my name is robert johnson forty nine years old i live in springfield missouri yeah i can listen to your stores johnson's antiques my things johnson think i'm robert johnson you know like the old often been tempted to use the name robert johnson because i'm a blues man thirty years later i'm still a blues man and i've never really wanted to use the name robert johnson because of the stigma attached to it robert johnson's legacy lives being known as selling his soul to the devil as well as the writer of some of the most famous blues songs i can't believe i'm this far deep in the delta it's been sixty years since robert johnson died poisoned by a jealous husband me he was twenty seven you know it seems me there must be a record of that thirty a song somewhere and i bet a no accent but i know robert didn't feel good about that after those years went by thank you used that ability to play one last song for jesus and i got to find that song i got to play it for the world here so the world i know i gotta find me some old in fact i've always wanted to have an opportunity to clear my good name i should say our good name because robert came along on the four idea but that seems to be the purpose of my life no not one but i even collections that i don't think that's where i'm going to find it i think it's going to be in something obscure a place where i just i don't know i'm going to have to just feel led to it and then have to just wait for the ri feeling when the time comes i'm going to keep looking you know i'm getting kind of tired of actually my really rather just like the blues guy you heard but there's this feeling i got that i just got to keep going i feel like it's something i'm supposed to i'd never heard of robert johnson when i decided i was going to be a blues man that came later but this song sometimes i think i can hear that you ever been to church that shiver go up to back your spine you know the holy ghost is moving feel like you got angels singing along with even the clatter singing also the choir sounds big all hours no more this new generation don't care nothing about the blues i guess is all the same today young folk don't listen to that and the middle he's forty a little maybe fifty sometime i mean don't do oh no don't take on him because they sound good to her yes it's like me because those people died out would have made them record and the way to go me this was thank and would then he didn't know was going to fight the devil with that contractor he didn't want to give up  it sometimes you've got to do with the feeling you go with which you feel like you're supposed to do something that you have to do just like you play the game when your kid for a blindfold on the play hot or cold if you get close to the place are supposed to be there so your heart far away your cold will sometimes lately when we get i meet these people and they start talking about the places i'm supposed to go i get this funny feeling so it feels like it feels like that maybe that's what i'm supposed to do so i just feel like i'm following a road map that's unfolding before me as i go i like going down route sixty six and finding places that that we didn't know were there and you see a they had in mind and by that i got jesus in my heart nothing coming at me i came but i got to get back to the streets that's where the blues is now but i really want to know was there these young people knowing about the blues of the background the the backbone of everything anything that has a rhythm and anything that has a little bit of soul and comes from blues blues started the whole thing blues is where it all came from any kind of guitar you hear any can a soulful anything you came from anything you want to feel any time any time you feel you always listen to the blues because you're somebody just got it worse it's always going to make you feel better because you know muddy let me tell you something whether you believe in that hoodoo stuff or no sometimes things happen that you just don't know i got a good feeling about this i don't have a very good feeling i don't know how much luck you're going to i don't expect you to want me to have any luck but i tell you what springfield missouri has got a whole bunch o record shops for a town that size i'm going to hit a bunch of  m already caught a few of them or got some pretty good leads on some records even sure there is a thirty year fell well sure there is everybody knows the respect i talk to who woman who knows for sure she was there when it was recorded but i tell you what i'm going to keep l site or something lord knows i think lots of people would love to see it just for the vibe like i'm feeling right now but to figure out what happened sixty years ago was buried outside the juke joint were dying the local preacher there put up a grave marker in the cemetery and the same story was over but just a few months later the fair came up with a new eyewitness of the actual burial you see there's also a mount zion church listed on robert's death certificate so here i am in mor we did something to people through his music man and i can't explain it you know a lot of people can't explain it that's why you know maybe that's how the legend got started maybe that's how the myth that you know he could play so well that you know  ready to fade yet in the middle of downtown greenwood steve the fair has opened his own museum and shop in memory of robert johnson in the sixty's steve was responsible for the renewed interest in robert and he found the only two known pictures we have of him i couldn't believe that this guy was so great that he had no eagle to ever go and sit for a portrait you know i mean a guy this great had to know how good he was right and he made all these records and he never had a picture taken i didn't make sense this got to be a picture of this guy knows anything about him you know we just haven't asked the right people or somebody has got to know something about it so eventual i found the sister one of the things that i asked her on the telephone before i had ever met her was is there a picture of your brother and she said yeah you know it's a funny thing she said there was another guy here about a year ago and i couldn't find that picture when he was here and she said i just found it a few weeks ago in a bible is the common story you know you put something in a safe place and you can't find it and when she showed it to me i took a look at that it was a studio portrait and i looked at a jesus is this an hour of cover what but there's still i think a lot of the straight and the culmination of all the frustration of the fact that now they don't make it as subtle as the used to be what they do now to go on to say you know i got to get the hell out of the ghetto in let me do i'm just do you believe in the crossroads legends i think whoever finds it out whoever finds that last one and hasn't well can't you can't see that and has the homeless for lack of well no no no not me not me maybe somebody like beginning to believe that maybe somebody like me but it isn't a jew world i don't want anything i just want to help i think i may be on