Robert Johnson

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Robert set on my lap and try to keep time, look like, or hold on to my skirt and sort of jig up and down and laugh and laugh." (Lomax, 14) Thus, Robert was first introduced by his church into the world of music and was forever captured by its beauty.

Mrs. Johnson didn’t have much trouble with Robert as a child but as he grew older, he became more and more intrigued about the extravagant life of the bluesmen, and taken by the spiritual music. He started following the musicians around, staying out all night, intrigued by the bluesman’s free lifestyle.

Anyone that had a guitar, little Robert would follow off according to his mother. "Sometimes he wouldn’t come home," Robert’s mother recalls, "and a whippin never did him no good." Mrs. Johnson feared the worst for Robert, she believed the guitar was the instrument of the devil and that the music he listened to was full of sin. Robert would ease her worries by playing church songs to her, yet this never erased the fear ...

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famous bluesman, Son House. Son House was a student of Charlie Patton, one of the first well known Delta Blues musicians. Son also had also learned quite a bit from a gentlemen referred to as Lemon, a name given to him for the fact that he had learned every Blind Lemon piece directly from the phonograph (Blind Lemon is was one of the first Mississippi Delta bluesmen). Son’s playing largely resembled that of Lemon’s, "The high pitch delivery, the brilliant counter melodies between phrases." (Lomax, 13) And thus, Robert Johnson unknowingly inherited the powerful influence of a long line of famous Delta bluesmen.

Son House recalls how, "We’d all play for the Saturday Night Balls and ...

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