Support our efforts, sign up to a full membership!
(Start for free)
Register or login with just your e-mail address
Alternative 02/08/2001

Robt. Johnson Gets Headstone

Hot Songs Around The World

Strangers
Kenya Grace
442 entries in 24 charts
Lovin On Me
Jack Harlow
293 entries in 22 charts
Popular
Weeknd, Playboi Carti & Madonna
266 entries in 18 charts
Lose Control
Teddy Swims
316 entries in 25 charts
Beautiful Things
Benson Boone
159 entries in 24 charts
Water
Tyla
306 entries in 20 charts
Stick Season
Noah Kahan
313 entries in 19 charts
Houdini
Dua Lipa
285 entries in 26 charts
Unwritten
Natasha Bedingfield
291 entries in 22 charts
Si No Estas
Inigo Quintero
283 entries in 17 charts
Greedy
Tate McRae
621 entries in 28 charts
Cruel Summer
Taylor Swift
572 entries in 20 charts
Anti-Hero
Taylor Swift
615 entries in 23 charts
Snooze
SZA
223 entries in 13 charts

NY (RS) - Blues historian Gayle Dean Wardlow, who spent more than three decades searching for the location of Robert Johnson's grave, is initiating the first annual Robert Johnson Cross Road Memorial Days celebration of the blues giant's life and music.

The two-day event is scheduled for August 16th and 17th, beginning at the Little Zion Baptist Church near Greenwood, Mississippi, which includes the Little Zion Baptist Church Cemetery, where Johnson was buried, sixty-three years earlier to the day. The festivities include a ninety-minute discussion of Johnson's recordings by Wardlow (who penned the book Chasin' That Devil Music), Frank Driggs and Larry Cohn.
Driggs was responsible for the production of the first Johnson reissue on Columbia in 1961, and Cohn put together the Grammy-winning 1991 box set that collected all of Johnson's known recordings. The day's events will also feature testimony from more than forty musicians about Johnson's work and influence, and the unveiling of a new headstone for Johnson's previously unmarked burial site.

On August 17th, blues fans will take a tour of the Delta Bar-B-Que at a nearby plantation where Johnson actually died, before taking a tour of Mississippi blues gravesites, which includes the final resting places of Mississippi John Hurt and Willie Brown.

Wardlow's lengthy search began in 1968 when he discovered the front page of Johnson's death certificate. He found the backside of the certificate in 1996, which was filed without the benefit of an attending physician, and included the opinion (of a plantation owner) that Johnson died of syphilis. Shortly afterwards, Wardlow was led to Johnson's actual burial site by eighty-six-year-old Rosie Eskridge, whose husband dug Johnson's grave on August 16, 1938.






Most read news of the week


© 2001-2024
top40-charts.com (S4)
about | site map
contact | privacy
Page gen. in 0.0080481 secs // 4 () queries in 0.0045180320739746 secs