A punk musician I interviewed recently for an article about his biggest influences cited Robert Johnson as one of them. That was a nice surprise. I’ve been doing a bit of a deep dive since - Which isn’t hard because he only recorded a couple of dozen songs during his life.
It’s really amazing how much we take the information age for granted. There’s so many mysteries surrounding this guy, his life and his music. Even how and when he died is something of an unknown. That would never happen today.
I have a book on him called “Up jumped the Devil” which is pretty much the most informative and accurate biography of his life, but even then, there’s inconsistencies due to the lack of documentation at the time.
Super talented and unique guitar player though, between him and Muddy Waters pretty much every guitar based band you’ve ever heard have been influenced in some way or other.
I really need to make a list of popular music and movies and TV shows I’ve heard of but never actually seen or listened to. I finally listed to Wonderwall for the first time, after hearing it being memed about for years now.
yeah, underground is always where the interesting stuff is going down.
on a side note: very early 2000s was just before post-rock solidified into mogwai/mono/explosions in the sky/godspeed formula. i remember reading an article about it that included the likes of tortoise, add n to x, royal trux (?!), third eye foundation, pram, hood, stereolab etc.
it seems to happen with all the music trends; a period where a label is applied liberally to everyone and then a few break out and cast it in a particular mould. emo springs to mind. didn’t end up how it started at all.
Genres are fuckin’ weird like that. Rites of Spring were called Emo back in the day. Now you’ve got swathes of people who associate emo with My Chemical Romance or whatever. There’s waves and eras to every genre I guess and they never stay the same for long
Have you ever heard of a band that has been kept alive by its evil producer for so long none of the (obviously not original) members are even from the same nation as when they started? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay1FBKsF2Nk
