Robert Johnson's Journey
“I’ve got stones in my passway
And my road seems dark as night”
—Robert Johnson
During his short life, blues singer Robert Johnson (1911-1938) received little recognition and few accolades. Although he could draw large crowds on street corners, his recordings met with modest sales and only a handful of fellow musicians acknowledged his talent. More than two decades after his death, Johnson’s rereleased recordings inspired the British Blues Invasion and American Folk Revival of the 1960s. After his songs were digitally remastered in 1990, they went on to sell millions of CDs worldwide. Writers, musicians and filmmakers were so captivated by the mysterious bluesman and his music that they spent more than five decades scouring small towns in the Mississippi Delta for scarce clues about Johnson’s life, death and musical development.
Stones in My Pathway is a new CDA project in progress that combines a literary nonfiction essay with photographs taken along the path of Johnson’s life. Locations include his birthplace, cities and towns where he honed his art as an itinerant musician, highways he traveled, buildings he recorded in and his final resting place. The essay compares Johnson’s music to the work of such disparate artists as Vincent Van Gogh and Herman Melville, who also failed to earn substantial recognition in their lifetimes yet went on to international superstardom decades after they died. Evocative black and white photographs echo the emotional qualities of Johnson’s music and capture a depopulated, post-Great-Migration American South of abandoned buildings and vast, empty cotton fields where sharecroppers have been replaced by mechanized farming.
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