Lee O’Daniel and His Hillbilly Boys, Al Dexter, and Hermanas Barraza, among others. “I did my own research and I came with a different room number.” McCormick also has a problem with the fact that only Johnson got recognition for those recording sessions when they’d been going on since November 10 with a long list of musicians including W. “Who told you it was in room 414?” asked musicologist Robert “Mack” McCormick, who lives in Houston and was featured in the 1992 documentary The Search for Robert Johnson. It’s to be expected that at least one historian disputes even that. Using a big portrait of a smiling Johnson (one of only two known photographs of him), the hotel proudly announces to the world that it was there that Johnson recorded. The entrance to the hotel (now owned by the Sheraton chain) has a large plaque commemorating the fact that it was there that the most influential blues recordings ever were produced. For $169 a night, you can still rent the room, now turned into a parlor facing the corner of East Houston and North St. What we do know is that on November 23, 26, and 27, 1936, Johnson recorded 16 of his 29 songs inside room 414 at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio. The more you dig into Johnson’s life, the more questions arise. We feel San Antonio’s importance in the world of music is so huge, we have to shoot rather than in our school studio in New York.” In that spirit, we’re telling the story the way Robert Johnson or maybe Shakespeare would, creating drama and feeling, not documentary. “Robert Johnson was a musical genius, under-appreciated in his time, whose music changed the blues and helped invent rock. “People know about his deal with the devil, but they haven’t heard the story of his deal with, the record label,” said Robert Brink, the director of Devil Deal Blues, a short film to be shot in San Antonio in 2012.
And his alleged deal with the devil in exchange for musical powers is a key part of that Faustian legend - supposedly, Johnson was an ordinary guitarist who became a master after meeting with the Devil at either a crossroads or a graveyard. His untimely death at age 27 has been attributed to a stabbing, a gunshot, or poisoning. The fact that he was an itinerant musician who used a variety of aliases hasn’t made it any easier for his biographers. To say Johnson - who would’ve turned 100 on May 8 - is a legend is not enough in his case, even the so-called truths about the man seem to bend depending on whom you talk to. That’s my opinion.”īut King himself didn’t think twice about recording his version of “Cross Road Blues” (one of the songs Johnson recorded in San Antonio in 1936) for the 100 Years of Robert Johnson tribute released in March by the Big Head Blues Club, a star-studded project headed by Big Head Todd & The Monsters’ Todd Park Mohr. I think ‘Lonnie’ Johnson was the best blues guitarist in history. “I don’t argue with them, but I don’t agree. “A lot of people think Robert Johnson was the best,” King told me from the back of his touring bus in San Antonio in 2006. King is the rare case of someone with a different view. Out of all the great living bluesmen, however, B.B. Johnson was one of those honored in the very first Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1986, and is frequently referred to as “the grandfather of rock ’n’ roll.” And yet the mysterious artist behind “Cross Road Blues” transcends the genre. Ask anyone from Clapton’s Cream to Led Zeppelin to the Rolling Stones who the most influential bluesman was, and you always go back to Johnson. Johnson and the EP Sessions for Robert J. He was “the most important blues musician who ever lived,” according to Eric Clapton, who released not one, but two collections of songs by Johnson in 2004: the album Me and Mr. Yet he’s widely regarded as the greatest bluesman of all time.