ROBERT JOHNSON IS IN TOWN

The summer of 1936 Robert Johnson stood in front of Walker's General Store and Gas Station adjoining the Martinsville train depot. He put down his bag made of blue-and-white bed ticking packed full of clothes, at least one notebook, and other belongings, and began playing his guitar. He was there to advertise his nighttime performance at O'Malley's — a bootleg house not far from the old Damascus Church just north of neighboring Hazlehurst's city limits, up the railroad tracks on the east side of old Highway 51. Hazlehurst was a town of about three thousand souls sitting thirty-five miles south of Jackson, Mississippi. Robert had been born in Hazlehurst twenty-five years earlier, and now he was there to play his blues at one of the many juke joints he frequented throughout the area. A slight five foot eight, 140 pounds, Robert was well known for more than just his music.

Robert had already gotten one local girl pregnant — Virgie Jane Smith — and the men in and around Hazlehurst wanted to make sure that was not going to happen to their daughters. Rosa Redman was eleven years old that year. Later a short, plump history teacher, she lived most of her life on the old Mangold Plantation, near both the house where Robert was born and O'Malley's juke. She recalledthat Robert's presence would create a certain stir among the residents. "People would know when Robert was in town. The men would let people know, and if they saw him coming up the road, our mothers would make all the girls go inside. It was OK for our older brothers, uncles, or fathers to go see him play and get drunk, but it was off limits to us girls. They'd keep us inside and locked up!"

His blues was the devil's music and could only lead to sin.

Throughout the Delta region and beyond, Robert's rambling had left a trail of drunken men and brokenhearted women. Whether he was playing a juke like O'Malley's, a picnic, or a party, Robert was always looking for a woman to satisfy his needs, financially or sexually. His songs were often a tool to seduce some woman he took a fancy to, and the human remnants he left behind were well known to locals. He even bragged about his conquests in one of his songs, "Traveling Riverside Blues": "I got womens in Vicksburg, clean on to Tennessee, but my Friars Point rider, now, hops all over me."

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Robert Johnson was using his guitar abilities to forge the transition from the older blues of Charley Patton, Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, Lead Belly, or even Son House, to the more modern approach and sounds of Muddy Waters and the postwar blues players. He played blues, pop tunes, jazz, and ragtime; started to popularize the use of guitar riffs as signature elements of a song; and was one of the first to use a boogie beat for his rhythm accompaniment, copying the driving, rhythmic bass that barrelhouse pianists played with their left hand. His playing helped move blues guitar fretting out of the first position and into the use of the entirety of the fretboard, opening musical possibilities that had previously been reserved for jazz guitarists.

He was a dancer and harmonica player in ways that surprised his companions, and he used all his entertainment talents as vehicles to further his quest for fame and freedom from the burdens of sharecropping, and even, perhaps, from the Jim Crow racism of the South. Yet, in spite of his considerable talents, Robert displayed an untrusting and insecure personality. He refused to let you pay too close attention to how he was playing, turning his back on you or stopping his playing completely if he thought you were watching him too closely.

But Robert also had an unrelenting desire for a good time, and his personal exploits would eventually lead to myth and speculation. He did little to make his world clear, for he refused to speak about his family and life, and he never — if he ever knew about them — did anything to either validate or disavow the ideas about him that circulated among his listeners and acquaintances. He was a chameleon who was perhaps on his own search for his true identity.

By the time Rosa Redman saw him, Robert's rambling had become both his main way of traveling from one musical job to the next and his way to satisfy his need to just "get up and go." His travels on both sides of the Mississippi River took him on circuitous journeys throughout Mississippi and parts of Louisiana and Arkansas. He followed Highway 1, which ran alongside the Mississippi River, Highways 61 and 49, which went north and south through the center of the Delta, and Highway 82, which ran east and west.

Robert found places to play and sing in Greenwood, Itta Bena, Moorhead ("where the Southern cross the Dog"), Indianola, Holly Ridge, Leland, and Greenville, all located on Highway 82. From Greenville, Robert traveled north on Highway 1, stopping at Winterville, Lamont, Beulah, Rosedale, Gunnison, Sherard, and then into Clarksdale. From Clarksdale he had several options.

He could continue north on Highway 61 and stop at Jonestown (with a detour west to Friars Point), Lula (onetime home of Charley Patton), Tunica, Robinsonville (where his mother lived), Walls, and then his Memphis home. Memphis was where he spent his seminal childhood years, the home of the family he considered his true kin, headed by Charles Dodds Spencer, his mother's ex-husband. He would go back there as often as he could throughout his life. From Memphis he could easily cross into Arkansas to reach West Memphis with its freewheeling base of jukes and party houses, then go to Marianna, Helena, and West Helena — wide-open towns for black blues singers — which Robert could also reach via the Friars Point ferry.

If he went south from Clarksdale on Highway 61 he hit Alligator, Shelby, Mound Bayou, Merigold, Cleveland, and Shaw. Conversely, if he headed south on Highway 49 West he stopped at Tutwiler, Drew, and Ruleville. Highway 49 East took him to Minter City, Greenwood, Tchula, Yazoo City, Bentonia (where Skip James had lived and played), and finally into Jackson.

From Jackson south on Highway 51 Robert stopped at Crystal Springs (home of Tommy Johnson), Hazlehurst (where his Aunt Clara lived), Beauregard and Wesson, and from there to Bogalusa, Louisiana, and over to Gulfport, Mississippi.

Of the locations Robert frequented, Friars Point was particularly important — a ferry ran between there and Arkansas. Mississippi was still a dry state even after Prohibition ended in 1933, so liquor was...