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I wonder where the Johnson story originally came from?

There aren't too many of any written references to Robert Johnson before the 1960s. There were a lot of Johnson's contemporaries alive through the 1960s who could have passed it down. Maybe so. Maybe not.

I do recall that Johnny Shines once said in an interview that he was afraid of Howlin' Wolf when he was growing up, as he thought that his voice might have come from the dark side. The fact that blues was often referred to as the "Devil's music" makes it natural that blues musicians might take on that association. Some even capitalized on it. Peetie Wheatstraw was the "Devil's Son in Law." Robert Johnson "walked side by side" with the Devil, and his "evil spirit" caught greyhound buses. Given the lyrics of his songs, I don't find it difficult at all to imagine that Johnson could have been the source of the myth himself. Robert Palmer wrote in Deep Blues that this type of myth could be associated with a number of Mississippi blues musicians. No, he gives no references. Yet there are few individuals who achieved as deep a cultural knowledge of the Mississippi Delta as Robert Palmer. Palmer knew and talked extensively with Mississippi blues musicians and their cohorts. He spent time in the juke joints, and I have some trust in his judgement.

Then a few new revisionist "historians" come along with a much more superficial understanding of the blues or the Delta than somebody like Robert Palmer, maybe talk to one or two people left living who claim that they knew Johnson, and on that basis "disprove" it all. Give me a break.

Muddy