[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich. Today on Radiolab ...

JAD: Music.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, singing: "The hills are alive ..."]

ROBERT: No, not that kind of music!

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Today, we're talking about music that knocks down walls.

JAD: Music that pushes you to your absolute psychological limit.

ROBERT: And music that could save your life.

JAD: First story comes from our executive producer Ellen Horne.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, instructor: So everybody's gonna count it out.]

JAD: Okay. Set the scene for me. Where are we?

ELLEN HORNE: This is a CPR class. It's a Sunday afternoon.

JAD: Okay.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, instructor: Everybody ready?]

ELLEN: There's about 25 students here.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, instructor: Begin.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, students: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight ...]

JAD: And everyone's sort of basically on dummies, is that what's happening?

ELLEN: Yeah, they press in the middle of the chest 30 times.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, students: 28, 29, 30.]

ELLEN: And then they tip the mannequin's head back and blow into the mouth twice. But here's the central problem with doing CPR really well: You need to get the tempo right. If you do it too slow, you don't get enough pressure up to get the blood moving around the body. And if you do it too fast, then the heart doesn't have time to fill back up.

JAD: And what's the ideal speed?

ELLEN: This.

[beeping]

ELLEN: A hundred beats per minute. And this class, the class that's just learning CPR, it's hard to hear but if you listen ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, students: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven ...]

ELLEN: ... they're just a little bit too fast.

JAD: And how exactly do you get people to do a hundred beats per minute?

ELLEN: Well, there's this guy, Alson Inaba ...

ALSON INABA: I'm a pediatric emergency medicine physician in Honolulu, Hawaii.

ELLEN: And he teaches CPR.

ALSON INABA: Mm-hmm.

ELLEN: And he was trying to figure out a good way ...

ALSON INABA: To remember what 100 compressions per minute should feel like when you're doing CPR. So I thought, find the song that had a beat of approximately 100 beats per minute.

ELLEN: And the song he came up with?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Staying Alive" – The Bee Gees]

ALSON INABA: "Staying Alive" by the Bee Gees.

JAD: No!

ELLEN: Yeah yeah!

ALSON INABA: Hopefully you help people stay alive.

JAD: Wow. And they did this at the class you went to?

ELLEN: Yeah. CPR classes all over the world ...

ALSON INABA: Egypt, Argentina, Japan.

ELLEN: ... are using this to teach the right tempo of CPR.

ALSON INABA: It was one of the best teaching tips I came up with in my career so far.

ELLEN: There is another song, though, that has a much simpler downbeat.

JAD: Same tempo?

ELLEN: Same tempo. And I asked the class to try one.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, instructor: Now, remember, it's one-and-a-half to two inches. Remember those numbers.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Another One Bites the Dust" - Queen]

JAD: Wait a second.

ELLEN: It's Queen.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, instructor: One, two, three. Again.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, students: One, two, three, four, five ...]

ELLEN: "Another One Bites the Dust."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, students: ... six, seven, eight, nine, ten ...]

JAD: Oh, that's so wrong.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, students: 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Another One Bites the Dust" - Queen]

ROBERT: [laughs] Just what you need. All right. Well, I have another story for you, which happens to also involve dust and noise. Do you know this story?

JAD: I—I know we're doing.

ROBERT: Should I remind you of the story?

JAD: I've heard the phrase "Walls of Jericho," and I know nothing else about it.

ROBERT: Because it's most famous as a song. [singing] "Joshua fought the Battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho ..."

JAD: So tell us the story so we can get started.

ROBERT: Well, as you know, the Hebrew people crossed the Red Sea, and then wandered around in the desert for a while.

JAD: We'll just say I knew that.

ROBERT: 40 years.

JAD: 40 years?

ROBERT: And now we're up to—we're almost into the promised land, but there is this city called Jericho.

JAD: Who is inside Jericho?

ROBERT: Well, the Jerichoans.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: The Jerichoans. I don't know much about them, actually.

JAD: Why aren't they friendly?

