1/6. Music journalist
Paul Sexton explores the life and career of nomadic, Mississippi-born blues singer, songwriter and guitarist Robert Johnson , who died - probably from poisoning - in 1938, aged 27, unware of the immeasurable impact his relatively few recordings would have on post-war Chicago blues, jazz, R&B and 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. Producer Neil Rosser