Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Robert Johnson and the Devil

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

Did the legendary blues singer really sell his soul to the devil in exchange for amazing musical skills? Probably not! But there’s still an interesting story there and it features the Coen Brothers. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Short Stuff. There's Chuck, there's Jerry, I'm Josh, and this is, wow, I already said short stuff.

I've already screwed up and wasted time. Squander precious time, Chuck. Let's just get started. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Oh yeah. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Like I said, oh yeah. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Who was the, God, I can't remember the Simpsons character now, what a dummy. Bleeding Gum's Murphy. Bleeding Gum's Murphy. Well, he played the sax. Yeah, I know, but I don't know. He was a jazz man, not a blues man. He was a hip cat.

He was super hip. He wore like sandals year round without socks, with suits, I believe. So yeah, this is about the blues, and specifically Robert Johnson. And this is, I have an interesting relationship with the blues. Oh yeah?

Yeah, in that I love occasionally putting on like a Sunhouse or Robert Johnson or something like that. And enjoy it for a bit. But then I have to turn it off. And I also recognize that blues is the foundation of rock and roll. Sure. Like full stop.

Right. But I also hate like, I just call it the Blind Willys Blues, it's a place here in Atlanta. This legendary blues bar where like. It's like the blues version of Smooth Jazz. Yeah, it's like where you see like the 52 year old in flip flops and cargo shorts up there playing the blues.

That's the stuff that makes me hate the blues, despite loving rock and roll and recognizing that blues is the foundation of that. I'm with you. So you can be selective. It is complicated, actually. That's a really, really good way to put it. All right, so we're talking about Robert Johnson

and whether or not he sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads to gain more talent as a blues guitarist and singer. Spoiler, that did not happen because there is no devil. What? I have wasted my life. But we're gonna talk a little bit about Robert Johnson's history and he's certainly a man

who sang the blues for a lot of reasons. Yeah, he had a pretty rough life. So he was, as a little kid, he got moved from place to place, mostly between little towns in Mississippi and I believe Memphis. And he lost his dad early. I don't think his dad left. His stepfather abused him and he,

yeah, he just kind of had a rough, especially after he became an adult. He married his girlfriend, Virginia. They had a kid and Virginia and the baby died during childbirth. And so he kind of got unmoored after that and very, very quickly started singing the blues more than ever and became a pretty hard-core alcoholic,

I believe, as a result. So yeah, he definitely had it rough and he lived the life that you could live to be the foundation of the blues, basically, which he grew up to be. Yeah, and they think even, he's a member of the 27 Club, perhaps the first even, if you really think about it.

But he died at 27 years old supposedly out of, and records are tough on guys like Robert Johnson, but supposedly was poisoned by the husband of one of his lovers when he was 27 years old. Right, so in that time, though, he managed to create a body of work that, like you said, is basically pointed to as one of the major blocks in the foundation

of rock and roll. This is in the 30s that he was playing prolifically, right? Yeah, and he followed in the footsteps of, he wasn't the first blues guitarist by any means. No, no, he wasn't, he wasn't, and in fact, there's the story, and this is the whole thing where it's like, why did he sell his soul to the devil? What's the story?

We're gonna tell you the story. The whole thing starts back in 1930 in Robinsonville, Mississippi, and there is a juke joint where the blues is being played by a couple of legends, Sun House, who you mentioned. Yeah, love it. And I think, who else was there that night? Willie Brown.

Willie Brown was playing that night, and these guys were already established as Delta Bluesmen, right? And the house was packed, and I guess in between sets, a very young Robert Johnson came up to the stage and grabbed, and I'm sure the stage was just a chair that was on the same level as the other chairs or wherever people were sitting and understanding.

And he grabs a guitar, not even his guitar. I mean, the audacity, right? Yeah. And he starts playing, and because it's Robert Johnson, you would assume that everybody was just stopped, transfixed it, how amazing he was. That is not how it went down at all, as a matter of fact. No, he wasn't very good.

And Sun House, you know, even says, he said that people came and told him, why don't some of y'all go down and make that boy put that thing down? He's running us crazy. Right, because his playing was so bad. And this is humiliating enough. They went over and basically said,

you not only need to stop playing, you need to leave this jug joy. You just showed you're actually not cool enough to even sit here as like an audience member anymore. So he left and he disappeared and he vanished. And then a year later. As legend has it. Right, at another blues place.

Again, Willie Brown and Sun House were playing, and Robert Johnson shows up. And he shows up with a guitar, his own guitar this time. And he starts playing and it's like nothing anyone else has ever heard. This guy has turned insanely good almost overnight. And he's got a seventh string on his guitar and everyone was like, what?

Yeah, and he used it to great effect. Eric Clapton put it kind of succinctly. He said that he was simultaneously playing a disjointed bass line on the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings and lead on the treble strings, which had the effect of sounding like there were multiple people playing when it was really just him on that seven string guitar.