ROBERT: I think they have all these 40,000 people showed up and were like, "Hey, who are these people? Get them out of here!"

JAD: So they were just looking after their property.

ROBERT: Or maybe they just didn't like what they saw. I'm a little fuzzy here on the cause of the thing. However, now quoting the Bible, "Jericho was tightly shut."

JAD: Because it had a wall.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: So read the part about how they knock down the wall.

ROBERT: Here's the formula.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: "And you shall march around the city, all the men of war circling the city once, and you shall do so for six days. And on the seventh day, you shall march around the city seven times and seven priests shall carry seven trumpets of ram's horns." It's a shofar, actually, is a ram's horn. "And the priests shall blow the trumpets, and it shall be the wall of the city will fall flat down."

JAD: And they do this with seven trumpets, you say.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: All right. So here we go. The question we have then is: what would it really take ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, singing: Joshua fought the Battle of Jericho ...]

JAD: ... to do this?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: I'm talking without God. Only puny physics.

DAVID LUBMAN: Here are your headphones. Independent left and right volume control. Should be fairly comfortable.

ROBERT: Is it just in principle possible for sound to blow down a wall?

JAD: That's our question. We actually called up a guy who's thought about this.

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAVID LUBMAN: I'm an acoustical consultant.

ROBERT: David Lubman ...

JAD: ... is his name.

DAVID LUBMAN: And an acoustical scientist. And if you think about the nature of sound, it's a fluctuating pressure.

JAD: He explained that when sound hits an object, the waves actually push the object, but also pull at it.

DAVID LUBMAN: Many times per second.

JAD: And theoretically, he says, if you can get enough of those pushes and pulls on the wall ...

DAVID LUBMAN: Eventually, it'll begin to crumble.

JAD: So the first question he asked, naturally is: what kind of wall are we dealing with?

DAVID LUBMAN: Well, looking at the construction of Bronze Age walls in the Middle East, they were mud brick walls.

ROBERT: The question then was: how much sound would be necessary, what volume, to topple a wall like that?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And he came up with a number. This is a technical number for the strength of the sound.

DAVID LUBMAN: You would need to produce 177 dB.

ROBERT: 177 decibels.

DAVID LUBMAN: Yes.

JAD: That would knock down the wall?

DAVID LUBMAN: Yes.

JAD: How many decibels, just for scale, is my voice right now, roughly?

DAVID LUBMAN: Your voice is probably about 60 or 65 decibels.

JAD: Oh! So we're already a third of the way there just talking?

DAVID LUBMAN: Well, no.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, singing: Joshua, Jericho, ba-doo-wah.]

JAD: And here's where the issue starts. Sound doesn't add up the way that you would think.

DAVID LUBMAN: And there's the rub. Assume that your voice level was 60 decibels. In order to get 70 decibels, you would have to produce 10 times as much power.

JAD: This didn't make much sense to us, until we ended up doing what he did and recruiting ...

DAVID LUBMAN: Some experienced shofar blowers.

ROBERT: We went up to All Souls Unit—what is it?

JAD: All Souls Unitarian Church.

ROBERT: Many times a month that church actually is host to a synagogue.

JAD: Oh my God, I hear them! Did you hear that? Like animals dying? Hey there!

JAD: So shofars were the horns that apparently knocked down the wall, so we wanted to measure how loud they could be, and we were lucky enough to find this guy.

DAVID PINCUS: Cantor Daniel Pincus.

JAD: Who got together about 10 people, everybody with their ram's horns.

DAVID PINCUS: Okay.

JAD: So in any case, he got us started. And we asked him to blow his shofar as loud as he could, and we were gonna measure the decibel level.

[Shofar blowing]

JAD: Just up to 96, but not quite there.

JAD: So that was our baseline: 96 decibels for one shofar player. But interestingly, when we doubled it and had two shofar players, listen to what happened.

[Shofars blowing]

JAD: That was 98.

JAD: We only got up to 98. Just shy of 99. And when we doubled that to four shofar players ...

[Shofars blowing]

JAD: We only bumped it up three more decibels.

