1045 - Mojo Special 6. Robert Johnson - King of the Delta Blues Singers (1961)

Track Listing

1. Cross Road Blues
2. Terraplane Blues
3. Come On In My Kitchen
4. Walkin' Blues
5. Last Fair Deal Gone Down
6. 32-20 Blues
7. Kind Hearted Woman Blues
8. If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day
9. Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped The Devil)
10. When You Got A Good Friend
11. Ramblin' On My Mind
12. Stones In My Passway
13. Traveling Riverside Blues
14. Milkcow's Calf Blues
15. Me And The Devil Blues
16. Hell Hound On My Trail

Review

This collection of tracks from the 1930s by Robert Johnson are reissued in 1961 as this album, the one that brought Johnson's music to attention, as the legend was already famous. Going to the crossroads to sell his soul to the devil for great musical skill. And he might just have done.

It is telling that this comes out when it does, 1961 is the ideal time for this collection to influence bands such as Cream and Led Zeppelin to define the style of music that would develop later in that same decade.

Much like the Anthology of American Folk Music, this album comes to influence the birth of whole new genres of music, and it is particularly strange how music is forgotten for 30 years only to explode on the 60s scene with a wide-ranging influence that really defined many of the best guitar players of that and the following decades.

Track Highlights

1. Cross Road Blues
2. Hell Hound on My Trail
3. Me and the Devil Blues
4. Terraplane Blues

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The album became a badge of hip taste in the 1960s, evidenced by its appearance in the album cover photo to Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home amid various emblems of bohemian life. Songs from the album were repeatedly covered throughout the decade by many artists, notably Eric Clapton who recorded "Ramblin' On My Mind" on John Mayall's 1966 classic Bluesbreakers album, and "Cross Road Blues" with his own power trio Cream on the 1968 album Wheels of Fire. Clapton would later record an entire disc of Johnson's songs, Me and Mr. Johnson.

Cross Road Blues (sorry about the crappy video):