• Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
• The original King of the Delta Blues Singers was released at the height of the folk music revival, when Robert Johnson was little more than a rumor. 

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Robert Johnson – King of the Delta Blues Singers (1985):  Cub Koda begins his review of King of the Delta Blues Singers for Allmusic this way:  “Reading about the power inherent in Robert Johnson’s music is one thing, but actually experiencing it is another matter entirely.”  This double album, released in England, combines the original LP, King of the Delta Blues Singers (1961), and the second LP, King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. II (1970), into a single package.  The 32 tracks included here (8 per side) are not quite everything that Robert Johnson recorded, but it is close; I think the total number is 35 or 36 recordings, including an alternate take of “Traveling Riverside Blues” that was discovered in 1998.  The original King of the Delta Blues Singers was released at the height of the folk music revival, when Robert Johnson was little more than a rumor – with the most dramatic part of that rumor being that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil “at the Crossroads” in exchange for his talent. 

King of the Delta Blues Singers was released at the instigation of John Hammond, who had just signed Bob Dylan to Columbia Records.  Dylan was unfamiliar with Robert Johnson at the time, but Hammond gave him a copy of the album, and it is shown lying on the coffee table in the cover photograph on Bob Dylan’s fifth album, Bringing it All Back Home (1965).  Mostly, Robert Johnson’s music is in the DNA of rock and roll, but there have been many covers of his songs by rock musicians over the years.  Perhaps the most famous is “Cross Road Blues” by Cream that appears in the live portion of their 1968 double album, Wheels of Fire (with the song name given as “Crossroads”, and incorporating a portion of “Traveling Riverside Blues”).  While in the band John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Eric Clapton recorded a version of “Crossroads” with a group of other musicians that was identified as Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse, as included on an album called What’s Shakin’ (1966) that announced the arrival of Elektra Records in the U.K.  Clapton had also recorded two other Robert Johnson songs, “Ramblin’ on My Mind” (with Mayall) and “From Four Until Late” (with Cream) as blues songs; but “Crossroads” was recast as a rock song.  Additionally, the Rolling Stones included “Love in Vain” on their 1969 album Let it Bleed after Keith Richards ran across a bootleg copy of King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. II.