JAD: This we got 101.

[cheering and laughing]

JAD: Turns out—and this is actually a rule of thumb—anytime you want to bump up your overall volume by three decibels, you've gotta double the amount of shofar players. So if you want to go from 101 dB to 104, that means going from four shofar players to eight. If you want to go from 104 to 107, that means eight shofar players become 16. And if you want to go from there all the way up to our target ...

DAVID LUBMAN: 177 DB.

JAD: Well then you're gonna have to double yourself a lot!

ROBERT: So here's the question: how many in the end—how many shofars would you need to make the walls of Jericho come tumbling down?

DAVID LUBMAN: 407,380.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: What?

DAVID LUBMAN: And it might take awhile, too.

ROBERT: Well, wait a second. Seven is what the Bible says, and you just said 407,380.

DAVID LUBMAN: Yes.

JAD: That's five Rose Bowls full of trumpet players.

DAVID LUBMAN: Ah. But of course, if it was a miracle, all bets are off.

JAD: But what if you could get that number of people together, can you knock down the wall?

DAVID LUBMAN: Well, the problem I had was getting a very large number of men so close to the wall that we could produce the necessary pressure.

JAD: Imagine, he says, you've got all these hornblowers, hundreds of thousands, at this wall. You've got to organize them, put them in rows, and that creates a little bit of a situation.

DAVID LUBMAN: Ah, yes. Well, the people in the front row would have their heads blown off.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

DAVID LUBMAN: By the blasts of the people behind them.

ROBERT: That's a sort of problem if you're a musician, I think.

DAVID LUBMAN: If you'd like, we could do an experiment. Do you volunteer?

ROBERT: No!

JAD: Okay, but what if you could put the people in the front row in helmets to protect them? Then could we do it?

ROBERT: Actually, we'd have another problem.

DAVID LUBMAN: That's right.

ROBERT: The sound, according to Dave, has to be focused. It has to actually sort of point ...

DAVID LUBMAN: ... at one spot on the wall.

ROBERT: When you put that many people together in front of a wall, some of them are gonna be way behind the ones in front.

JAD: Hmm. We're gonna lose focus.

WOODY NORRIS: And there's the problem.

ROBERT: But then we found Woody.

WOODY NORRIS: Elwood Norris. I go by Woody.

JAD: And we called Woody because well, he's an inventor.

WOODY NORRIS: President, chairman and CEO of a brand new company called Parametric Sound Corporation.

JAD: And he's invented a technology that can beam sound in a direct line like a laser.

KURT CONAN: Well, let's check some of these—some of these things out.

JAD: That's reporter Kurt Conan.

WOODY NORRIS: Okay, first I'm gonna play you this guy.

JAD: To demonstrate, he pulls out his sound beamer.

WOODY NORRIS: This is an ultrasonic emitter.

JAD: It's like a mini satellite dish, but kind of in a square.

WOODY NORRIS: Stand over there.

JAD: He and Kirk get on opposite sides of the room, very far apart, and then Woody shoots a concentrated beam of sound, in this case the sound of rushing water right at Kurt's head.

WOODY NORRIS: [laughs] Now if I shine it at you, see the difference? Just aim it at my chest. Almost a hundred percent gone.

KURT CONAN: Wow!

WOODY NORRIS: Magic.

ROBERT: Does your invention allow us to take the sound and put it into a beam such that it will hit a spot on the wall of Jericho?

WOODY NORRIS: Absolutely. With a caveat.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: What's the caveat?

WOODY NORRIS: There is no known loudspeaker on the planet that can put out 170 decibels.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: Oh.

WOODY NORRIS: My company makes some of the loudest speakers on the planet, and the loudest unit the company sells puts out about 155 decibels.

ROBERT: That's not enough to knock down our wall, though.

WOODY NORRIS: No, not at all. There's another issue. This will be caveat number two.

JAD: Uh-oh.

WOODY NORRIS: When you get about 155-165 decibels, you get close to causing cavitation in the air where the air turns into a plasma.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: What is ...?

