Episode #113 | 11.1.22
Robert Johnson: Voodoo, Delta Blues, Cursing God, and a Crossroads
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In this episode
Robert Johnson didn’t just play the blues. He embodied them. He drank and womanized his way through the South, New York, and Chicago in the 1930s, until he finally met the devil at the crossroads for a little trade. So the legend goes, anyway. With the same soul he supposedly sold to the devil, Robert Johnson belted lighting blues that captured trouble in 12 bars. But the trouble he touted would eventually trickle into his own life, one bottle of poison at a time.
Sources
Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow
Brother Robert: Growing up with Robert Johnson, by Annye C. Andersen with Preston Lauterbach
The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It (The New York Review of Books)
Overlooked No More: Robert Johnson, Bluesman Whose Life Was a Riddle (NY Times)
Fact-checking the Life and Death of Bluesman Robert Johnson (Mother Jones)
David “Honeyboy” Edwards talks about Robert Johnson’s death (YouTube)
Disgraceland is a podcast about musicians getting away with murder and behaving very badly. It melds music history, true crime and transgressive fiction. Disgraceland is not journalism. Disgraceland is entertainment. Entertainment inspired by true events. However, certain scenes, characters and names are sometimes fictionalized for dramatic purposes.
Music
Hosted and written by Jake Brennan.
Copy editing by Pat Healy.
Mixed and Engineered by Sean Cahalin.
Score by Jake Brennan.
Disgraceland theme song, "Crenshaw Space Boogie" written and produced by Jake Brennan. Performed by Jake Brennan, Bryce Kanzer, Jay Cannava and Evan Kenney. Mixed and engineered by Adam Taylor.
*illustrations by Avi Spivak @avispivak