Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues
Robert JohnsonKING OF THE DELTA
BLUES SINGERS.
King of the Delta Blues Singers introduced Robert Johnson's 1930s recordings to the long-playing album era more than two decades after the original sessions.
Album artwork shown for commentary and historical reference. Image source: Cover Art Archive / MusicBrainz.
SEVEN THINGS
WORTH KNOWING.
Recording stories, personnel, physical details and numbers worth keeping with the record.
King of the Delta Blues Singers was released by Columbia in 1961.
The original LP contains 16 tracks drawn from Robert Johnson's 1936 and 1937 recording sessions.
The collection was issued more than twenty years after Johnson's death in 1938.
"Cross Road Blues" was recorded in San Antonio in November 1936.
Producer Don Law supervised Johnson's original recording sessions.
The album also includes "Terraplane Blues," "Come On in My Kitchen" and "Hellhound on My Trail."
The compilation helped make Johnson's recordings widely available to the generation of blues and rock musicians emerging in the 1960s.
WHY THIS
ALBUM MATTERS.
The album matters because Johnson never made an LP in his lifetime, so this 1961 compilation became the physical format through which many later listeners first encountered his small but enormously influential recorded catalog.
THE
NUMBERS.
TRACKS
The original LP contains sixteen performances.
SESSIONS
The recordings come from Johnson's two main recording periods.
LP RELEASE
Columbia assembled the material into an album decades later.
THE
PHYSICAL OBJECT.
The cover's illustrated bluesman image became a visual stand-in for an artist whose surviving photographic record was extremely limited when the album was assembled.
RESEARCH SOURCES
Facts are checked against official artist archives, release databases, recording credits and established archival sources before publication.
KEEP
DIGGING.
More recording stories, strange credits, cover art, chart numbers and details hiding inside the records.