ROBERT: You mean the sound won't travel through the air?

WOODY NORRIS: Only for a few millimeters.

JAD: We weren't able to 1,000 percent confirm this, but according to Woody, even if we were able to make the necessary amount of noise, we would not be able to get that noise to the wall. The sound would just go ...

[Shofars blowing then fading]

ROBERT: We are just—there's an Anglo-Saxon word that would go right there, but we're talking about the Hebrews.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs] Well, we are that thing and I don't know what to do.

DAVID LUBMAN: Well I had an alternate theory that could make the story plausible.

JAD: Ah!

DAVID LUBMAN: What I've imagined is that the attackers would try to undermine the wall by digging underneath it. And the defenders, figuring that the attackers would do that would send spies out to find out where the digging is so they can use countermeasures such as boiling oil.

ROBERT: [laughs] But—but, but ...

JAD: No, no. Wait, wait. Let him finish. I'm enjoying this.

DAVID LUBMAN: Okay. But then the attackers would say "They'll probably send out spies to find out where we're digging, so let's issue orders that nobody is to know where we are digging. And we won't tell those blabbermouth Israelites because it's sure to be picked up by one of the spies. And next thing you know, we'll have boiling oil on our head." In the meantime, the diggers, in order to keep the wall from falling in on them, they would prop it up with timbers. Then when the digging was about complete, they would pull out the whatever was the equivalent of a Zippo lighter in the Bronze Age, and light the timbers and then run like heck as the fire burned through. Eventually, that part of the wall would fall straight down.

ROBERT: No, you're rewriting the whole thing.

JAD: But where does the horn blowing come into the equation?

DAVID LUBMAN: Ah. Well, in the meantime, the spies report back, "We can't figure out where those Israelites are digging." So the King of Jericho probably says, "Well, we'll have to use the old hole-in-the-shield trick to find out." And so they take their Bronze Age shields with a hole in the middle, and they place them on the ground and put the ear to the hole. And they do this all around the perimeter of Jericho trying to hear the digging. But then the attackers say, "The defenders will probably use the old hole-in-the-shield trick. We know that. So we'll have to use acoustic warfare, make noise to prevent them from being able to hear where the digging is. So let's send out a bunch of priests with shofars to make noise."

ROBERT: [laughs] So your shofars are there to keep the shield-listening Jerichoans from overhearing the digging Hebrews. And the horns are just a way to mask the digging Hebrews's location.

DAVID LUBMAN: Yes.

ROBERT: This is very unsatisfactory.

JAD: Thanks to Daniel Lubman, Elwood "Woody" Norris, Daniel Pincus and his Shofar All-Stars.

RACHEL KELK: Rachel Kelk.

ANNA LEVY: Anna Levy.

ADAM HAMETZ-BERNER: Adam Hametz-Berner.

RICHARD SCHEINER: Richard Scheiner.

BOB WINE: Bob Wine.

ED KERSON: Ed Kerson.

DANIELA DRAKHLER: Daniela Drakhler.

MIRIAM FRANK: Miriam Frank.

JAD: We'll be right back.

[LISTENERS: This is Matt Bushka and Alyssa Old Crow in Gainesville, Florida. And 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. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks.]

JAD: Cool. Here we are.

ALAN PIERSON: Here we are.

JAD: Thank you for doing this.

ALAN PIERSON: Mm-hmm. My pleasure.

JAD: I have questions. You have some big books in front of you.

ALAN PIERSON: I do.

JAD: What are those?

ALAN PIERSON: These are Beethoven's symphonies.

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert. And we are talking about the power of music.

JAD: Just drop them on the desk so we can feel the weighty massiveness of them.

[thump]

JAD: There you go.

ALAN PIERSON: Yeah.

JAD: And this is Alan Pierson.

ALAN PIERSON: Conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

ROBERT: The Brook Phil?

JAD: The Brook Phil, yeah.

ROBERT: The B-Phil?

JAD: Anyhow, I called up Alan ...

JAD: That's a lot of Beethovens.

