[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD: I gotta say I'm suddenly regretting this. I was looking forward to this all day, but now it's—I didn't expect it to be so profoundly dark.

PAT WALTERS: You're scared?

JAD: A little tiny bit, yeah. Dude, you don't need to be doing that. Pat, like a moron, just turned his lights off to freak me out.

PAT: Did you ever do that when you're driving out in the—out in the ...

JAD: So that's producer Pat Walters and I.

JAD: It's this one right here?

PAT: This is the railroad crossroads.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Where are you?

JAD: So Pat and I ...

ROBERT: I know it's Pat. I know it's you. And you're driving in the dark?

JAD: Yes. It takes a sec to set up. So a little while back, Pat and I went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to this little tiny town out in the sticks of the Mississippi Delta. Drove down this dirt road—and this was dark—until we got to this place where our little road crossed another little road and made kind of an X.

PAT: Got the tape recorder.

JAD: Should we get out of the car?

PAT: Yeah.

JAD: All right.

JAD: And we got out of the car and we stood there.

JAD: Okay, we have to be completely silent now.

JAD: And waited.

PAT: Five minutes to midnight.

JAD: Because we were told if we stood in that very spot 'til midnight, the devil would come and talk to us.

ROBERT: What?

PAT: What's that over there?

JAD: Nothing.

PAT: [laughs]

JAD: I'm gonna beat you with this microphone if you do that one more time.

PAT: [laughs]

ROBERT: Why—why—I should just wait and find out, I guess.

JAD: No, you should ask.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Would you like to know why we were waiting for the devil?

ROBERT: Yes.

PAT: What a bunch of tool bags we are.

JAD: Okay. So I've been interested for years in this story of Robert Johnson and the crossroads. I mean, do you know Robert Johnson?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: He's one of the great blues musicians of all time. He's influenced a ton of people: Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin. He's also the center of this myth.

ROBERT: Situate me in time. When did Robert Johnson live?

JAD: So here's the story.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: 1920s. Robert Johnson is a kid in Mississippi.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: Wants to play the blues, hang around blues guys. But he sucks. Other blues guys would laugh at him. So he goes away. Disappears one day. Shortly after, comes back and he's not just good now, he's incredible. I mean, he's making this music that's not just technically good but it's just got a feeling to it that's so different.

ROBERT: And are the other musicians, like, amazed?

JAD: They were like, "What happened?" And supposedly what he says to them is, "Well, one night I walked out into the darkness, found a place where two roads cross and I waited there 'til midnight."

ROBERT: What do you mean, a place in the—where two roads. There's lots of places.

JAD: That's apparently what you do when you want to meet the devil, you walk out of town, find a crossroads. At precisely midnight, the devil will come up, he'll take your guitar, he'll tune it, hand it back to you. And in that moment, you've given the devil your soul, and he is giving you the ability to play anything.

ROBERT: Is that story still told?

JAD: Oh my God. This is like one of the most famous, like, myths in rock and roll. This is a story that's repeated constantly. It's like one of the most enduring stories in music.

ROBERT: Oh, I knew that. I was just testing you.

JAD: And for some reason, for the last 12 years or so I keep thinking about it. And I'm always like, "One day, one day Radiolab is gonna go down to the crossroads and we're gonna figure out where this damned story came from." And this is an honest question, but is there something about the myth that is true?

PAT: Yeah.

JAD: Something.

JAD: Oh my God, I've never seen so many stars.

PAT: No?

JAD: No. It's amazing.

PAT: It's beautiful.

ROBERT: All right, so what do you do?

JAD: Well, we didn't see any devil, first of all.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: But ...

JAD: Oh my God, a shooting star!

JAD: ... we did see a shooting star.

ROBERT: [laughs] A shooting star!

JAD: I know. And so we ended up—we ended up doing a lot of reporting, you know, going around Memphis, visiting Clarksdale, all these different places. And the funny thing, the very first thing that we sort of learned about this whole story—and we learned about it from this guy Tom Graves who lives in Memphis and has studied the history.

TOM GRAVES: Come on in and have a seat.

PAT: Okay.

JAD: Very first thing we learned is that actually the myth in a way began here. We didn't even have to go to Memphis, it began right here.

