Ethan Hein references the mythologizing habits that have surrounded Robert Johnson as nonsense and I agree. I know that many people want to believe the myth that Robert Johnson went to the crossroads to sell his soul to the devil to play guitar better. Avoiding the physical ordeals of plantation work and getting formal training in music sounds far, far more plausible. If you get too immersed in some times of work there's not a lot of time or energy left to do as much musical anything. My earliest years working were in vegetable canneries down in Oregon and there's nothing like even an eight hour shift of doing that sort of work to leave you less than ideally situated to write a bunch of music, and that's cannery work replete with union benefits and the like, not plantation anything.
I finished Bruce Cornforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow's recent biography on Robert Johnson earlier this year, so their case that Robert Johnson apprenticed or studied guitar formally with Ike Zimmerman may be something the mythologizers want to contest and let them make their case. Johnson's music is too complex to be explained as the work of a man who did everything by "feel" and didn't think through what he was doing.
