Two fat men in a Hudson Hornet.

dermott wrote:

this is one fantastic song, robert johnson wrote/played this in 1936. bio said it was about getting out of jail [1936] and coming home to find your terraplane will not start, because your woman let her boyfriend drive it while you went away and he killed the battery. he died in 38 i think, drank booze laced with something, story says that it was laced by the bar owner he was playing at because the owners wife was very interested in robert. i down loaded it off a music site, great old blues.

Fiction does read better than fact - It is said fellow blues singer Sonny Boy Williamson II was present the night of Johnson's poisoning (even warning him against accepting a pre-opened bottle of whiskey) giving the account that he died whilst on his hands and knees "howling and barking like a dog".

Actually he recovered from the alleged poisining, but only lasted a couple weeks, dying from pneumonia, August 16, 1938, in Greenwood, MS.

His actual gravesite remains unknown - there are at least 3 claims to where he is buried. For sure it's somewhere in Mississippi, in the delta country he was born and raised in.

He was considered then, and now, one of the great, if not the greatest, bluesman of all time. I used to hang out at the tonks and juke joints down along 61 between Memphis and Clarksdale in the mid-50's, sometimes even a bit further south. There one could hear, and I learned to love, blues right out of the delta cotton fields. At least once a night a bluesman would say "I learned this one from an old Johnson song", or maybe "Bobby Johnson was my influence when I was learning to play blues." It was safe enough for white folks to stop by - just enjoy your beer, keep your mouth shut, don't start any trouble and enjoy the great music. These places were where the black folks hung out.



Hudsonly,

Alex B