That's how fast and how varied the music he was playing was. And no one had ever heard anything like it. Yeah, so the legend is that he went down to the crossroads during that time, sold his soul to the devil. And Satan granted him with these special talents in exchange for his soul. But like you already spoiled that,

that actually probably didn't happen. So should we take a break? We should take a break. We'll do some more explaining when we get back. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast

or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so we've established that there actually isn't a devil unless it's the greatest trick you ever pulled. Oh. We may have just fallen victim to that. But not only, so does that mean that that story didn't happen in that sense?

It probably didn't even happen to Robert Johnson. There seems to have been a case of mistaken identity because there's a story of an earlier blues man who was not related to Robert Johnson but had the same last name. His name was Tommy Johnson. And if you're a fan of the movie, Oh Brother, We're Out Thou and you were only familiar with Robert Johnson like me,

you may have been wondering all this time why they didn't just call that character, Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson, since he was clearly based on Robert Johnson. Well, it turns out I know now that the Coen brothers did their homework. They tend to do that. Yeah, they do. So yeah, Tommy Johnson was in that movie

and had sold his soul to the devil in that movie. It's been covered elsewhere. There was that great movie to me, Crossroads with Ralph Macchio. Was it good? Well, I mean, it was one of those HBO movies that as a young kid who got a guitar at 13 watched like 50 times.

I never saw it. I thought it was pretty great. I mean, Steve Vai is in it. Oh, he is? Yeah, he plays Satan's right hand man and lead shredder in the main cutting heads competition at the end. Did Pat Morita play Satan?

No, he totally should have. No, who was it? Oh man, he's been in stuff. If you saw him, you'd be like, oh, he plays a good Satan. Wings Houser. No. Tree Williams. I don't know then.

Those are the only three actors you know. Tommy Chong, no. Anyway, I haven't seen it in a while. I'd like to check it out, but there's always sort of been this blues legend all the way around is where the crossroads, you go meet the devil. You sign up for a lifetime of hellfire in exchange for what seems to be like a good deal on earth,

even though the tail end of that tail always ends as like they die young or something. Right, don't fall for it kids. That's right. Supposedly Jimmy Page sold us all to the devil too. Sure, who didn't, you know? So the story though seems to have originated with Tommy Johnson and there's an article,

there's this site Chuck called Paranormal Academic, which is just like a dream come true for me. I just found it, it was linked to in this House of Works article. Does that mean you're not going to tinfoilhat.com anymore? No, not anymore, I've rescinded my membership. So on Paranormal Academic, there's an excerpt from an interview

with Tommy Johnson's brother, who said, Tommy told me the story of what happened. And he supposedly went down to the crossroads. He said, anybody can do this. You get on to the crossroads, get there a little before midnight to make sure you're there on time, which is hilarious. They included that little detail, be punctual.

And if you bring your own instrument, like great big black man will show up, take your instrument from you, tune it for you, hand it back and the deal is done. That's how it happens. And that's what the legend became. And but then at some point, it seems to have been transposed onto from Tommy Johnson,

onto the later on much greater known Robert Johnson. And Robert Johnson seems to have been like, sure, yeah, that happened to me. And you can really see that in some of the song titles of the body of his work. Yeah, Hellhound on my trail, Me and the Devil Blues. Obviously the song Crossroads, Crossroad Blues, Up Jump the Devil.

Here's the thing though. The singing about the devil and talking about the devil in that community at that time was very commonplace. And Robert Johnson was talking about his demons, not literal demons, just his demons in life because he had a rough go and then fell into alcoholism and chasing women and probably believed that the Hellhounds were on his tail,

or I'm sorry, on his trail. Right, and his tail, let's be honest. That's right, the devil had given him. So that's the interpretation by his grandson, Steven Johnson, who also has an answer for that question. Okay, all right, fine. But besides the supernatural, how could somebody go from zero to hero blues legend wise

in just a year like that? And Steven Johnson's like, actually it was probably more like three years. Like, yeah, he actually probably was kicked out of that juke joint for playing badly. And he probably did come back and blow those same people away. But it wasn't a year, it was about three years.

And he didn't go sell a soul to the devil. He went and studied under a legendary guitarist named Ike Zimmerman, whose family confirms that Robert Johnson was there all the time around that time. Yeah, so like the boring, but also inspiring answer was practice. Yeah, don't sell your soul.

He got good because he played a ton of guitar. Probably, because he wanted to get better, probably also due to a little bit of shame and wanted to go back there and make a name for himself. So he practiced and practiced and practiced, like anybody who was good at anything does. And that is the true legacy of Robert Johnson, legendary blues man, right?

That's right. Well, thanks for listening. You can read about this article on How Stuff Works. That's where we got this one, right, Chuck? That's right. All right, well then, until next time, short stuff away. The Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

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