ROBERT: Here? What do you mean? In New York City?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: What do you mean it starts in New York?

JAD: Well, it starts on a very particular day in a very particular place and time with a very particular guy.

TOM GRAVES: I think we can trace pretty much this whole thing back to John Hammond, you know, at Columbia Records. I mean, he's the one that pushed the whole thing into everybody.

JAD: And John Hammond was an interesting guy.

TOM GRAVES: He was one of the heirs to the Vanderbilt fortune, you know, in New York. He was a thorough New Yorker.

JAD: And at CBS, he was a sort of a talent scout.

ELIJAH WALD: And John Hammond had ...

JAD: This is Elijah Wald, a historian.

ELIJAH WALD: ... he had the best years in show business.

JAD: Pretty much ever.

TOM GRAVES: He discovered so much talent.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "God Bless the Child" – Billie Holiday]

TOM GRAVES: Billie Holiday.

ELIJAH WALD: Count Basie. Aretha Franklin.

TOM GRAVES: Bob Dylan.

ELIJAH WALD: Stevie Ray Vaughan.

TOM GRAVES: He discovered Bruce Springsteen.

JAD: I mean, the idea that the same guy could discover Bruce Springsteen and Count Basie? It's crazy!

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Anyhow, the moment that we're interested in happened kind of early in John Hammond's career.

ELIJAH WALD: He was very young. He was in his 20s.

JAD: Doing well because he'd already brought on ...

ELIJAH WALD: I think it was Benny Goodman, you know, who was a huge success.

JAD: This would be the late '30s. Benny Goodman has the first major integrated band.

ELIJAH WALD: And John Hammond, he thought that racial segregation was an abomination.

JAD: And right around the time that Benny Goodman broke, he decided it's time to make a statement.

ELIJAH WALD: So yeah, in 1938, John Hammond decided to put together this one concert that would be like the whole history of Black music from the old slave-era spirituals up to the hottest swing band.

JAD: And not only was he gonna cram the entire history of Black music into one concert ...

TOM GRAVES: He wanted to put it in Carnegie Hall.

JAD: As in that Carnegie Hall.

TOM GRAVES: Now it's a very high tone place, this Carnegie Hall, you know?

JAD: And what was it called?

TOM GRAVES: It was called "From Spirituals to Swing."

ROBERT: "From Spirituals to Swing."

JAD: But here was the problem: in this whole chronology he was putting together, he needed somebody to represent backwoods blues.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: And he didn't have anybody.

TOM GRAVES: So ...

JAD: So he sends one of his guys down to Mississippi to a particularly famous record shop, and the guy comes back with a record from this young guy named ...

TOM GRAVES: Robert Johnson.

JAD: Was he known at that point?

ELIJAH WALD: No. He was a nobody. He was a nobody.

JAD: But when he heard this record ...

TOM GRAVES: John Hammond thought, "Wow, this is the best of the backwood blues guys I've ever heard."

ELIJAH WALD: That sort of haunting voice.

JAD: He knew right away this was the guy.

TOM GRAVES: I'm gonna pluck him from obscurity, and I'm gonna put him in Carnegie Hall.

ELIJAH WALD: And so he sent word down to Mississippi to try to get Robert Johnson and bring him up.

JAD: But word came back ...

ELIJAH WALD: ... that Robert Johnson had—had died very, very recently.

JAD: Just a few months before.

ELIJAH WALD: He was messing around with a woman, and the woman's husband gave him a bottle of poisoned whiskey.

JAD: And that was it.

ROBERT: Wow! Well, there's a blues singer's death.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So he's out of the program.

JAD: One would think. Concert rolls around. December 13, 1938.

TOM GRAVES: Here we go.

ELIJAH WALD: This was a concert if you could have been there, you wanted to be there.

TOM GRAVES: And John Hammond is the MC.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Hammond: Tonight, we are going to have ...]

JAD: And he, you know, walks the crowd through the chronology starting with ...

ELIJAH WALD: The spiritual.

TOM GRAVES: Onto boogie woogie.

ELIJAH WALD: Benny Goodman and The Count Basie Orchestra.