ALAN PIERSON: That's a lot of Beethoven symphonies.

JAD: ... because it turns out in those scores that he brought?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: There was this mystery that could completely transform how you feel about Beethoven, or at least how I have always felt about Beethoven, which is that I couldn't stand him.

ROBERT: Really?

ALAN PIERSON: Yeah.

JAD: Alan, too.

ALAN PIERSON: And I remember growing up and thinking, "Well, I'm a musician. I should love this. And I don't. Does that mean that maybe I'm a fraud? Am I a bad musician?"

JAD: You know, like he would hear the Fifth, the one that everybody knows.

ALAN PIERSON: You know, those first measures are like bom bom bom bom. Very, like, heavy, ponderous.

JAD: Suffocating.

ROBERT: No!

JAD: But whatever you think of Beethoven, it turns out that the Beethoven that you and I know, that we all know ...

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: ... may in fact, not be the Beethoven that Beethoven wanted us to know at all.

ROBERT: I have no idea what you're talking about.

JAD: All right. Let me just start the story where it really begins.

ROBERT: Please.

JAD: You kind of have to go back all the way to the invention of this.

[metronome ticking]

ALAN PIERSON: Beethoven was one of the first composers to work with the metronome, and the metronome came out in 1817. So he would have been 47 when the metronome was—you know, came out for the first time.

JAD: So the metronome was this new gizmo.

ALAN PIERSON: Right. It was a new gizmo. And the inventor of the metronome ...

JAD: Was his last name actually metronome? Like, Bobby Metronome?

ALAN PIERSON: No. Maelzel or Maelzel.

JAD: Maelzel.

ALAN PIERSON: I'm sure I'm saying it wrong.

JAD: However you say his name, in 1817 this dude, after he'd invented the metronome ...

ALAN PIERSON: Brought his metronome to Beethoven and said ...

JAD: "Check it out."

ALAN PIERSON: "I want you to use this." And Beethoven's first response was, "No, no, no. This is not the way music works."

JAD: But then, as was not uncommon for Mr. B. ...

ALAN PIERSON: It seemed to change his mind, and got really excited about the idea of using the metronome to fix for eternity what the tempos for all of his pieces should be.

[music]

JAD: As in this piece. Don't play it at this speed. Play like this. Now keep in mind, at this point Beethoven was pretty much at the end of his career.

ALAN PIERSON: Of the nine symphonies, by the time he'd gotten the metronome he'd written eight of them.

JAD: So what he did was he went back ...

ALAN PIERSON: And he marked in metronome markings for all of his symphonies.

JAD: And here's where the mystery really begins. Those tempo markings are fast. Like, really fast. Like, in some cases obscenely fast.

ALAN PIERSON: You know, like okay, take a—take a piece like the Third Symphony. For that piece, the first movement is marked at dotted half equals 60. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three.

JAD: Which is almost impossible to play.

ALAN PIERSON: Takka-takka-takka-takka-takka-takka ...

JAD: Holy shoot!

ALAN PIERSON: Really fast.

JAD: Who's playing—who's playing that fast?

ALAN PIERSON: Strings.

JAD: Alan got a couple string players together from the Brooklyn Phil to demonstrate just how hard it is to play the Third at Beethoven's tempo markings. Like this part coming up. Check this out.

[strings playing]

ROBERT: Wow.

JAD: That was great!

JAD: Alan says when he tried to play that piece at that tempo with the entire orchestra ...

ALAN PIERSON: There was one rehearsal where we got it—got it up to tempo.

JAD: But when you do get it up to that speed it's a completely different piece.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Then take the Fifth, which has been played as slow as this right here.

[slow orchestral movement]

JAD: This is 74 beats per minute. Beethoven actually marked it here.

[fast orchestral movement]

JAD: At 108 beats per minute.

ROBERT: Oh, now that's ridiculous.

JAD: No, it's just a different feel.

ROBERT: That's too fast.

JAD: Well, you're—it is for a lot of people. And according to Alan, for the last couple hundred years, people have been arguing about these tempo markings.

