Robert johnson actor biography youtube
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Producer produced by. Credits Edit. Director 2 Location Management 2 Self 3 Thanks 4. Expand below. Upcoming 3. Tonic Officer Murphy Completed. Previous Undying 6. The Actor 3. The Wild Man 8. Corsicana 4. Red Stone 4. Robert Johnson--King of the Delta Blues, guitar marvel, womanizer, hobo, pact-maker with the devil--has never been more popular than today, more than half a century after his premature death in at age There is now a thriving industry that stokes the Robert Johnson flame, including books, plays, docudramas, limited edition guitars, movie scripts and even a U.
His estate has been frozen in litigation for five years, as courts and attorneys try to untangle the complex and not always well-documented genealogical web that Johnson left behind. Ball, believed to be in his 80s; a nephew in his early 30s, Robert M. Harris, in Annapolis, Md. All are making a legal claim that they are the rightful heirs to the estate.
After that issue is resolved, a Leflore County, Miss. And then, finally, some relatives may get some money. In exchange, Spencer, who died in , gave LaVere two photos of her half brother, which she had tucked away years earlier in her Bible. Craig Brewer, attorney for the estate in Greenwood, Miss. Yates and her attorney declined to say more because of the pending litigation.
Nevas, the attorney for claimants Anderson and Harris, also declined to discuss details of the case because of the litigation. The situation in some ways echoes a recently resolved matter concerning the legacy of a more recent guitar icon: Jimi Hendrix. At this point no one has filed any legal challenge against LaVere. LaVere, for his part, defends his actions and says he has done everything according to the law.
He says that if not for his careful tending of the Johnson flame, in fact, there would be no estate to fight over. Robert Johnson remains an unparalleled figure in blues music. His influence extends to countless musicians and the genre as a whole.
Despite the brevity of his career, Johnson's music has left an enduring mark on American culture. The reissue of his complete recordings in the s ensured that his legacy would continue to inspire generations to come. Robert Johnson American singer, bluesman, guitarist and songwriter Date of Birth: Contact About Privacy. James Morrison.
When Johnson arrived in a new town, he would play for tips on street corners or in front of the local barbershop or a restaurant. Musical associates have said that in live performances Johnson often did not focus on his dark and complex original compositions, but instead pleased audiences by performing more well-known pop standards of the day [ 33 ] — and not necessarily blues.
With an ability to pick up tunes at first hearing, he had no trouble giving his audiences what they wanted, and certain of his contemporaries later remarked on his interest in jazz and country music. He also had an uncanny ability to establish a rapport with his audience; in every town in which he stopped, he would establish ties to the local community that would serve him well when he passed through again a month or a year later.
Shines was 20 when he met Johnson in He estimated Johnson was maybe a year older than himself Johnson was actually four years older. Robert was a very friendly person, even though he was sulky at times, you know. And I hung around Robert for quite a while. One evening he disappeared. He was kind of a peculiar fellow. Robert'd be standing up playing some place, playing like nobody's business.
At about that time it was a hustle with him as well as a pleasure. And money'd be coming from all directions. But Robert'd just pick up and walk off and leave you standing there playing. And you wouldn't see Robert no more maybe in two or three weeks. So Robert and I, we began journeying off. I was just, matter of fact, tagging along.
During this time Johnson established what would be a relatively long-term relationship with Estella Coleman, a woman about 15 years his senior and the mother of the blues musician Robert Lockwood Jr. Johnson reportedly cultivated a woman to look after him in each town he played in.
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He reputedly asked homely young women living in the country with their families whether he could go home with them, and in most cases, he was accepted, until a boyfriend arrived or Johnson was ready to move on. On learning of Johnson's death, Hammond replaced him with Big Bill Broonzy , but he played two of Johnson's records from the stage.
In Jackson, Mississippi, around , Johnson sought out H. Speir , who ran a general store and also acted as a talent scout. The recording session was held on November 23—25, , in room of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio. Building, [ 40 ] on June 19—20, Most of Johnson's "somber and introspective" songs and performances come from his second recording session.
Because of this, there is more opportunity to compare different performances of a single song by Johnson than for any other blues performer of his era. Johnson died on August 16, , at the age of 27, near Greenwood, Mississippi , of unknown causes. Johnson's death was not reported publicly. Almost 30 years later, Gayle Dean Wardlow , a Mississippi-based musicologist researching Johnson's life, found Johnson's death certificate, which listed only the date and location, with no official cause of death.
