This week in Texas music history: Robert Johnson records in San Antonio

On Nov. 23, 1936, bluesman Robert Johnson made his first recordings at San Antonio’s Gunter Hotel. He wasn’t the first artist, or even the most popular, to cut records in the Mississippi Delta blues style before WWII, but Johnson’s Depression-era records would become legend.

His haunting lyricism and otherworldly guitar beget mythology, deepened by the mystery of Johnson’s death two years later. You know his myth even if you don’t know his songs.

He’s the bluesman they say sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads. But before all that mythmaking, Johnson was a young, itinerant guitarist from Mississippi in a San Antonio hotel room trying to make a hit. Englishman Don Law produced the sessions for Vocalion Records, one of those open-cattle-call affairs that record companies led in the South during the Great Depression.

One artist cycled into the room after another in quick succession, Johnson squeezing in between country gospel group the Chuck Wagon Gang and música tejana duo Andres Berlanga and Francisco Montalvo. Johnson’s San Antonio sessions yielded the songs “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Rambling on My Mind,” and “Cross Road Blues,” among others.

Most of these singles didn’t sell well initially, with the partial exception of the double entendre car song “Terraplane Blues.” That one did well enough that Vocalion brought Johnson back for a second session in Dallas the next year that produced “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Me and the Devil Blues.”

After Johnson’s death in 1938, Mississippi artists of his generation like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf moved north and modernized the Delta blues for the electric age. And it was the quest to find the roots of that sound in the 1960s that led young Brits to stumble on Johnson’s rare records.

They entranced Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, each seeing in Robert Johnson the origin point of rock and roll. So remember, though Robert Johnson’s roots were all Mississippi and his global influence spanned Chicago and London, every Robert Johnson record you hear was made in Texas.

Sources:

Alan Govenar, ed. The Blues Come to Texas: Mack McCormick and Paul Oliver’s Unfinished Book. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019.
Robert “Mack” McCormick with John Troutman, ed. Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2023.
Elijah Wald. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.