Top 10 Robert Johnson Songs: The Birth Of Classic Rock

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The story of Robert Johnson is every bit as fascinating as it is creepy. There was always an enigmatic quality to the Delta bluesman, who hailed from Mississippi. His life story was the pinnacle of unsourced mystery that only heightened the curiosity about his precocious existence. Much of Robert Johnson’s life remains poorly documented. He was born in 1911 and died in 1938 at the age of 27. He spent much of his early life playing where he could by frequenting the local bars. According to legend, Johnson achieved his remarkable ability to play the guitar after going down to a Mississippi crossroads and making a deal with the devil. Johnson recorded 29 songs for the American Record Corporation (ARC) in 1936 and 1937, with eleven 78 rpm records issued on Vocalion Records during his lifetime and one after his death.

What makes Robert Johnson such a renowned figure in music is his pioneering of the blues and the legend that he made a pact with Satan to obtain his complex guitar playing. Son House recalled that Johnson had once been such a poor guitarist that other musicians disliked hearing him play. Johnson later returned with astonishing ability, and the crossroads legend grew around that transformation. Johnson confounded his contemporaries with some of the best music of his time.

There’s really no denying his ubiquitous influence across the musical spectrum. Johnson not only laid the groundwork for the blues genre, but he also influenced just about every highly regarded musician/band known to mankind, which includes Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Elmore James, Bob Dylan, Jack White, Led Zeppelin, and Fleetwood Mac (the early years with Peter Green); just to name a selective few.

Robert Johnson’s legacy is undeniable, and his respective impact on music is hard not to feel when one thumbs through the infinite glossary of genres. He’s essential to rock and roll, with a style so brash and openly honest that it’s hard not to connect with him in some way. This list will feature different recordings showing the breadth of his technique, both well-known and underrated.

# 10 – They’re Red Hot

This is one of Johnson’s fastest-paced songs. He bangs out such a quick and consistent rhythm, swaying at each ragtime chord and growling in a high-pitched fit of rasping. And the recurring bar, hot tamales, and they’re red hot! Yes, she got ’em for sale! Draws the listener into a humid kitchen where one could almost taste those hot tamales. This is the only recording he ever did of this song, and the sound in his voice shows that he had fun recording it.

# 9 – Drunken Hearted Man

Here’s a prime example of bellowing out the pain of the blues. Johnson does what he does best here, creating a descending riff with those classic blues fills and turnarounds while wallowing in a pool of self-pity. He speaks of leaving his mother, falling victim to certain women who’ve done him wrong, his father dying, and trying to change his downtrodden ways. It’s certainly one of his sadder songs.

# 8 – Traveling Riverside Blues

Led Zeppelin famously covered this song and referenced the iconic line, ” Squeeze my lemon ’til the juice runs down my leg. Johnson played Traveling Riverside Blues in an open tuning typical for slide guitar, and it features subtle sexual innuendo representative of the blues. This is one of his coolest songs.

# 7 – Last Fair Deal Gone Down

One thing that should be noted about Johnson is the complexity of his technique. He adopted this finger-picking pattern where the thumb would hit the lower strings for a descending bassline while his other fingers plucked the higher strings; this created the mind-bending perception that both lead and rhythm were going simultaneously. It’s such a great song, referencing the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad and metaphorical passages like this line: If you cry about a nickel, you’ll die for a dime.

# 6 – Cross Road Blues

I’m sure everyone knows Cream’s classic interpretation; they turn this little number into a rockin’ masterpiece. Of course, nothing beats the original. This song perfectly sums up Johnson’s esoteric spirit; he’s just a man standing at the crossroads trying to find his purpose. Here, Johnson also showcases his virtuosic slide playing by chugging on that overhanging bassline while simultaneously attacking the twelfth fret with his metal slide, the quintessential lick for when playing slide guitar.

# 5 – Sweet Home Chicago

Sweet Home Chicago amalgamated earlier blues standards that Johnson decided to rework. The beginning turnaround lick starts the song off in quite a reserved fashion before turning into a heavy, 12-bar riff that perfectly accentuates Johnson’s musings on taking his woman to California and back to his home in Chicago. The song’s interpretation has been analyzed for years, most notably the ambiguity of Johnson’s geographical annotations in the lyrics. But that’s what makes him so great: the many layers of songwriting. Everybody’s covered the song, offering their own re-imagining of its tenor and bringing in countless new hordes of fans of Johnson’s work.

# 4 – Me and the Devil Blues

If there ever was such a composition of his that elucidated the otherworldly qualities that shrouded him, it would be this one. It’s got a great melody to it, but the lyrics are what make it a sinister force. Johnson’s at his most amoral and imminent here as he speaks so apathetically about the Devil knocking on his door and meeting up with him. With brutal lines about beating his woman under the influence of the Devil and talks of being buried on the highway so his evil spirit can catch a greyhound, it is nothing short of rock and roll.

# 3 – I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom

This is the song that Elmore James made famous with his glass-cutting, electric slide explication. Johnson breathed life into the now-formulaic 12-bar blues in E, but he switched it up and created this boogie shuffle; its attitude still feels organic 80 years later. The lyrics, keeping in the tradition of a bluesman’s disposition, talk about a man leaving everything behind and traveling to places of deeper meaning. Johnson incorporates floating verses from previous standards while adding a couple of new verses of his own, most notably his geographical musings of China, the Philippines, and Ethiopia.

# 2 – Kind Hearted Woman Blues

It was pretty arduous coming up with a slot for this song. It deserves to be number one because it was the first recording Johnson ever did and has the only recorded guitar solo he ever ripped; the mechanics are so dexterous because he’s soloing while playing the bassline. It squeezes out a gorgeous harmony and features his classic turnaround involving an octave in the key of A where the five notes are chromatically resolved; when you hear it, you’ll immediately recognize it since it can be heard in almost every other blues composition. The song was written as a response to Bumble Bee Slim’s Cruel Hearted Woman Blues and remains one of Johnson’s most well-respected and popular songs.

# 1 – Hell Hound on My Trail

Returning to what was expounded in our number four entry, Me and the Devil Blues, this is the musical expository of the Faustian myth that has become synonymous with Robert Johnson. It’s the darkest, most grim composition he ever recorded, and it’s the stuff that nightmares are truly made of, both in sound and content. Hell Hound on My Trail is his most powerful song, and it shows the depth of Johnson as a musician; he immerses himself in those ominous verses with a howl in his voice of pain and the presentiment that something’s coming to get him.

Some have said the song is an allusion to lynching, and that opens the song up to a different perspective; it makes it an even more depressing song. But that’s what makes it, hands down, the best song he ever did. It’s a perennial artifact that will indeed be unearthed hundreds of years from now, along with the rest of his work, and marveled at by the following species that comes along.