ALAN PIERSON: You know, to what extent did, like, those markings that he put in in 1817 really represent his actual intentions?

JAD: Well, wait. What's the debate? If he put them in, he put them in.

ALAN PIERSON: There are lots of ways that people debate them. One is there's a story that goes around that Beethoven's metronome was broken.

JAD: [laughs] Really?

ALAN PIERSON: Yeah.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Like, he had ...

ROBERT: It was going too fast?

JAD: Not too fast, but that the numbers were wrong.

ROBERT: Oh.

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: Although we now have Beethoven's metronome, and it seems to work fine.

JAD: You have the metronome?

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: I believe somebody tracked it down ...

JAD: That's music critic Matthew Guerrieri, who's written a lot about Beethoven.

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: ... tested it and it seemed to work okay.

JAD: And it matches up to every—all the other metronomes in the world?

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: Yeah. Now ...

JAD: Another story that's sometimes used to explain the markings, it goes like this. That Beethoven actually did notate the tempos slower, but then he gave the pages to his assistants ...

ALAN PIERSON: And now they needed to go off to the publisher, but they couldn't find them.

JAD: They somehow lost the papers.

ALAN PIERSON: And so they had to rewrite them.

JAD: And in their haste, they inadvertently put down the wrong numbers and sped up the pieces.

ROBERT: Clerical error. Explanation number two.

JAD: Yeah, but this one I just—I don't find that plausible. I mean, he could have corrected them at some point. And, you know, he didn't just do this one time. He did it for all eight symphonies.

ROBERT: Huh.

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: And then there was—then there was speculation that ...

JAD: Theory number three.

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: This may have been affected by the fact that by the time he was doing all these metronome markings ...

ALAN PIERSON: Beethoven was deaf.

JAD: Oh.

ALAN PIERSON: So Beethoven by 1814 was basically completely deaf, and the metronome came out in 1817.

ROBERT: What does being deaf have to do with how—what speed you play the music? I mean, you can't hear the music in any event.

JAD: It's—it has to do with the space in which you're hearing the music. Like, if you're hearing the music just in your head ...

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: ... it's just kind of in the vacuum of your imagination.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: You take that music and you put it into a room. Suddenly, you've got the acoustics of that room, which if it's a big concert hall are gonna make all the notes muddy, the tails of one note are gonna bleed into the attacks of the next. And so Alan says what always happens when you put music in a room ...

ALAN PIERSON: You will play things a little bit slower.

JAD: To maintain the clarity.

ALAN PIERSON: Right.

JAD: But Beethoven ...

ALAN PIERSON: When he was making these metronome markings ...

JAD: ... he was only hearing the music in his head.

ALAN PIERSON: Not hearing it in the real world. And maybe had he heard it in the real world, would have done something different. But the counter-argument is ...

JAD: Who cares?

ALAN PIERSON: If we can create the music that Beethoven heard in his head, isn't that something that's worth doing?

JAD: Up until recently, the answer has been no because people have not generally performed these pieces at his markings. But both Alan and Matt think that we probably should just accept these accelerated tempos, you know, like with the Fifth at 108, just go with it.

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: Yeah, it's very possible that that's the speed he wanted. If that is the speed he wanted it, it's a very interesting speed because it's—it's a tempo almost designed to make us feel uncomfortable. It's almost designed to disorient us.

JAD: Here's where we get to a fourth explanation for why Beethoven made these tempos super fast. It's speculative, it takes a little setup, but it's super interesting, I think.

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: There's something called Vierordt's law, which is a law, it was discovered in the 1860s by an Austrian doctor named Karl von Vierordt.

JAD: And what this law says, according to Matt, is that when you ask people to guess tempos or lengths of time ...

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: People will always overestimate short durations of time, and they'll always underestimate long durations of time.

ROBERT: What does that mean to underestimate?

JAD: Well ...

ROBERT: You mean, you guess backwards, oh that ...

