Imagine a 27-year-old musician who owned virtually nothing, recorded just 29 songs inside makeshift hotel rooms and warehouses over the course of seven months, and then died under incredibly mysterious circumstances. Today, Eric Clapton calls him the most important blues singer who ever lived, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame considers him the very first rock star. In this special story-driven biographical profile for our Epopod series format, we use curated sources to strip away the heavy mythology surrounding Delta Blues master Robert Johnson and discover the ambitious, highly driven human being underneath the legends.

Born Robert Leroy Johnson in Hazelhurst, Mississippi around 1911, his early life immediately challenges the popular myth of the isolated, uneducated rustic. From a childhood marked by trauma—including his mother Julia fle ...