Showing posts with label Robert Johnson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Johnson. Show all posts

16 June 2019

How To Sell Your Soul to The Devil*


First, trim your fingernails as close as you possibly can. 
Take a Black Cat Bone and a guitar and go to a lonely fork in the road at midnight. Sit down there and play a piece, your best piece, thinking of and wishing for the devil all the while. By and by you will hear music, dim at first but growing louder as the musician approaches nearer. Do not look around; just keep playing your guitar. The unseen musician will finally sit down by you and play in unison with you. After a time you will feel something tugging at your instrument. Do not try to hold it. Let the devil take it. and keep strumming along with your fingers as if you had a guitar in your hands. Then the devil will hand you his instrument to play and will accompany you on yours. After doing this for a while he will sieze your fingers and trim the nails till they bleed, finally taking his guitar back and returning your own. Keep on playing. Do not look around. His music will become fainter and fainter as he moves away. When all is quiet you may go home. You will be able to play any piece you desire on the guitar and you can do anything you want to do in this world but you have sold your soul to the devil and you are his in this world and in the world to come.

*
They Say Lucifer Was The Cutest Boy in Heaven: Information provided for amusement only. Evil does not play well with others. Satan is a liar. Don't be a dumbass.

03 December 2013

The Story of ROBERT JOHNSON and the Myth of The Crossroads @ RadioLab


Interesting story on RadioLab about Robert Johnson and the myth of the crossroads. 
David Evans is interviewed as well as Mack McCormick, Elijah Wald, and others. Great stuff!





14 July 2011

Love In Vain - A Vision Of Robert Johnson

I'm not much of a fan of Pitchfork.  I find a fair amount of what Pitchfork writers like to be pretentious, weak, and suffering from Hipsteria.  This review of Scott H Biram's Dirty Old One-Man Band by Stephen M. Duesner to be a perfect example of my gripe.  Google his name. I'm not the only one who thinks he's a dick.  But I digress.

Pitchfork recently posted a list of their writers favorite books about music and they did a decent job. I was particularly delighted to see Love In Vain - A Vision Of Robert Johnson listed.  I read this book years ago and found it to be a unique take on the Johnson story.  I'll let Pitchfork' Brandon Soderburg tell you about it:

Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson by Alan Greenberg 

Alan Greenberg's Robert Johnson screenplay has never been made into a film, though people have certainly tried. In the late 70s, Mick Jagger backed the project. Throughout the 90s, Martin Scorsese was gonna direct, and in the early 2000s, Diddy was to star in a version. But Love In Vain the film still hasn't happened, leaving only a stand-alone biopic script that reads like a great American novel.
Instead of conveniently conflating history like most dramatized musical biographies, the book focuses on milieu and mood. Greenberg, who went to the Mississippi Delta and chased down friends and enemies of Johnson for research, is very sensitive to the contingencies of vagabond living as he conveys the feeling of what it was like to drunkenly shuffle from one dirty and dangerous jook joint to the next each night. There's a tragic inevitability to the script that's hard to shake.
For cold hard facts about Johnson, there are 50 pages of end notes, wherein Greenberg cites sources, explicates screenwriting decisions (taking note of where he's played with the truth or created composite characters), obsessively breaks down blues traditions, and provides prospective directors some cinematic advice (apparently, Ethiopian tribal music should score Johnson's death). This well-researched, brashly impressionistic screenplay is haunting, but it also happens to be the definitive book of any kind on the gifted, eccentric blues legend. --Brandon Soderberg

03 May 2011

ROBERT JOHNSON 100th BiRTHDAY PARTY iN CHiCAGO::Not The Same Lame Blues!

Hey kids!
If you plan to be in the Chicago area May 7th,
one of America's most esteemed blogs, Big Rock Candy Mountain along with Hell Hound Trail Booking, is hosting a killer 100th birthday party for Robert Johnson. Some of your favorite band will be there as well. I've been given some tracks to share with you so you'll know what yr missing or what yr in for:

Devil In Her Eyes mp3
John Henry mp3
Tiger Man mp3
Dirty, High and Confused mp3
Going For Broke mp3
Johnny and The Pale Rider mp3
Honest Man Blues #3 mp3
In The Paint mp3
Keep Ta Boogie If Ye Like It mp3
The 4-12 March mp3

07 October 2008

New Photo of Robert Johnson?

Is this a new photo of Robert Johnson?

Thanks to my friends at Rick Saunders World Yahoo Group for the tip!