JAD: Well, let me just—it's kind of a complicated thing he just said. So I'm gonna—let's just do it as a demonstration.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: I'm gonna give you four beats, first slow then fast. Your job is to guess where that fifth beat is gonna land. So I'm gonna give you four beats: dat dat dat dat, and then you have to hit your pen where you think that fifth beat is going to fall. Okay?

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: Okay, here's the first one. Slow.

[slow beeps]

JAD: Okay, ready?

[pen hits table]

JAD: See, this is the law in action. You just rushed it.

ROBERT: I did not! Do it again.

JAD: All right.

[slow beeps]

[pen hits table]

JAD: Okay, you were closer that time. You were closer.

ROBERT: I was the same.

JAD: And you rushed it a little bit, but you were closer.

ROBERT: I didn't rush it.

JAD: Now if we do the same thing with a fast tempo, like I give you four you guess the fifth, okay?

ROBERT: All right.

JAD: Here goes.

[fast beeps]

[pen hits table]

JAD: Oh, come on. Try that again.

[fast beeps]

[pen hits table]

JAD: You were late again.

ROBERT: I wasn't late. That was exactly ...

JAD: You were so late!

ROBERT: Measure it. Measure it.

JAD: You were audibly late.

ROBERT: Measure the [bleep] thing!

JAD: It's right here on the waveform. Boom. 3-7-8. Oh yeah, you're 50 milliseconds late! So the point is Vierordt's law says that when we have a slow tempo ...

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: We'll tend to unconsciously try and speed it up.

JAD: And when we have a really fast tempo ...

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: We will tend to unconsciously slow it down. And if you think about that for a minute, at some point our perception has to flip over.

JAD: Because if we're unconsciously speeding up slow beats and slowing down fast beats, well, there's got to be ...

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: Some particular point ...

JAD: ... right in the middle ...

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: ... where our judgment of time actually syncs up with actual time.

JAD: Where, in other words, we guess the tempo correctly.

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: Yeah, and it's called the indifference point.

JAD: According to most research that point falls somewhere around this tempo.

[beeps]

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: 94, 96 beats per minute.

JAD: If you give people four beats of this tempo and then ask them to guess the fifth, they usually get it right.

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: Yep.

JAD: And the really interesting thing is that this tempo, this little point ...

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: Is right about where people tend to dial back to when they don't want to perform Beethoven's Fifth as fast as it's written.

JAD: In fact, when Alan asked his quartet to just play the Fifth at whatever tempo felt right, they fell right back to this indifference point.

ROBERT: Well, so you're building to some theory here, aren't you?

JAD: Yeah, that maybe, just maybe, Beethoven was playing a kind of cat and mouse game. That he intuited that there was some point where we felt comfortable, where ...

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: ... every beat is coming exactly where we expect it to.

JAD: And it just feels right. And he never wanted his music to fall into that place.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: So if we like 92 beats per minute, he was gonna push his tempos to 108. So it was just a little too fast. Every beat kind of coming a tiny bit too early.

MATTHEW GUERRIERI: So the piece is always—it always just feels like it's running away from us in a very real, psychological way.

JAD: And this fits with what we know about the guy. I mean, there are numerous anecdotes where he would push not just his audience but his musicians, almost as if he wanted to hear them struggle.

TERRANCE MCKNIGHT: When he was rehearsing his Ninth Symphony, those soloists walked out of rehearsal because he was pushing them beyond their limits.

JAD: That's Terrance McKnight who hosts a classical music show on WQXR.

TERRANCE MCKNIGHT: Maybe that's what those quick tempos were about.

JAD: About maybe pushing the musicians so they'd miss a few notes.

TERRANCE MCKNIGHT: He didn't care about the notes.

JAD: So that the music was right on the edge.

TERRANCE MCKNIGHT: You know, this is—you know, something's impending. This is danger. This is ferocious.

JAD: Think of it this way, says Terrance.

TERRANCE MCKNIGHT: You know, Beethoven was kind of an outsider.

JAD: Didn't come from privilege. He was a short, dark-skinned dude.

