Then, he decided to be anything other than a sharecropper and started on a journey to focus on musical activities.

 

He left Robinsonville and moved to his birthplace, Hazlehurst.

 

At that time, the whole country suffered a deep recession, but Hazlehurst had public construction works for highways and that provided work for all that wanted it.

 

Johnson usually performed at juke joints where construction workers gathered.

 

There, he often worked with a blues singer named Ike Zinnerman.

 

He learned to play guitar from Zinnerman for the next two years.

 

Johnson worked on a farm in the daytime when he had to.

 

However, more than that, he would go off into a forest and sing the blues to himself. 

 

On Saturdays, he usually sat directly on the stone stairway of a courthouse and practiced the blues during the day.

 

 Then, he would perform in local juke joints with Zinnerman from Saturday evening.

 

Later, as he became confident of his own talent, he played by himself.

 

In fact, he was disliked by audiences consisting of laborers and sharecroppers, because he was a slightly built man and barely worked.

 

However, they respected Johnson’s blues technique.

 

In May 1931, he married a mother of three children, Calletta Callie Craft, in Hazelhurst.

 

She worked and cooked for him and treated him courteously.

 

However, Johnson left her and came back to Robinsonville in 1932 when Callie got ill.

 

When he returned to the town, Son House and Willie Brown were totally shocked at his musical development since he had left.

 

Robinsonville was a farming town, so it was no longer a place for Robert to settle down in.

 

Thus, a couple months later, he moved to Helena, Arkansas.

 

Helena was an area where almost all the great musicians of the Delta came through.

 

Sonny Boy Williamson, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf and other noted bluesmen performed in night clubs in Helena, and Johnson had chances to meet and play with them all.

 

He started a life in Helena with his lover and her son.

 

Then, he traveled from place to place.

 

He visited even nameless areas to give a performance.

 

Therefore, there were Robert Johnson fans not only in the whole Delta but also in the south part of Mississippi and the east part of Memphis.

 

In 1936, Johnson played for a music shop owner and talent scout, H.C. Speir, in Jackson, Mississippi who recommended him to Ernie Oertle, an American Record Corporation (ARC) salesman.

 

After Oertle gave him an audition, he took Johnson to San Antonio, Texas to record.

 

Among his first session take place in November 1936 at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, the first song Terraplane Blues was released on the Vocalion label in March 1937.

 

It was his best seller and became a moderate hit selling about 5000 copies.

 

In June 1937, Johnson visited Dallas, Texas, for another recording session.

 

Although all of the tunes recorded as a result of this session was not sold as well as Terraplane Blues, the songs made him more famous and increased his income.

 

He was able to find an enthusiastic fan in anywhere he went.

 

The following year, he left Helena with two bluesmen Johnny Shines and Calvin Frazier, and they set out on a journey that lasted about four months.

 

They traveled to Chicago through St. Louis and Decatur.

 

There, they played the blues and met many of the cities’ famous bluesmen.

 

Then, they spent some time in Detroit to appear on radio.

 

After that, Johnson and Shines visited the East and played in New York and New Jersey.

 

On their way back, they traveled through St. Louis and Memphis.

There, they reinforced newly made friendships and renewed old ones. 

 

In August 1938, he stayed in a country area near Green Wood, Mississippi.

 

There, he gave performances in juke joints and pubs on Saturday evenings.

 

He became close to a women whose husband was the owner of a juke joint named “Three Forks”.

 

On the late evening of August 13, Johnson was playing with Sonny Boy Williamson at Three Folks.

 

During a recess between their performances, a man delivered a half pint bottle of whiskey and Robert drank it.

 

Shortly after, he became intoxicated during their performance, and he died on August 16.

 

The owner killed him by putting poison in the whiskey.

 

Following You Tube clip is Japanese TV show capturing meeting of famous singer song writer Masayoshi Yamazaki and one old blues man.

 

This man's name is David "Honeyboy" Edwards (June 28, 1915-August 29, 2011).

 

He is a Delta blues guitarist and singer from Mississippi.

 

He was Johnson's close friend and accidently saw his death.

 

At the end of the year, John Hammond started recruiting musicians for his concert in Carnegie Hall Spiritual to Swing(Chapter Ⅱ).

 

 He started searching for Robert Johnson to take him to New York for his concert.

 However, he was dead already.