The Crossroads

In another version, Ledell placed the meeting not at a crossroads but in a graveyard. This resembles the story told to Steve LaVere that Ike Zinnerman of Hazlehurst, Mississippi , learned to play the guitar at midnight while sitting on tombstones. Zinnerman is believed to have influenced the playing of the young Johnson. Recent research by the blues scholar Bruce Conforth , in Living Blues magazine, makes the story clearer.

Johnson and Ike Zimmerman the spelling reportedly given in census records for the family going back to the early s, on his Social Security card and Social Security death notice, on his funeral program, and by his daughters did practice in a graveyard at night, because it was quiet and no one would disturb them, but it was not the Hazlehurst cemetery as had been believed: Zimmerman was not from Hazlehurst but nearby Beauregard , and he didn't practice in one graveyard, but in several in the area. While Dockery, Hazlehurst and Beauregard have each been claimed as the locations of the mythical crossroads, there are also tourist attractions claiming to be "The Crossroads" in both Clarksdale and Memphis.

The blues historian Steve Cheseborough wrote that it may be impossible to discover the exact location of the mythical crossroads, because "Robert Johnson was a rambling guy".

Some scholars have argued that the devil in these songs may refer not only to the Christian figure of Satan but also to the African trickster god Legba , himself associated with crossroads. Hyatt wrote that, during his research in the South from to , when African-Americans born in the 19th or early 20th century said they or anyone else had "sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads," they had a different meaning in mind.

Hyatt claimed there was evidence indicating African religious retentions surrounding Legba and the making of a "deal" not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by Graves with the so-called devil at the crossroads. The Blues and the Blues singer has really special powers over women, especially.

It is said that the Blues singer could possess women and have any woman they wanted. And so when Robert Johnson came back, having left his community as an apparently mediocre musician, with a clear genius in his guitar style and lyrics, people said he must have sold his soul to the devil. And that fits in with this old African association with the crossroads where you find wisdom: You sell your soul to become the greatest musician in history.

This view that the devil in Johnson's songs is derived from an African deity was disputed by the blues scholar David Evans in an essay published in , "Demythologizing the Blues":. The devil imagery found in the blues is thoroughly familiar from western folklore, and nowhere do blues singers ever mention Legba or any other African deity in their songs or other lore. The actual African music connected with cults of Legba and similar trickster deities sounds nothing like the blues, but rather features polyrhythmic percussion and choral call-and-response singing.

The musicologist Alan Lomax dismissed the myth, stating, "In fact, every blues fiddler, banjo picker, harp blower, piano strummer and guitar framer was, in the opinion of both himself and his peers, a child of the Devil, a consequence of the black view of the European dance embrace as sinful in the extreme". Johnson is considered a master of the blues, particularly of the Delta blues style. Keith Richards , of the Rolling Stones , said in , "You want to know how good the blues can get?

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Well, this is it. Louis , with "a full-fledged, abundantly varied musical arrangement". An important aspect of Johnson's singing was his use of microtonality. These subtle inflections of pitch help explain why his singing conveys such powerful emotion. Eric Clapton described Johnson's music as "the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice". In two takes of "Me and the Devil Blues" he shows a high degree of precision in the complex vocal delivery of the last verse: Johnson is also known for using the guitar as "the other vocalist in the song", a technique later perfected by B.

King and his personified guitar named Lucille: Johnson mastered the guitar, being considered today one of the all-time greats on the instrument. His approach was complex and musically advanced. When Keith Richards was first introduced to Johnson's music by his bandmate Brian Jones , he asked, "Who is the other guy playing with him?

The Blues, if anything, are deeply sexual. You know, 'my car doesn't run, I'm gonna check my oil' Every verse has sexuality associated with it.

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In The Guardian ' s music blog from May , Jon Wilde speculated that Johnson's recordings may have been "accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78 [rpm records], or else were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting". Biographer Elijah Wald and other musicologists dispute this hypothesis on various grounds, including that Johnson's extant recordings were made on five different days, spread across two years at two different studios, making uniform speed changes or malfunctions highly improbable.

Johnson fused approaches specific to Delta blues to those from the broader music world. The slide guitar work on "Rambling on My Mind" is pure Delta and Johnson's vocal there has "a touch of Son House rawness", but the train imitation on the bridge is not at all typical of Delta blues—it is more like something out of minstrel show music or vaudeville. As with the first take of "Come On in My Kitchen", the influence of Skip James is evident in James's "Devil Got My Woman", but the lyrics rise to the level of first-rate poetry, and Johnson sings with a strained voice found nowhere else in his recorded output.