TERRANCE MCKNIGHT: You know, some people say that his grandmother was of African descent.

JAD: He probably stood out in 19th-century Vienna.

TERRANCE MCKNIGHT: Oh my God.

JAD: So you could say here's this guy who's always on the outside, and he wants his music to always express that. But he can see into the future to a time when his music would become the canon!

ROBERT: The man!

JAD: Yes! And maybe that's not what he wanted.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: If you read it that way, these tempo markings are kind of liberating. It's like this message from 1817 saying, "Get me out of here!"

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And interestingly when I was talking with Alan, he sort of implied without quite saying it outright, that one of the ways that you can keep orchestral music exciting in a time when it's not for a lot of people, is by just playing things faster.

ALAN PIERSON: Um ...

JAD: Have you ever done Beethoven faster than its markings?

ALAN PIERSON: No. I would—the Fifth you could play faster. I've never heard it done.

JAD: You've never heard it faster than 108?

ALAN PIERSON: I would think you could do 120-ish.

JAD: Well, let's just—let's just do this. Let's get our metronomes out.

ALAN PIERSON: So here's 120. [humming]

JAD: Okay. Well make it faster. Make it 140.

ALAN PIERSON: 140, I bet [humming]. You could do it.

JAD: Could you go to, like, 160?

ALAN PIERSON: I think that's around the edge.

JAD: But we tried it with his quartet.

ALAN PIERSON: All right. Ready?

[string quartet plays]

JAD: Wow! I just want to go run out into the snow. That was fantastic! You totally nailed 160.

ALAN PIERSON: I don't know if I'd say "nailed."

JAD: That is a Beethoven I can dig right there. Thanks first and foremost to Alan Pierson at the Brooklyn Phil, and to the incredible players.

DEBORAH BUCK: I'm Deborah Buck.

JAD: Violin.

SUZIE PERELMAN: I'm violin too. I'm Suzie Perelman.

ARASH AMINI: Arash Amini. I go by Joey. I'm a cellist.

AH LING NEU: Ah Ling Neu on the viola.

JAD: Thanks also to Kathleen Coughlin from the Brooklyn Phil, and Matthew Guerrieri who wrote the book The First Four Notes—dun dun dun da—which is a great read about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

ROBERT: And thanks of course, to Ludwig van B and his lovely metronome.

JAD: Yes. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We'll be back in a bit.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Shalin Alaria, and I'm calling from Piscataway, New Jersey. 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. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks!]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich. We're talking about the power of music.

JAD: And our last story starts on a dark and empty dirt road.

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.

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

JAD: It's this one right here.

PAT: This is the railroad crossroads.

ROBERT: Where are you?

JAD: 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.

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. 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: I was just testing you.

JAD: And for some reason, for the last 12 years or so I keep thinking about it. Is there something about the myth that is true?

PAT: Yeah.

JAD: Something.

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

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?

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

JAD: 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."

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

ROBERT: Hmm.

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.

ROBERT: 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: On the 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. 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 ...

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.

JAD: But now all the conditions are sort of in place, because you've got this whole folk-roots movement, when 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: 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.

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. 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 Liddell 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, Liddell Johnson: In 1914, that's what he came back ...]

PAT: Liddell tells Dave a story about his brother Tommy. And again, this is Tommy Johnson, not Robert Johnson. But Liddell 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, Liddell 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, he's 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.]

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 Liddell 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.

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 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, and says Robert Johnson disappeared. He came back, he was better than all of us. Nobody knew how he did it.

PAT: 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—the 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. 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[00:50:00.13] 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: But that story about Robert Johnson's young wife dying in childbirth was so 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, the Robert Johnson, are actually about a collection of different Robert Johnsons?

MACK MCCORMICK: 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, "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 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: Hi, my name is Megan O'Hearn, and I'm calling from Brockport, New York. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Molly Webster, Malissa O'Donnell, Jamie York, Dylan Keefe, Lynn Levy and Andy Mills, with help from Arianne Wack and Damiano Marchetti. Okay, thanks guys.]

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