TOM GRAVES: And he gets up and tells us, "Well, the big surprise of the evening," this is what he said.

JAD: Although unfortunately, this part was not recorded.

TOM GRAVES: "Was to bring you this guy that I discovered recently, Robert Johnson. And we just found out that he died. But I still want you to hear him, and we're gonna play a couple of his best songs."

PAT: How did he play it?

TOM GRAVES: He played it on a phonograph record and mic'd it through the PA system.

JAD: Right there on stage?

TOM GRAVES: Right there on stage. Drops a needle, and he played—one of them was "Preaching Blues," which happens to be maybe my favorite.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Preaching Blues" – Robert Johnson]

TOM GRAVES: And you can just imagine these spellbound people in this audience hearing that record being played through the PA. It was very obvious something different was going on. I mean, what a remarkable thing.

JAD: And that was in a sense, Robert Johnson's—I guess not in a sense, it was his introduction.

TOM GRAVES: It was his debut.

JAD: It's so ghostly!

ELIJAH WALD: Yeah. What's most obvious is his absence.

JAD: Now at this point, there is no myth about a devil in the crossroads. All you got is music sung by a guy who's not in the room.

ROBERT: When the record finishes did they sit quietly or did they jump up and down and yell? Or ...

JAD: We have no idea. I mean, it wasn't recorded. But the temptation would be to say their minds were blown, but probably what happened was that they just clapped politely and the concert kept going.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: But the seed was planted, and that seed would bloom in the weirdest way 22 years later. So let me just fast forward a bit.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: See, from 1938 to about 1963, '64, no one really listened to Robert Johnson. Not too many of his records were in circulation because, you know, it was the war years and people were really into these, like, twist and hop kind of happy records. But then as you slide into the '60s, people get kind of tired of that stuff, and they start getting into folk music.

ROBERT: Kingston Trio and all that.

JAD: Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger, all these guys.

ROBERT: Peter Paul and Mary.

JAD: So John Hammond—again, John Hammond ...

TOM GRAVES: He had his finger on the pulse of what was going on. You know, he had just signed Bob Dylan.

JAD: And Dylan's first record, as you can hear, was kind of bluesy in places. So Hammond thought, "Hmm, maybe now is the time to revisit the whole Robert Johnson thing. Maybe put out a Robert Johnson record." So he did.

TOM GRAVES: And then people took those records overseas.

JAD: And then guys like Eric Clapton heard it, flipped out, started recording covers.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Crossroads" - Cream]

TOM GRAVES: I mean, it just sort of like went into warp drive. This is really the song that catapulted Robert Johnson into the world conscious.

JAD: But still, despite the name of the song, there was no selling of any souls.

TOM GRAVES: The crossroads is a metaphor used in countless blues songs. Come to the crossroads, which way are you gonna go?

JAD: It just refers to a decision point.

TOM GRAVES: That shouldn't surprise anybody.

ROBERT: So if you bought the vinyl album and you looked at the album cover, there's no mythology on the back cover.

JAD: No. No devil myth yet. But now all the conditions are sort of in place, because you've got this whole folk-roots movement, and people who want to know more about the music, and you've got a guy in Robert Johnson who's being covered by huge rock bands, but who nobody knows the first thing about. So you have this void that needed to be filled, and into that space walks a guy named Pat. No, his name's not Pat. But Pat, you take this part.

PAT: Right. So when Jad and I were in Memphis, we went to see this guy who was one of the first people to find out anything about Robert Johnson. In a way, he's actually at the root of the myth about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil.

JAD: Though he didn't mean to be.

PAT: Right. His name's Dave.

DAVID EVANS: David Evans. I'm a professor of music at the University of Memphis.

PAT: He works in the music building, so as you walk in you hear, like, 60 different instruments playing, and you kind of feel like you're losing your mind. But when you step into his office ...

JAD: Okay.

PAT: Thanks for having us.

JAD: It's kind of quiet.

PAT: It felt weirdly appropriate. We're surrounded by all these old books and stacks of reel-to-reel tapes of people that he's interviewed over the last five decades. And while we were there, he told us about one of those taped interviews that changed everything.

DAVID EVANS: I was a student at UCLA.