The sad, romantic "Love in Vain" successfully blends several of Johnson's disparate influences. The form, including the wordless last verse, follows Leroy Carr's last hit "When the Sun Goes Down"; the words of the last sung verse come directly from a song Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded in He croons the lyrics in a manner reminiscent of Lonnie Johnson , and his guitar style is more that of a ragtime -influenced player like Blind Blake.

In , Yazoo Records released The Roots of Robert Johnson , a compilation CD of Delta blues recordings including several of those cited here which pre-date Johnson and illustrate how his blues output was influenced.

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Johnson has had enormous impact on music and musicians, but outside his own time and place and even the genre for which he was famous. His influence on contemporaries was much smaller, in part because he was an itinerant performer—playing mostly on street corners, in juke joints , and at Saturday night dances—who worked in a then undervalued style of music. He also died young after recording only a handful of songs. Johnson, though well-traveled and admired in his performances, was little noted in his lifetime, and his records were even less appreciated.

If one had asked black blues fans about Johnson in the first twenty years after his death, writes Elijah Wald , "the response in the vast majority of cases would have been a puzzled 'Robert who? Johnson's greatest influence has been on genres of music that developed after his death: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included four of his songs in a set of [81] they deemed to have shaped the genre:. Johnson recorded these songs a decade and a half before the advent of rock and roll , dying a year or two later.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him as an early influence in its first induction ceremony, in , almost a half century after his death. Marc Meyers, of the Wall Street Journal , wrote that "His 'Stop Breakin' Down Blues' from is so far ahead of its time that the song could easily have been a rock demo cut in Many of the artists who claim to have been influenced by Johnson the most, injecting his revolutionary stylings into their work and recording tribute songs and collections, are prominent rock musicians from the United Kingdom.

His impact on these musicians—who contributed to and helped to define rock and roll and rock music—came from the compilation of his works released in by Columbia Records King of the Delta Blues Singers. The blues master's recordings would have as much impact on him as on Mick Jagger. Other examples of the influence he had on English blues and blues-rock musicians and musical groups include the following:.

Johnson's revolutionary guitar playing has led contemporary critics, assessing his talents through the handful of old recordings available, to rate him among the greatest guitar players of all time:. Musicians who proclaim Johnson's profound impact on them—including Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix , and Eric Clapton—all rated in the top ten with him on each of these lists. The boogie bass line he fashioned for " I Believe I'll Dust My Broom " has now passed into the standard guitar repertoire. At the time it was completely new, a guitarist's version of something people would otherwise have heard only from a piano.

Johnson's recordings, such as "Sweet Home Chicago", have been used by companies and nonprofit organizations for marketing purposes. A Vision of Robert Johnson.

The Crossroads by Seraphinite

Very little of Johnson's early life is known with certainty. Two marriage licenses for Johnson have been located in county records offices. The ages given in these certificates point to different birth dates, as do the entries showing his attendance at Indian Creek School, in Tunica, Mississippi. That he was not listed among his mother's children in the census [9] casts further doubt on these dates. The census gives his age as 7, suggesting he was born in or Monday, Thursday and Friday, November 23, 26, and 27, , at a recording session in San Antonio, Texas; and Saturday and Sunday, June 19 and 20, , at a recording session in Dallas.

His death certificate, discovered in , lists the date and location of his death. Johnson's records were admired by record collectors from the time of their first release, and efforts were made to discover his biography, with virtually no success. The blues researcher Mack McCormick began researching his family background but was never ready to publish his findings. McCormick's research eventually became as much a legend as Johnson himself. A revised summary acknowledging major informants was written by Stephen LaVere for the booklet accompanying the compilation album Robert Johnson, The Complete Recordings , and is maintained with updates at the Delta Haze website.

These published biographical sketches achieve coherent narratives, partly by ignoring reminiscences and hearsay accounts which contradict or conflict with other accounts. In , the sleeve notes to the album King of the Delta Blues Singers included reminiscences of Don Law who had recorded Johnson in Law added to the mystique surrounding Johnson, representing him as very young and extraordinarily shy.

The two confirmed images of Johnson were located in , in the possession of his half-sister Carrie Thompson, but were not widely published until the late s. A third photo, purporting to show Johnson posing with the blues musician Johnny Shines , was published in the November issue of Vanity Fair magazine. This photograph has never been made public.