No formal autopsy had been done. Instead, a pro forma examination was done to file the death certificate, and no immediate cause of death was determined. It is likely he had congenital syphilis and it was suspected later by medical professionals that this may have been a contributing factor in his death. However, 30 years of local oral tradition had, like the rest of his life story, built a legend which has filled in gaps in the scant historical record.
Several differing accounts have described the events preceding his death. Johnson had been playing for a few weeks at a country dance in a town about 15 miles 24 km from Greenwood. According to one theory, Johnson was murdered by the jealous husband of a woman with whom he had flirted. In an account by the blues musician David 'Honeyboy' Edwards , Johnson had been flirting with a married woman at a dance, and she gave him a bottle of whiskey poisoned by her husband.
When Johnson took the bottle, Edwards knocked it out of his hand, admonishing him to never drink from a bottle that he had not personally seen opened. Johnson replied, "Don't ever knock a bottle out of my hand. Over the next three days his condition steadily worsened. Witnesses reported that he died in a convulsive state of severe pain. The musicologist Robert "Mack" McCormick claimed to have tracked down the man who murdered Johnson and to have obtained a confession from him in a personal interview, but he declined to reveal the man's name.
While strychnine has been suggested as the poison that killed Johnson, at least one scholar has disputed the notion. Tom Graves, in his book Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson , relies on expert testimony from toxicologists to argue that strychnine has such a distinctive odor and taste that it cannot be disguised, even in strong liquor.
Graves also claims that a significant amount of strychnine would have to be consumed in one sitting to be fatal, and that death from the poison would occur within hours, not days. This was "a common way of poisoning people in the rural South", but was rarely fatal.
Robert johnson actor biography youtube
However, Johnson had been diagnosed with an ulcer and with esophageal varices , and the poison was sufficient to cause them to hemorrhage. He died after two days of severe abdominal pain, vomiting, and bleeding from the mouth. The Leflore County registrar, Cornelia Jordan, years later and after conducting an investigation into Johnson's death for the state director of vital statistics, R.
Whitfield, wrote a clarifying note on the back of Johnson's death certificate:. I talked with the white man on whose place this negro died and I also talked with a negro woman on the place. The plantation owner said the negro man, seemingly about 26 years old, came from Tunica two or three weeks before he died to play banjo at a negro dance given there on the plantation.
He stayed in the house with some of the negroes saying he wanted to pick cotton. The white man did not have a doctor for this negro as he had not worked for him. He was buried in a homemade coffin furnished by the county. The plantation owner said it was his opinion that the man died of syphilis. In , a medical practitioner, David Connell, suggested, on the basis of photographs showing Johnson's "unnaturally long fingers" and "one bad eye", that Johnson may have had Marfan syndrome , which could have both affected his guitar playing and contributed to his death due to aortic dissection.
The true location of Johnson's grave is unknown; three different markers have been erected at possible sites in church cemeteries outside Greenwood. John Hammond Jr. According to legend, as a young man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi, Johnson had a tremendous desire to become a great blues musician. One of the legends often told says that Johnson was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight.
There are claims for other sites as the location of the crossroads. There he was met by a large being the Devil who took the guitar and tuned it. The Devil played a few songs and then returned the guitar to Johnson, giving him mastery of the instrument.
This story of a deal with the Devil at the crossroads mirrors the legend of Faust. In exchange for his soul, Johnson was able to create the blues for which he became famous. This story was originally associated with Delta blues musician Tommy Johnson , to whom Robert Johnson was unrelated. This legend was developed over time and has been chronicled by Gayle Dean Wardlow , [ 56 ] Edward Komara [ 57 ] and Elijah Wald, who sees the legend as largely dating from Johnson's rediscovery by white fans more than two decades after his death.
Other interviewers failed to elicit any confirmation from House and there were two full years between House's observation of Johnson as first a novice and then a master. Further details were absorbed from the imaginative retellings by Greil Marcus [ 58 ] and Robert Palmer. There is dispute as to how and when the crossroads detail was attached to the Robert Johnson story.
All the published evidence, including a full chapter on the subject in the biography Crossroads , by Tom Graves, suggests an origin in the story of the blues musician Tommy Johnson. In another version, Ledell placed the meeting not at a crossroads but in a graveyard. This resembles the story told to Steve LaVere that Ike Zimmerman of Hazlehurst, Mississippi , learned to play the guitar at midnight while sitting on tombstones.