PAT: This is 1966.

DAVID EVANS: Just getting interested in folk music and blues. Got a guitar, you know?

PAT: Even started gigging around a little bit.

DAVID EVANS: I was interested in Tommy Johnson.

PAT: Now Tommy Johnson is a pretty famous blues guy, but there's no relation between Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, none whatsoever. And musically, they're way different. Tommy Johnson yodels.

JAD: And Robert Johnson doesn't do that.

PAT: No. So David Evans was into Tommy Johnson.

DAVID EVANS: I had heard a number of his recordings, and had met Babe Stovall, a blues singer who was on the circuit in 1964. And Babe had known Tommy.

PAT: And he told Dave, well, you know, if you want to find Tommy, Tommy's dead, but I can point you to his brother LeDell Johnson.

DAVID EVANS: Well, he was living in a little house in Jackson, Mississippi. And ...

PAT: Dave decides to go see him and record an interview, see if he could learn a few things about Tommy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, LeDell Johnson: In 1914, that's when he came back …]

PAT: LeDell was a bluesman turned preacher.

DAVID EVANS: He was very spry.

PAT: Didn't play the blues anymore, but he sang for David a little bit.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, LeDell Johnson: [singing] Hey, hey. Hey, don't you hear my lonesome cry? Hey, hey. Baby, don't you hear my lonesome cry? Well, the way you treat me, mama, well, well, that's the way you do.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Evans: When did he first start singing that?]

PAT: It's an amazing interview to listen to. In any case, after he sang a little bit, David gave him a guitar and he played a bit.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, LeDell Johnson: [playing guitar]

PAT: And after that, LeDell tells Dave a story about his brother Tommy. And again, this is Tommy Johnson, not Robert Johnson. But LeDell tells David a story that tries to explain how his brother Tommy got so good.

JAD: And to our knowledge, this tape has never been broadcast before.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, LeDell Johnson: You could sing any kind of tangled up song you wanted to, and I bet you he would play it. Me and him would plays for some white folks here and he'd just get set up, and just sit there and just fumble with his box and he could make a song. He could make a song in 10 minutes. And I'd ask him, "Now you're done with living, you're dead." Now he done told my wife there, he said the reason he know so much. He said he sold hisself to the devil. I asked him how. He said, "If you wanna learn how to play anything you wanna play and learn how to make songs yourself," he said, "You take your guitar and you go to a road crossing thataway." Where a crossroad is. And said, "Get there. Be sure to get there just a little 'fore 12 o'clock that night so you will know you will be there." And said, "You have your guitar and be playing a piece sitting there by yourself." Said, "You have to go by yourself, and be sitting there playing a piece." And said, "A big Black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he'll tune it, and then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you." He said, "That's the way I learned to play anything I wanted." And he could. Now he told that then. Play anything! Don't care what it was.]

DAVID EVANS: I mean, I was collecting stuff on Tommy Johnson.

PAT: Mm-hmm.

DAVID EVANS: And here was this legend.

PAT: And Dave says he wasn't quite sure what to make of this. I mean, he knew that the idea that a person could sell their soul to the devil in exchange for limitless talent, that is a very old myth, but that was about it. So he goes back to UCLA, and one night he's chatting with some friends.

DAVID EVANS: You know, grad students have their bull sessions. You know, we all talked about these things.

PAT: And he tells his friends about this thing that LeDell had said about Tommy. And in the room that day was a fellow grad student named Pete Welding.

DAVID EVANS: Pete was as much of a blues freak as I was. And ...

PAT: And according to David, as Pete's listening to this story, he makes a little mental switcheroo. He thinks to himself, you know, this whole "sold your soul to the devil" thing would make a hell of a lot more sense if it was about Robert Johnson. Not Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson.

DAVID EVANS: I mean, the fact is Robert Johnson sang a song about going to a crossroads.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Crossroads" - Robert Johnson]

DAVID EVANS: Now he doesn't—in the song, he doesn't say that he went there to meet the Devil. But he also sang another song on the same album about "me and the Devil walking side by side."

PAT: You know, which does suggest ...

DAVID EVANS: ... at least in the song that he's in some kind of partnership with the Devil.