Johnson left no will. The relationship was attested to by a friend, Eula Mae Williams, but other relatives descended from Robert Johnson's half-sister, Carrie Harris Thompson, contested Claud Johnson's claim. The Radiolab podcast "Crossroads", broadcast initially April 16, , on NPR , raises the possibility that more than one Robert Johnson was traveling around the region making music at the time of the subject's life — perhaps confusing related biographical information.

The death certificate attributed to Johnson, for example, indicates on the reverse side that possibly another Robert Johnson came to the area to play banjo not guitar and died of syphilis. This could help explain some of the confusion surrounding Johnson's cause of death. Johnson was also reportedly seen twice after his supposed death, once in and another time in Memphis in Eleven rpm records by Johnson were released by Vocalion Records during his lifetime.

A twelfth was issued posthumously. In , Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues Singers on vinyl, the album representing the first modern-era release of Johnson's performances, which started the "re-discovery" of Johnson as blues artist. II , in The Complete Recordings , a two-disc set, released on August 28, , contains almost everything Johnson recorded, with all 29 recordings, and 12 alternate takes. The Centennial Collection , a re-mastered 2-CD set of all 42 of his recordings [] and two brief fragments, one of Johnson practicing a guitar figure and the other of Johnson saying, presumably to engineer Don Law, "I wanna go on with our next one myself.

On September 17, , the U. Post Office issued a Robert Johnson cent commemorative postage stamp. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other people named Robert Johnson, see Robert Johnson disambiguation. Johnson's recordings were released by several record companies: To the uninitiated, Johnson's recordings may sound like just another dusty Delta blues musician wailing away. But a careful listen reveals that Johnson was a revisionist in his time Johnson's tortured soul vocals and anxiety-ridden guitar playing aren't found in the cotton-field blues of his contemporaries.

When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard. The songs weren't customary blues songs. They were so utterly fluid. At first they went by quick, too quick to even get. They jumped all over the place in range and subject matter, short punchy verses that resulted in some panoramic story-fires of mankind blasting off the surface of this spinning piece of plastic. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.

Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. September Learn how and when to remove this template message. The thing about Robert Johnson was that he only existed on his records. He was pure legend. Retrieved November 1, Booklet accompanying Complete Recordings. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Retrieved August 4, Retrieved September 25, Hellhounds on My Trail: The Afterlife of Robert Johnson.

Quoted in Wald , p. Retrieved May 22, Worley's Dallas City Directory , The tale most often told about how Johnson met his fate is that he was poisoned by a jealous husband who put strychnine in his whiskey. Archived from the original JPG on March 5, Retrieved September 6, The Holy Sites of Delta Blues.

University Press of Mississippi. The Holy Sites of Delta Blues 3rd ed. The Story with Dick Gordon. Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter. Retrieved June 5, Retrieved August 18, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Archived from the original on May 2, Listen to the Story. Archived from the original on May 13, Retrieved June 3, Archived from the original on July 13, Retrieved September 5, Archived from the original on July 14, Retrieved July 15, Our character is really amazing and far from those air-headed, naive girls often found in other games.

For such a short time you made something stunning! I also want to say that I absolutely adore Tristan! Such a sweetheart, I feel like I fell for him two lines into the games ahah. And our character is really beautiful! I do like to make my MCs have a little more punch to them! Having the personality options is something I will always put into my VNs or interactive fiction: Lucan is a trip oh my gosh xD Another wonderful game! Aah, thank you so much: D Lucan was a blast to write, it was nice just letting loose with a character! What I loved most about this visual novel was that you could choose what to say- and you wouldn't have to worry about how it affected the ending that you got.

In most visual novels, the protaganist is usually However, this game completely took that idea and destroyed it, which I absolutely loved. Sometimes I wanted to be a flirt without worrying about the outcome, and most times I acted a little more mature, which let me stay true to my actual personality. I've played The Lady's Choice before straying off topic, but my favorite was Amesbury and I think you kind of ruined visual novels for me starting then haha. I've only completed one of Lucan's route so far Freed Spirits Ending and his personality was A plus, but I was actually hoping to kind of know him a little more?

Something that could assure me that behind that flirty exterior there was some sob story; I'm a sucker for those. Perhaps, is there a walkthrough of this? I'm so glad you've enjoyed the game: Having different personality options and repsonses for the MC is something I really enjoy myself, so I always make sure to add it into whatever interactive pieces I am doing! I wish I'd had more time to explore the personality and stories of each of the guys further, but a month was much shorter than I thought it was: D I had to cut out quite a bit to keep to the time limit of NaNo- though, I hope it was enjoyable even with that.