Zimmerman is believed to have influenced the playing of the young Johnson. Recent research by the blues scholar Bruce Conforth , in Living Blues magazine, makes the story clearer. Johnson and Ike Zimmerman did practice in a graveyard at night, because it was quiet and no one would disturb them, but it was not the Hazlehurst cemetery as had been believed: Zimmerman was not from Hazlehurst but nearby Beauregard , and he did not practice in one graveyard, but in several in the area.
While Dockery, Hazlehurst and Beauregard have each been claimed as the locations of the mythical crossroads, there are also tourist attractions claiming to be "The Crossroads" in both Clarksdale and Memphis. The blues historian Steve Cheseborough wrote that it may be impossible to discover the exact location of the mythical crossroads, because "Robert Johnson was a rambling guy".
Some scholars have argued that the devil in these songs may refer not only to the Christian figure of Satan but also to the trickster god of African origin, Legba , himself associated with crossroads. Folklorist Harry M. Hyatt wrote that, during his research in the South from to , when African-Americans born in the 19th or early 20th century said they or anyone else had "sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads", they had a different meaning in mind.
Hyatt claimed there was evidence indicating African religious retentions surrounding Legba and the making of a "deal" not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by Graves with the so-called devil at the crossroads. The Blues and the Blues singer has really special powers over women, especially. It is said that the Blues singer could possess women and have any woman they wanted.
And so when Robert Johnson came back, having left his community as an apparently mediocre musician, with a clear genius in his guitar style and lyrics, people said he must have sold his soul to the devil. And that fits in with this old African association with the crossroads where you find wisdom: you go down to the crossroads to learn, and in his case to learn in a Faustian pact, with the devil.
You sell your soul to become the greatest musician in history. This view that the devil in Johnson's songs is derived from an African deity was disputed by the blues scholar David Evans in an essay published in , "Demythologizing the Blues":. There are The devil imagery found in the blues is thoroughly familiar from western folklore, and nowhere do blues singers ever mention Legba or any other African deity in their songs or other lore.
The actual African music connected with cults of Legba and similar trickster deities sounds nothing like the blues, but rather features polyrhythmic percussion and choral call-and-response singing. The musicologist Alan Lomax dismissed the myth, stating, "In fact, every blues fiddler, banjo picker, harp blower, piano strummer and guitar framer was, in the opinion of both himself and his peers, a child of the Devil, a consequence of the black view of the European dance embrace as sinful in the extreme".
Both Lomax's and Evans's accounts themselves have been disputed and dismissed by Black scholars and authors including Amiri Baraka and Cornel West. Baraka's words are more directly critical of white writers who study African-American Blues artform and culture from a Western viewpoint, stating that "They have to do that to make themselves superior in some kind of way: that everything has come from Europe, which is not true".
The call-and-response singing Lomax argues is different from Blues has been widely cited as being a central aspect of Blues music. Johnson is considered a master of the blues, particularly of the Delta blues style. Keith Richards , of the Rolling Stones , said in , "You want to know how good the blues can get? Well, this is it".
Louis , with "a full-fledged, abundantly varied musical arrangement". According to Wald, it was "the most musically complex in the cycle" [ 78 ] and stood apart from most rural blues as a thoroughly composed lyric, rather than an arbitrary collection of more or less unrelated verses. To the uninitiated, Johnson's recordings may sound like just another dusty Delta blues musician wailing away.
But a careful listen reveals that Johnson was a revisionist in his time Johnson's tortured soul vocals and anxiety-ridden guitar playing aren't found in the cotton-field blues of his contemporaries.
Item 1 of 3: Robert Johnson’s recordings, made in and , have profoundly influenced generations of singers, guitarists, and songwriters. Yet until now, his short life—he was murdered at the age of.
An important aspect of Johnson's singing was his use of microtonality. These subtle inflections of pitch help explain why his singing conveys such powerful emotion. Eric Clapton described Johnson's music as "the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice". In two takes of " Me and the Devil Blues " he shows a high degree of precision in the complex vocal delivery of the last verse: "The range of tone he can pack into a few lines is astonishing.
Johnson is also known for using the guitar as "the other vocalist in the song", a technique later perfected by B. King and his personified guitar named Lucille : "In Africa and in Afro-American tradition, there is the tradition of the talking instrument, beginning with the drums