Who killed blues singer Robert Johnson?
Posthumously crowned King of the Delta Blues Singers, Robert Johnson lived a brief and tragic life amid the plantations of the Mississippi Delta. He never knew his real father, and his wife died of childbirth when he was just 18 years old. Her family kept him away from his only child for playing the “devil’s music”. Yet it was this music that would cultivate a legacy arguably more influential than any other early blues musician.
Johnson’s legendary deal with the devil at a Mississippi crossroads is one of the most venerated stories in modern music mythology. But so is the story of his untimely death at the peak of his musical powers. He was six years into a nomadic life of non-stop musical performance when he arrived in Greenwood, just over 100 miles from his birthplace, in August 1938.
The previous year, he’d recorded 29 unique songs containing embryonic elements of the music that would become rhythm and blues and later rock and roll. He’d also met David “Honeyboy” Edwards, a fellow bluesman barely out of his teens who’d begun travelling with him to perform at juke joints around the Delta region.
The two musicians settled in Greenwood for a residency at the Three Forks joint over the coming weeks, alongside fellow Mississippi native Sonny Boy Williamson. Honeyboy later came back to the spot where Three Forks had once stood and confirmed, “This is the place”. In fact, it was the place where Johnson met his fate. He wouldn’t make it out of Greenwood alive, dying on August 16th at the age of just 27.
So, how did he die?
It wasn’t just playing the blues that Johnson was in Greenwood for, apparently. “Ol’ Robert did like to drink a lot of whiskey and [was] crazy ’bout his womens,” Honeyboy recalled in an interview. “That’s two things he was crazy about, whiskey and women.” During his initial performances at the Three Forks, one particular one had caught his eye. A married woman.
According to Honeyboy and other local sources, the woman was actually the wife of the joint’s proprietor. “She had a sister nearby in Greenwood,” Johnson’s blues companion explained. “And every Monday morning, she’d go over there to see her sister, but she’d go there and lay with Robert.”
But Johnson was messing with the wrong man. “Her husband, on the plantation, he was something like a snitch,” Honeyboy claimed. “Telling the white man everything.” He also had plenty of customers coming to him for the whisky and gambling his joint could provide. And so, information was flowing just as freely in the other direction. Honeyboy suggests that someone must have told the joint owner, “Man, you know so-and-so’s going with your wife.”
On the night of August 13th, while Johnson was at the bar of the joint, he was served revenge in a whisky glass. Poison, suspected to be naphthalene or strychnine, had allegedly been placed in the bottle meant for Johnson. “The man didn’t pour it,” Honeyboy recalled. “He gave it to this woman to give him.”
We don’t know the name of either person involved, as no historical records were kept about juke joints like the Three Forks. Nor was anyone arrested for the crime, and no official cause of death was listed on Johnson’s death certificate.
Later in the evening, Honeyboy was ready to play and wanted Johnson to perform some of his usual blues repertoire. But he found the blues legend slumped in a corner, unable to move. After being told to “wake up”, Johnson replied, “I’m kinda sick. I don’t feel good.” He struggled his way through half a song before keeling over. He was taken to bed before being moved to the house of a white farmer in Greenwood itself.
He then spent the next two days “crawling round like a dog, just howling” until he finally succumbed to the toxins in his body. It’s been speculated that either congenital syphilis, Marfan syndrome, or both may have contributed to Johnson’s death. In any case, neither of these chronic conditions alone explained the sudden and dramatic change in his health.
His fellow blues player and friend Johnny Shines has corroborated Honeyboy’s account. “Sonny Boy [Williamson] told me he was poisoned to death,” he stated in the documentary The Life and Music of Robert Johnson. “Said he died in his arms. Crawled on his hands and knees, barked and howled like a dog before he died.”
Johnson’s final days in a state of physical convulsion seem like a torturous end to a deeply troubled life. Fans and detractors alike have called it an end befitting perhaps the greatest proponent of the devil’s music who ever lived. Yet someone was responsible for his demise, who deliberately administered the fatal dose of poison via the drink he loved almost as much as his music. Their name may be forgotten, but we should never forget the act of jealousy that cut down an artistic genius in his prime.
