SOURCE: "Robert Johnson: A Perpetuation of A Myth," inLiving Blues, Vol. 94, 1971, pp. 34-6.

In the following essay, Garon attempts to provide a balanced estimate of Johnson's talent and influence as a blues musician.

"… Robert Johnson is acknowledged as perhaps the most accomplished and certainly the most influential of all bluesmen.…" This overwhelmingly biased opinion, dressed as "acknowledged" fact, not only appears in a rock magazine whose readers are in dire need of real information about the blues, but it was written by someone whose familiarity with the blues is more than superficial; someone who, indeed, should have known better.

That a writer with much more than a passing acquaintance with the blues should continue to perpetuate the Robert Johnson myth is evidence only of how firmly the myth is entrenched. The purpose of this article is not at all to denigrate Robert Johnson, who really was one...