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started by explaining that, though the state’s artists had not been considered particularly important in the commercial blues world of their day, they were justifiably singled out by virtually all later commentators. I then played recordings of the great prewar Mississippians: Charley Patton, with his growling voice and astonishing polyrhythms. Tommy Johnson with his warmer, lighter approach and eerie falsetto. The wild bottleneck styles of Son House and Willie Newbern. Skip James, for me the most intense and transcendent singer in blues. Plus the Mississippi Sheiks, the Mississippi Jook Band, some fife-and-drum music from the hill country, Rube Lacey, Arthur Pettis, Robert Petway…
    Finally, we came to Robert Johnson, the most famous Mississippian of all. My students had all heard of him, knew he was supposedto be the pinnacle of the Delta style, but most had never actually listened to his music. Now, as he sang and played, they looked at me blankly. What was so special about this? Compared to some of the earlier players, Johnson seemed rather sedate. Why would he be hailed as a musical revolutionary, towering above his elders and contemporaries?
    I did my best to come up with answers, but I was caught off guard, and over the next months this experience forced me to rethink much of what I knew—or thought I knew—about blues. My students’ reaction, far from being stupid or ill-informed, was closer to the reaction of most 1930s blues fans than mine was. Even in Mississippi, Johnson’s work was hardly greeted as revolutionary. His most celebrated talent, if we are to judge by the reports of his contemporaries, was his versatility, his ability to pick up new guitar parts as if by magic and to command a vast range of styles. It was incredible to them that he could play everything from Son House’s raw country slide to the supple, jazzy style of Lonnie Johnson and all the latest pop and western hits. No one would have asked him to be more passionate than Son House and more soulful than Skip James. In fact, at that time there would have been hardly any listeners who were familiar with both House’s and James’s work, since they came from opposite ends of the Delta and their records sold poorly. It was much more impressive to be able to sound like Leroy Carr, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Kokomo Arnold, national stars familiar to every blues fan. To people in the Delta, Johnson’s strength was not that he exemplified the best of the local style, but rather that he had assimilated all the hottest sounds from outside. For his young fellow musicians, he was an example of someone of their own generation who had managed to make records, and whose work pointed the way to forming versatile bands and holding their own with the pop stars up north, rather than being stuck forever playing in rundown country shacks. Meanwhile, for the broader world of blues fans, there was nothing special about one more young guy who sounded like Carr or Arnold, and the unique qualities of the Delta style had never been big selling points.
    Which is to say my students were in the rare position of approaching Johnson by way of the records that preceded and surrounded him,rather than coming to him by traveling backward from the Rolling Stones via Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters—the path taken by virtually all modern listeners. Given this, their reactions made perfect sense. Not that I believe Johnson was in any way an ordinary talent, but what makes him great is by no means as obvious and clear-cut as it has often appeared to the generations of white rock and jazz fans who have heard him in a vacuum, cut off from the larger blues world of his time.
    I went back to Johnson’s records with a new mission: to understand his work in its natural context. This book is, to a great extent, the result of that experience and the paths it took me down. The first step was to listen to his music, and as much as possible of the music