, that's all Homesick James ever played, that's all the original Fleetwood Mac guys ever played, except when Peter [Green] was playing like B. B. King. It was a definite thing.

"Now, Robert was the stuff that myths are made of. This was a guy who hung around all the blues singers who were making popular records at that time, as I did when I was his age, and couldn't play worth a damn. He'd always try to sit in, and they'd say, 'Sure, let him play.' And he couldn't play. He would almost be retarded in his ability to play music, and he was so shy, so painfully shy all his life, that he could barely get the request out to ask could he sit in and play.

"And these musicians were travelers, and they would leave the area where Robert lived, and they would go away. They came back a year later, and Robert again would ask to play, and he still couldn't play. Two years passed — and I've heard this from four bluesmen who knew Robert Johnson intimately in his younger days — and they came back, and Robert could not only play, he could outplay them. He could outplay the guys that he could not even vaguely imitate two years prior.

"So, as it's been told to me — and this sounds so strange, but a lot of southern people believe this — it's been told to me that they say that Robert sold his soul to the devil. He went to a fork in the roads, a crossroads, and he put his guitar down there and he made a deal with the devil, that the devil would give him the ability to be good with women, good with gambling, good with the guitar. He could take him at a young age and let him burn in hell. And the devil said that was a good deal.

"And if you've ever listened to songs like 'Stagger Lee,' or any songs that are about that, it's usually a moral tale about the devil making a deal with someone for powers for his soul. And Robert made that deal, and all these guys who told me this — Johnny Shines, Sunnyland Slim, Muddy Waters, Elmore James — were four men who distinctly told me the same tale of Robert selling his soul to the devil, though I think Muddy had heard it from someone, because he was even younger than Robert Johnson. He learned from Robert when he was a young man. But Johnny was an absolute contemporary of Robert's, the same age, and they hung around together.

"So Robert got amazingly good, and he had a chance to make some records for Columbia Records, and he did, and they were just superb records. Some people say they're the greatest country blues records of all. I don't know if I really agree with that, but you can hear a young man with an amazing amount of young man's energy, the kind of thing that you would find in early Pete Townshend or early Elvis, or in any young man who's really burning up his energy. And you can hear this in Robert's records; it just leaps off [at] you from the turntable.

"There's various discrepancies about what age he was, but everybody agrees that he didn't live past thirty. He recorded about sixty-something sides, and he was killed. Apparently, if you pay credence [to] selling your soul to the devil, the devil collected his dues real early. So that's probably why many musicians know who Robert is. Maybe they just know him from the musical standpoint. Maybe they know that Clapton listened to him, maybe they know Muddy Waters listened to him. But I know him as this entire mythic creature. The thing that interests me most of all is that I've seen this one photograph of Robert Johnson. He was a really handsome man. Very gentle-looking fellow.

"You know, there's a story about how shy he was. He was in a recording studio, and he couldn't face the engineer. There was a band of Mexican musicians, and they came in, and the engineer said they had never heard blues, and they had very seldom seen black performers play. He said, 'Would you let them watch you?' And Robert finished the entire session facing the wall. He couldn't look at them, or allow the musicians or the engineer to watch him play. It was done in a hotel room, and he put the mike in the corner and he sat facing away from them. They could hear him, but he was too shy to let them...