PAT: So Pete has this thought that the story sounds a lot more Robert Johnson-y than Tommy Johnson-y, and a few months later he travels to Mississippi and he ends up interviewing this really famous bluesman named Son House. Pete asked Son about Robert Johnson. Son tells Pete the usual story about how Robert Johnson was just so bad. He would get up on stage, and ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Son House: It would be just noise to people, you know? And the folks would come out and say, "Why don't some of y'all go and make that boy put that—that thing down? He's runnin' us crazy!"]

PAT: That's a little bit of Son House that we found on YouTube. So Son tells Pete that story, and in the usual way says Robert Johnson disappeared. He came back, he was better than all of us. Nobody knew how he did it. And then probably what happens, says David, is in that moment ...

DAVID EVANS: I think Pete asked a leading question. I wasn't there, but ...

PAT: Dave suspects maybe Pete said something like, "Is it possible that Robert Johnson got so good because he sold his soul to the Devil?" And Son ...

DAVID EVANS: Son, I think, gave a kind of hesitant answer that seemed like it left open that possibility.

PAT: Probably said something like, "Yeah, sure it's possible." And David says Pete takes that non-answer and runs with it. Publishes an article where he says you wouldn't believe this, but Son House told me that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil.

DAVID EVANS: Pete, he was a writer, a "stylist."

JAD: A little bit of a liar is what you're saying.

DAVID EVANS: In quotes. He himself even admitted that that article was a bit over the top.

PAT: Over the top or not, the story exploded. Got printed over and over in books and magazines, Clapton and others talked about at concerts. And over time, it just became part of the canon—this story that we like to tell about a guy that we really know nothing about.

JAD: But okay, I mean, this was not why we decided to do this story. I mean, the whole thought was that there's gotta be something more going on here than just a bad game of telephone. Because the music does seem to suggest that there is more going on. I mean, it does feel haunted. And midway through our reporting, we did learn one thing that suddenly made the myth make a kind of sense. And like real sense, not just story sense.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Well, tell me that story.

JAD: Well, we heard it from a guy named Mack McCormick. I'm actually gonna play you him talking about it in an old documentary that we found.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: Now Mack is probably the expert on Robert Johnson. And in the '80s, he tracked down some Robert Johnson's family that no one had been able to locate, and he came back with a really different story about the guy than at least I would have ever expected.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mack McCormick: Robert Johnson was married in 1929, but he was quite young.]

JAD: He was about 18, says Mack, and he met a girl named Virginia, and he fell in love.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mack McCormick: When he married, he made one of the important decisions in his life, which was to live a conventional life.]

JAD: They were gonna live on a farm, raise a family.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mack McCormick: Up until then, he'd been a kind of a casual party musician. And his wife Virginia became pregnant. She decided to go back to her family to have the child.]

JAD: He was gonna join her, but right before she was due ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mack McCormick: Robert went off playing.]

JAD: Kind of snuck off to play a few gigs before the baby was born.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mack McCormick: And when he went to visit her, he found that she'd died in childbirth.]

JAD: And he was destroyed.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mack McCormick: And he was faced with this incredible community condemnation of what you've done to Virginia, because he was in Virginia's childhood community at the time. And they looked upon him as an itinerant evil musician who was singing the Devil's songs and who'd killed Virginia. And he gradually became that person that the community saw him as.]

JAD: So if Robert Johnson was haunted by anything, maybe it was grief.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Love In Vain" - Robert Johnson]

ROBERT: So you—so if you had to tell it, you'd say so no, he didn't go out and meet the Devil. He had this tragedy and the tragedy changed him and it changed him into a great musician.

JAD: Mm-hmm. That's what I would say.

PAT: And that's where our story might have ended.

MACK MCCORMICK: Hello?

PAT: Hello, Mack?

MACK MCCORMICK: Yes.

PAT: Hi, this is Pat at NPR.

MACK MCCORMICK: Pat, welcome.

PAT: But that story about Robert Johnson's young wife dying in childbirth was so sad and fascinating that we really wanted to talk to the guy who found it.

MACK MCCORMICK: My name is Mack McCormick.

JAD: He's the guy we just heard in the documentary.

