2/6. Music journalist Paul Sexton explores the life and career of itinerant, tormented Mississippi-born blues singer, songwriter and guitarist Robert Johnson , who died - probably from poisoning - in 1938, aged 27, unaware of the immeasurable impact his relatively few recordings would have on postwar 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. The story continues in Oxford, Mississippi, where Paul Sexton talks to Living Blues magazine editor
Brett Bonner and Greg Johnson , who curates the blues archive of the University of Mississippi. With further input from Fat Possum label boss Matthew Johnson.