BackAlleyBlues

Robert Leroy Johnson was born on May 8, 1911 to Julia Major Dodds and Noah Johnson in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. Until his late adolescence, his name was Robert Spencer after his stepfather, who had to change his name from Dodds to Spencer when he ran from Mississippi after a personal vandetta with the Marchetti Brothers (Lavere 7). Johnson took the name of his natural father as a teenager, even though he had not met him. Music was a long-time interest for Johnson, and his first instruments were the Jew's harp and the harmonica. Before he became seriously involved with the guitar, he married Virginia Travis in February 1929, and the young couple soon became expectant parents. But tragedy struck when Virginia, only sixteen years old, died in childbirth in 1930.

Around June of 1930, blues musician Son House came to Mississippi. His music deeply affected Johnson, for it was the "rawest, most direct pure emotion Robert had ever heard, and he followed House and [Willie] Brown wherever they went" (Lavere 11). But Johnson did not appear to be gifted with a musician's talent for guitar, as Son House asserts, "Such another racket you never heard! It'd make people mad, you know. They'd come out and say, "Why don't y'all go in there and get that guitar from that boy!" (Cobb 289).