Learning to Love

A powerful blog, Jake!!

They say that the legendary Delta Blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for his extraordinary ability. They say it. But his contemporaries insist that Johnson himself never told that story. Bluesman Johnny Sines, for instance, said that he would have called him a liar if he had.

Promoters and recording companies used the story to attract audiences and to sell records. But those early twentieth-century black musicians—many of whom had escaped the misery of sharecropping by laboriously developing their craft—knew an insult when they heard it…
— Read on jakeowensby.com/2020/02/21/learning-to-love/