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Robert Johnson: Lost and Found BARRY LEE PEARSON and BILL MCCuLLOCH University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2003 142 pp., $24.95
The term "legendary" has been applied to many musical artists over time, but none has deserved the term more than Robert Johnson. In their book Robert Johnson: Lost and Found, blues scholar Barry Lee Pearson and journalist Bill McCulloch set out to chart the origins of the Johnson myth and prove once and for all that there is absolutely no truth to the belief that the blues giant was a demon-tortured soul who could find no peace in this life.
As blues folklore has it, Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in order to play as skillfully as he did in such a short period of time. This Faustian piece of Johnson's biography should obviously be taken with a grain of salt. Few today would take such a midnight rendezvous literally. But as a symbolic recapitulation of Johnson's life it has served scholars, critics, and record producers nicely, from John Hammond, who discovered Johnson in the Delta and first attempted to bring him to a wider audience, to Frank Driggs, who produced the 1961 reissue of Johnson's recordings that...