the right know you might be over that way or was it over there or maybe it was berg over there you guys don't know where it is do you you're looking for it to unless you've had the blues unless you actually really experience some sort of deep feeling there you go do the blues you have to be like ready for a very desperate life if you because it's not gonna unfold in any way normal and you know you'll always be sort of on the pitch down at the edge of poverty and somewhere close kin or close to desperation i think that probably the distance between real blues people and people who are not real blues people is just that very belief that the devil exist in carney and will buy your soul for knowledge you really do sell your soul to the devil when you play the blues it's not is no nobody has done it is ever happy that nobody is ever really happy about it and it's not necessarily at a crossroad with a contract written in blood or anything so graphic as that but there comes a point where you know that you have to sell out a little bit to go forward that you have to sell something that you not provocative they don't want you to play about they don't care about you being able to play with thrill is gone one more time as good as the last guy played the thrill is gone i don't care if you sound like mighty waters or even sing like my uighurs what they want is some provocative entertainment they want you to sing about subjects on the dark side because they don't live on the dark side they live on the light side why because it's too dangerous to live on the dark side it's too dangerous to you know get drunk or do drugs or you know live in poverty or you know travel on the road by yourself night after night you know what was going on saturday night and your joint was more like you know blues is a blues man corruptible absolutely he's corruptible because he's already out there playing the guitar to girls or money or you know whatever it is and so you know if he gets liquor too and gets more money or more of these worldly things going on then in some certain sense he's bargained with the world of the devil even if the guy who said he not doesn't have tails and a horn you know he's like represents old scratch and if you look at all of the legends it's really that the guy at the crossroads says that he's the devil himself he says he represents the devil he's the devil's agent i know who i'm dealing with here i know who wants to stop me i don't know who tried to buy robert johnson so you know i hear about myself to ask you why that song matters so much  don't give me the pretense of being on my side no i recognize what's going on here now a nobody opposing me but the devil i'm going to find robert johnson's record and none of your women could take a lifetime to hunt down all these blues guys think god for this blues festival thing out here in arkansas i guess is about the biggest blues deal in the south every year  i believe it exists because it's down the road a little bit sure i believe that there's no other understanding i can come up with that that's the only thing i can think of that could happen well i think that if you're going to believe in god and you can believe in the devil you know the devil there you can make a deal and i enjoyed it but the devil didn't show  was kind of like a deal was saying but i don't believe in safety now i believe there are situations like that and i think the blues fit that situation no matter who you are what you do i believe it sometimes you're called to do it you're called do it and you're good at it but dry no pay off album must be ten cross roads within five miles of where we are right now two roads come together and you know how difficult is that to find you know lots of things to say where it is how do you explain a talent so great in normal everyday life one of the ways you can explain it is by saying that it comes from some other place it's a way to explain the unexplainable don't mess with me or the devil again you know who knows but he is reported to have used death language about himself at one point in time loose thirty minutes shooting a breeze with new people in town about anything that has to come up three songs a few heads and some closing credits and i phones change much and all the time fifty four years on the and if anybody does he does and maybe one other person and he's six feet under so now that they're not missing they i think it as a long story poisoned is the intersection of highways forty nine and eighty two i have never found anybody besides honeyboy lover called that place before and so i'm venturing i found out that there was a zion church right near the real three four that have come to be the place where johnson is truly buried we found a was the eyewitness to the burial of robert johnson told me when i first brought her out here she said now i don't know exactly where he is buried out here but i know it's not too far from this tree she said because when they brought him out here on that flatbed truck in that pine box the truck pulled right up next to this tree and they took that pine box and set it right at the foot of this tree and she said tom the closer husband had dug a grave right over in this area  someplace and she said eventually they they took him from the foot of this tree and put him down in that grave she said i never saw who was in the grave but i was told that it was a famous blues singer she didn't even know its name she never went out at night she was not a you know a worldly person she just lived peacefully on the plantation and one was a good christian woman this place was the only place that was burying indigent black people in the hundred thirty s and i think that's as close as we're ever going to get to anything that that comes close to a verification of the fact that robert johnson was buried in this place i think the fact that he's got three graves just adds to the to the folklore about robert johnson you know i and i think it's wonderful that a man who created such great music is not buried in one grave but three this just is just more of the same you know hyperbole that surrounds the life and music and death of robert johnson jesus of nazareth king of jerusalem i know that my redeemer liveth and that he w call me from the grave and it's supposed to be in his own handwriting and that note was a very treasured keepsake of his sister because even though he lived the life of the blues singer she believes  the end he was saying that's the end of the story and the beginning of the leg so robert believed he could be saved and was going to tell the world i got a feeling i'm going to find out just how bad the devil wants this record thank you finally made it down i reckon i you think he was only a blues man don't know i'm a blues man to wilson where i don't guess you'd want to look in the bag and see what i got you know i've been looking for robbers thirty a song bullshit back when you got in there robert johnson's last record terraplane blues on one side blank on the other i'm here to trade robert johnson's last record the one he never got to play live and what robert johnson sold to get free