The Search for Robert Johnson

The Search for Robert Johnson is a 1991 UK television documentary film about the Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, hosted by John Hammond, and produced and directed by Chris Hunt. In it, Hammond travels through the American Deep South to pursue topics such as Johnsons birth date, place and parents, his early musical development, performances and travels, romances, his mythic pact with the devil, his untimely murder in his late twenties, the discovery of possible offspring, and the uncertainty over where Johnson is buried. Throughout, Johnsons music is both foreground and background, from recordings of Johnson and as performed on camera by Hammond, David Honeyboy Edwards, and Johnny Shines.

The film is loosely organised around field work by Johnson researcher Robert Mack McCormick. Throughout the film, Hammond travels to locations where Johnson lived, performed, recorded, and purportedly where he died, and interviews two of Johnsons girlfriends and blues musicians who knew him, as well as two noted blues researchers. Locations include the Delta, the floodplain of northwestern Mississippi, on into Arkansas and Texas, and into southern Mississippi, where he was born and died.Guitarists Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, blues researchers Gayle Dean Wardlow and Robert Mack McCormick, childhood acquaintance Wink Clark, Nat Richardson, a juke house owners son, Delta blues musicians David Honeyboy Edwards and Johnny Shines, girlfriends Willie Mae Powell and Queen Elizabeth, discovered son Claude Johnson, his son Gregory and grandson Richard, Greenwood Councillor David Jordan, and cemetery attendant Miller Carter were all interviewed for the film. ........

Source: Wikipedia