I haven't done a walkthrough, but there are three endings for each character- but they vary only slightly for each character, which is why I put that there is only 'three' endings in general for the game another thing due to time constraints Everything about the game from the art to the GUI to the writing gave it a nice warm feeling. I loved getting to know both guys and was pleasantly surprised by Lucan. The character customization was a neat touch too!



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Thank you so much for the lovely comment: I'm glad you liked the guys- Lucan was fun to write, though I really wish I'd had more time to delve further into his personality! I binge-played this game yesterday up to today and managed to finish the three endings. What I loved most about this game of yours is that the conversation of the player to the guys you talk to is very interactive.

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If you're spontaneous with your choices they'll tell you how capricious you are, or when you're pretty straight-forward they'll tell you about it in certain lines as the game progress. It almost feels like you're talking to a real person. It's fun to change courses with the choices because of it, that it doesn't feel like you're doing it all over again.

I so love the backgrounds that I wanted to screenshot them! If you don't mind me putting them as my wallpaper then, I'll better get right to the screen capture thing. The CGs were something I'm amazed for some time when it was shown that it does feature the appearance of the character as you chose it to. I'm still wondering even now how you were able to do that. I heard at least three or four BGMs which did its job on giving the whole scenario a nice spring-like 'getting away'-vibe feeling.

I cracked up when the guitar-shredding music cues in for the glorious debut of the guys. And lastly, the guys. It's amazing that you managed to create those two with depth for such a short time. Lucan is my favorite; how he makes the heroine 'react' with his double-meanings which is such a comedic relief throughout his route. As for Tristan, he's like the unique bear you just can't wrapped your arms around without feeling uneasy about it.



All in all, I want to give this 4. This game is amazing it saddens me that there's no neutral ending for it. I love both of the characters to be freed equally, not just one, but the circumstances being sensible. The personality and dynamic conversations is something I really enjoy doing, and is something I will always endeavour to put into every interactive piece that I make! So, it's nice to know that it really is something people enjoy: I only played Lucan's route so far but, oh god I love your work so much.

Any game you make I'll be sure to play and love. You're so good at this it hurts my heart. I literally loss my voice from screaming about how much I loved him and this game. Keep up the good work my friend. Aah, thank you so much! D Makes me smile so much to know you enjoy what I make! I'm looking forward to future projects, so I hope you will enjoy those just as much! Everything is really cohesive and polished, and honestly? I'm completely floored about what you've managed to accomplish in a month.

It's nuts to me. Tristan is a real cutie, and I aboslutely loved the variety in personality choices throughout. Sometimes I like being sarcastic also the sarcastic options were Funny , but sometimes the situation just doesn't call for it, so having varying options like that made it feel that oh, yeah, I can respond dynamically to the situation at hand. I haven't done Lucan's route yet, but I'm going to after class. One little thing I would have loved to see and wouldn't have been a big addition would be the MC ruminating on the house itself a bit.

Like, particularly during lines where "and then time passed", it would have been a nice touch if she mentioned specific little quirks of the house. Say, oh, maybe the library has a lot of romance novels which would make a lot of sense, for Reasons or oh, she took a nap underneath one of the maple trees or something.

Little specific details like that make the setting feel Without going to a lot of effort. Thank you so much for your lovely comment! D And sorry for the incredibly late reply, I've just come back from break. I'm really glad you enjoyed what was there- there was a bunch more I wanted to add, but a month really is shorter than I always think it is! Definitely think the character customisation is something I would like to continue in all of my VNs in future if possible: Definitely not bad for a game made in that amount of time!

I liked Tristan's route a lot more because I didn't feel like I really got to know Lucan. I just felt like we never really saw what was under his 'mask' and it was a bit ignored so he came off as just a flirt to me. Other than that, the art was super and it was fun for a short game! I'm glad you liked Tristan, he was definitely the more romantic of the two.

The guys aren't brothers, just housemates and colleagues I hope everyone enjoys it: Download Now Name your own price. Click download now to get access to the following files: Comments Log in with itch. I'm really glad I stumbled across Seraphinite's Tumblr and found this game.

I really enjoyed the game. Chiara days ago. Trixiye days ago. Seraphinite days ago. Seraphinite 1 year ago. MzMystery 1 year ago. MariaDarkchild 1 year ago. I thought I was to. Aren't they just cute!? Like Sam and Dean: MariaDarkchild days ago.

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