1/6 Another chance to hear Paul Sexton's profile of Mississippi-born blues singer, songwriter and guitarist Robert Johnson, who died - probably from poisoning - in 1938, aged 27, unware of the seismic impact his relatively few recordings would have on postwar Chicago blues, jazz, R&Band rock. Few 20th-century artists remain as mythically defined as Johnson, who allegedly earned his great talent in a crossroads meeting with Satan, immortalised in the singer's 1936 signature classic
Cross Road Blues. Indebted to the often tormented Johnson are such acts as Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones and their followers.