I'm not a blues purist myself. I tend to like them distilled through the likes of the Stones, Clapton, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac and others but I know just enough to be curious about the brief life and times of Robert Johnson, the great American blues guitarist and singer and founding member of the legendary "27" club, being the shared age at which a number of highly prominent musicians, including Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Any Winehouse and others have died ever since Johnson's original demise.
Ideally, I suppose this rather brief Netflix documentary could have been edited down still more to 27 minutes to further emphasise the point but I guess that would have been taking things a bit too far, although so little is known about Johnson's life that I guess it could actually have been done in half the time.
Here, the little that is known about him, is fleshed out with animations and of course lots and lots of people talking about him. The great myth or legend, depending on your viewpoint about Johnson, is the whole deal about him selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads. More credible perhaps is that he went away and was taught by a master guitarist who allegedly said to him that the best place to rehearse and practice was in a graveyard at midnight.
Although it's clear there isn't much meat to the bone so far as his life story is concerned, it was still interesting to learn that he had two significant relationships in his life with very young women both of which were nipped in the bud we are told by over-protective family members who couldn't handle the fact that Robert made his living by playing what they called the devil's music, a.k.a. The blues. He did have a child by his second girlfriend (his first girlfriend also died tragically in childbirth before he could reach her) although the boy only had one memory of ever seeing his father and that only when he was being turned away by the boy's great grandfather on a surprise visit. The most interesting interviewees in the film I thought were of his only son and two subsequent grandsons, one of whom styles himself as a latter-day blues singer.
It really is a pity that there is no video footage available of the man himself in action but at least there is his legacy of 29 individual recordings and the bitter-sweet story is told that the legendary music historian and producer John Hammond had lined Johnson up to play in a special concert at New York's Carnegie Hall only to learn of course that Johnson had died some months before.
Unsurprisingly, I detected more than a hint of hyperbole and yarn-spinning by some of the contributors here, which I suppose is only to be expected. Nevertheless I found this introduction to one of the legendary figures of 20th Century music to be an informative and entertaining mini-documentary which may yet lead me down my own crossroads to take in some of Johnson's music.