PAT: But when we mention that story that he told about Robert Johnson's wife dying in childbirth, he kind of cut us off.

MACK MCCORMICK: No, let's not get into that.

JAD: Why not?

MACK MCCORMICK: That's—that's not something I've confirmed—confirmed satisfactorily.

JAD: What does that mean?

MACK MCCORMICK: I have doubts about the things I said years ago.

PAT: Specifically like what?

MACK MCCORMICK: Well, okay. This is one.

PAT: Mack told us about a weird encounter he'd had in New Orleans.

MACK MCCORMICK: In New Orleans, I was told about a man named Robert Johnson who was a blues musician.

JAD: And this was years after, you know, the Robert Johnson had died.

MACK MCCORMICK: And I went racing down the street to this address, but when I got there, this man said his name was Robert Johnson. He was a blues singer, or had been. But he was not the man who made the records, but he was somebody who at the time had gone around imitating the records.

PAT: And Mack says at that moment he started to wonder like, is it possible that the stories I've been connecting about Robert Johnson, one particular Robert Johnson, the Robert Johnson, are actually about a collection of different Robert Johnsons?

MACK MCCORMICK: This is what you have to apply is statistics here.

PAT: Robert's a pretty common first name, and Johnson's a pretty common last name.

MACK MCCORMICK: So if you have a state with whatever population, you've gotta say there's this many Robert Johnsons.

PAT: And we don't know how many, but Mack figures there's certainly more than one. And as Mack's doubts mounted, he started to run into other problems.

MACK MCCORMICK: Have you seen the death certificate?

PAT: I've seen reprints of it in books.

MACK MCCORMICK: Have you seen a reprint of the back side of it?

PAT: No.

MACK MCCORMICK: Okay. The back side ...

PAT: ... says ...

MACK MCCORMICK: ... that he had come from Tunica County to play banjo at a country dance. Play banjo.

PAT: But Johnson played the guitar. And to make matters more confusing, the death certificate said that this Robert Johnson died of syphilis, not whiskey poisoning.

MACK MCCORMICK: This has got to be a different guy.

PAT: Mack wasn't entirely convinced until he met this guy who had played with Robert Johnson back in the day.

MACK MCCORMICK: He and Robert Johnson jammed together a little bit.

PAT: When Mack brought up Johnson, and the fact that he'd died in 1938, this guy gave him a funny look and said, "No, I saw him at a rodeo."

MACK MCCORMICK: In I believe it was April or so in '39.

PAT: A few years later, the same thing happened with another guy Mack was talking to. He said that he'd seen Johnson in Memphis.

MACK MCCORMICK: In April, 1941.

PAT: And not too long after that, it happened again.

MACK MCCORMICK: So it's things like that that give you hints.

PAT: That you might be wrong. And if you're wrong about whether he died or not ...

MACK MCCORMICK: How do you know any of these other things that I believed?

JAD: Obviously, when Mack told us this, we were really disappointed. Kinda kills the story. Although we do still have this song, which is incredible. And 28 others. And maybe that's enough.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Come On in My Kitchen" - Robert Johnson]

JAD: And if you think back to that moment in Carnegie Hall where music was drifting out of that audience for the first time, we talked about that earlier as an absence. But clearly it's not if it's all we got. Actually, it's everything.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Come On in My Kitchen" - Robert Johnson]

ROBERT: On the subject of Robert Johnson, there's the book by writer Tom Graves, it's called Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson.

JAD: And thanks to Elijah Wald, who wrote Escaping the Delta. I don't know the subtitle. Do you have it?

ROBERT: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues.

JAD: Yep.

ROBERT: And Peter Guralnick, whose book on Robert Johnson is called Searching for Robert Johnson. There's a lot of people looking for that guy.

JAD: Yeah. And the truth is, I should also just say that to close this out, the person who put Robert Johnson into my head and his music in my head is a guy named Dean Ulster—sort of my first mentor in radio—who used to run a great program called The Next Big Thing. A big heartfelt bluesy thanks to Dean Ulster. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Hey, this is Deanna. I'm calling from Oakland, and I'm a Radiolab listener. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. For more information about Sloan, visit www.sloan.org. Thanks!]

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