Did Robert Johnson Really Sell His Soul To The Devil?

And was it Robert Johnson or Tommy Johnson?

We explore the beginning of the bluesman soul selling myth that still captures people’s imaginations decades later.

While Robert Johnson wasn’t the first blues man associated with the soul selling myth, he did re-enforce the legend with his lyrics about hellhounds, crossroads and folk magic.

We can really thank another blues guitarist, Son House, for popularizing the Robert’s soul selling story — and it came years after Johnson had died.

Son, Howlin Wolf, Charley Patton et al lived, worked and played music music on a plantation called Dockery Farm outside of Cleveland, Mississippi primarily in the 1930s.

At some point during a break in some engagement, Johnson tried to take the stage and play, and was “laughed off” by Son & company.

Then some time later House sees Johnson again, and is surprised to find he’s now a very skilled guitarist who earns the elder bluesman’s respect. They all go about their lives.

Some thirty years later, the folk blues revival spearheaded by Bob Dylan generates massive of interest in old blues, and music fans start hunting down the blues legends who are living in obscurity. Suddenly elder musicians, some who haven’t played in years, have big late-life careers for packed houses of college students who hang on every word they say. Son House had the most successful and in-demand career revival.

After Columbia had a massive surprise hit with the Robert Johnson album compilation “King of the Delta Blues Singers” in 1961, Son was one of the only people who verifiably knew Johnson, so he was often asked about the mysterious bluesman.

And Son loved telling stories. He would relish in talking about how Johnson “must have sold his soul to the devil to learn to play like that!”

Johnson’s otherworldly lyrics about hellhounds on his trail, going down to the crossroads, and hoodoo folk magic such as black cat bones and hot foot powder played into the mystery.

And so did the murky, completely uncertain details of his death… “when the devil came to collect”. Unfortunately, next-to-nothing is known about Johnson’s life, or his alleged murder. For decades, it wasn’t even known where he was buried. Three gravestones were erected in different cemetaries around Greenwood, Mississippi. Only a couple of people later ever verifiably knew the bluesman, and were only interviewed decades later. Johnson left almost no recorded words except his lyrics. The mysteries of his life are ghostly and almost certainly lost to time forever. And so the legend has fertile soil to grow.

To “muddy the waters”, (pun intended) an unrelated but also noteworthy bluesman Tommy Johnson really did tell his family, his brother Ledell in particular, that he’d sold his soul to the devil for his incredible guitar ability. Noteworthy musicologist Gayle Dean Wardlow interviewed his brother for the biography aptly named “Tommy Johnson” where the brother goes into explicit detail about the transaction.

Specifically, he cited Tommy as saying you have to go down to a crossroads late at night to make a deal with a devil figure to learn to play. These otherworldly instructions were never attributed to Johnson.

The myth of TOMMY Johnson selling his soul was even represented in the 2000 comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, where Tommy, portrayed by the real-life bluesman Chris Thomas King, plays guitar and talks about the soul transaction.

With both artists talking and singing about the crossroads, and Son House’s storytelling, the series of events became forever interwoven into a faustian trope of guitars and mortal deals.

Really, the legend of soul selling runs deeper than Mississippi, as ancient African folk traditions had people making deals at crossroads with an otherworldly figure known as Papa Legba.

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