Poet J. Patrick Lewis revisits the life of legendary blues man Robert Johnson

Your latest book, Black Cat Bone, examines the life of Robert Johnson. A lot of people think he invented the blues.

He didn’t invent the blues, but he’s associated with it. I suppose there are all sorts of questions as to why he is the only pre-World War II blues artist whose records are still widely owned and heard today. I mean, there were other Mississippi masters: Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, Ike Zinnerman. In fact, all of those people were his mentors, but they are appreciated today only by blues aficionados.

Johnson died in 1938 at age 27. Why has his legacy endured?

Partly, it was his mysteriousness. In fact, when Sony Records released Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings in 1990, they were caught short. They hadn’t expected such great sales. The guy really is a mystery and is this sort of lost-soul character in a way that no other musician of that time was.

The recording blew people away and sold 400,000 copies in six months.

Right. The novelist Russell Banks has said that for a generation of music lovers, the experience of first hearing Robert Johnson was riveting and memorable in the same way you knew what you were doing when President Kennedy was killed. That may be a little over the top, but it’s certainly close to what many of today’s admirers of Johnson feel.

What was your impression the first time you heard him?

My reaction was sort of like Keith Richards’s. He thought he was hearing two guitars, and it took him a long time to realize that Johnson was actually doing it all by himself.

Popular legend has it that Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of two highways, at the stroke of midnight, in exchange for making him a great guitarist.

The early researchers mythologized Robert Johnson out of the realm of possibility. I don’t mean to be overly earnest or melodramatic, but I had an aim in this book. It was to transport myself backward in time and place and try to evoke this phantom memory of Johnson’s genius—and possibly to build my own very small monument to his uniqueness. Here was a fellow wrapped in the mystery of dark and violent Mississippi, and I wanted to see if I could peel away some of the shroud without in any way contributing to this grotesque mythology.

How did you separate the man from the myth?

The best approach for getting at the essence of Johnson was to listen to his music and then listen to what his contemporaries said about him—and that’s what I did. I was at pains to stay away from this notion that he was haunted by demons. If you follow that belief, then you necessarily make him larger than life—and he wasn’t. He traveled all over—not because he was pursued by hellhounds, but because he was just Mississippi poor. The only hellhound he rode was a Greyhound, a freight train, a hitched ride, because he couldn’t stand still on street corners and make a living during the Depression. And Johnson’s songs don’t tell us that he was a satanist or a believer in hoodoo and voodoo and sorcery.

What do they tell us?

If anything, quite frankly—maybe you don’t want to put this in—I think the lyrics suggest that he was a notorious womanizer.