Robert Johnson: The guitarist Eric Clapton called “the most important blues musician”
Due to his history of abhorrent remarks, many understandably believe that the legacy of Eric Clapton is irrevocably tarnished. In the eyes of many, Clapton handed in his rock ‘n’ roll membership when he made a racist speech while on stage in 1976. However, others still see him as an important part of the development of contemporary music whose voice carries weight. In what some people may see as ironic positioning, Clapton concedes that the late Robert Johnson is the greatest to ever play the blues.
Johnson remains one of the most influential musicians of all time, and the lineage of contemporary music would look starkly different if he had never picked up a guitar. In addition to Clapton, others who have shared their admiration toward Johnson include Keith Richards, Peter Green, Jack White, and Bob Dylan. In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, the latter wrote: “I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard. The songs weren’t customary blues songs”.
Dylan added: “They were perfected pieces–each song contained four or five verses, every couplet intertwined with the next, but in no obvious way. If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down.”
The Mississippi musician impacted Clapton in a similar fashion, and in 2004, he felt inclined to pay tribute to the late guitarist. Clapton recorded the album, Me and Mr Johnson, which consisted of tracks originally written and recorded by Johnson. It was a daunting task for the guitarist, but one he felt compelled to undertake to keep his hero’s legacy alive.
Speaking to NPR about the project, he said: “I was definitely overwhelmed, but I was also a bit repelled by the intensity of it. I kind of got hooked on it because it was so much more powerful than anything else I had heard or was listening to. Amongst all of his peers, I felt he was the one that was talking from his soul without really compromising for anybody.”
“In one way or another, he’s been in my life since I was a kid,” Clapton added. He also explained how Johnson “has been in the back of my head to do for so long. It was about time that I took my hat off to him”.
The album was well-received and helped spread the word about Johnson’s creations to a new audience thanks to Clapton’s gesture. It was a project he’d wanted to make for a series of years and a perfect tool to encapsulate his love of Johnson.
Clapton also wrote an essay for a boxset of Johnson’s recordings in 1990. In his message, Clapton wrote: “Robert Johnson, to me, is the most important blues musician who ever lived. He was true, absolutely, to his own vision, and as deep as I have gotten into the music over the last 30 years, I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson. His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice, really … it seemed to echo something I had always felt.”
Listen below to Clapton’s take on Johnson’s track, ‘Rambling on My Mind’.
