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84 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Invaluable document of a great talent, June 22, 2003
The irony of Robert Johnson's superstar status is hard to miss. He was almost completely ignored by the music-buying public of his day, even in the market his records were aimed at. Yet in the present day, he's practically the only country blues artist most people know about. On one level, this is because of relentless championing by other blues artists, not least Eric Clapton. On another level, Johnson's fame rests on the fact that he was able to write, or more properly pull together from his various mentors and influences, his songs and make them complete unto themselves. His songs have made an impact, and have been covered time and again by countless artists. That counts for something. Part of who Robert Johnson was as a singer and songwriter is obscured by his legend, which has been retold so often it borders on cliche. But even after the hype has been dismissed, this box set shows Johnson as a powerful, innovative, soulful blues man, a great performer and a great songwriter (in the context of blues songwriting) with his own unique sound. Johnson was not without his influences, and if he had lived he would have told you that himself. However, the interesting thing was that he managed to transform his influences and personalize them into his own vision of the blues, a blues that was one of the first steps away from country blues toward city blues - a vision that would eventually become Chicago blues. It has been fashionable in blues circles to put Robert Johnson down recently, and to gripe about how Johnson's influences should be as well known as he is. This is a valid point. However, Johnson became an influence himself, and as such, he still deserves a good deal of respect. This box set, which contains every recording he is known for, is a just tribute to a brilliant singer, songwriter and performer. The remastering is surprisingly good, considering the sources. Johnson's voice and guitar playing come through vividly and illustrate his wealth of talent. The only possible drawback to this box set, for the casual listener, is the number of alternate takes included. They show that Johnson was an adept performer, because a lot of the alternates are similar to the "released" versions. This showed that he was no closet bluesman or flash-in-the-pan, but was adept at entertaining an audience. And to this day his guitar playing is astonishingly fluid and innovative. However, the repetitiveness of the alternate takes can become trying to people who are not students of the blues, and for the casual listener a single-disc set would probably be sufficient. This box set, is, and remains, a worthy overview of a talent that received its due far too late. I would advise the listener not to be put off by people who would place Johnson's influences over him, but to listen to Johnson on his own merits. My guess is that he'll win you over, as he has generations of listeners.
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51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The only way to go, February 5, 2004
Robert Johnson may not have been the king of the blues (that title belongs forever to the great Son House), and he certainly didn't invent the idiom, but he was an amazing talent, a magnificent guitar player, and an awesome songwriter whose best songs hold a simultaneous beauty and terror which no songwriters really seem capable of achieving anymore.
This is the ultimate collection of his works; all of Robert Johnson's 29 Vocalion singles, impressive sound, and the best annotation anywhere.
Here you'll find the original versions of "Sweet Home Chicago", "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom", "Crossroads Blues", "Rambling On My Mind", "Come On In My Kitchen", "Terraplane Blues", "Stop Breakin' Down", "I'm A Steady Rollin' Man", and "Love In Vain", as well as lesser-known gems like "From Four Till Late", "When You Got A Good Friend", and "Last Fair Deal Gone Down".
Johnson's version of "Walking Blues" is here as well, an adaptation of Son House's 1930 single "My Black Mama pt. II" (not the song that House called "Walking Blues"), and the fine remastering allows the listener to hear every phrase and every chord and every one of Johnson's quicksilver slide guitar licks.
Great as it is, this is not really meant to be listened to in one long sitting. It is just one man and a guitar, after all, and it wears a bit thin after the first hour. But don't discount Robert Johnson just because of that, or because you're sick of hearing Johnson-worshipping guitarists like Eric Clapton rave about him. It is true that Robert Johnson wasn't a particularly influential artist back when he was alive, most people had never heard of him, and wouldn't hear of him until the 60s when his music was reissued, and in that respect he may be said to be overrated.
But that fact doesn't diminish the artistic value of his songs. As a singer, a composer, and as a guitarist of considerable skills, Robert Leroy Johnson produced some of the genre's best and most influential music, and in 1990 this two-CD box set was released with every scrap of Johnson material in existence, plus the holy grail of the blues: the publishing of the only two known photographs of the man himself.
Columbia's parent company, Sony, was hoping that sales would maybe hit 20,000. The box set went on to sell over a million units, the first blues recordings ever to do so. And there is still no reason to buy any other collection than this one.
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47 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A shoddy masterpiece, January 11, 2002
First of all, I took one star off not because I don't think Robert Johnson was a transcendent genius (because I do think that), but because, since his legacy clearly _had_ to be collected and remastered and boxed up in a convenient form, it's a damn shame that they had to make such a bad job of it. The lack of the fifth star is a finger-wag to CBS-Sony, not a rebuke to Johnson.It's all true, in case you were wondering - Robert Johnson really was the most entrancingly scary and affecting and emotional and technically accomplished Delta blues singer ever recorded. His guitar playing is quite extraordinary; Keith Richards reports in the liner notes that when he first heard Johnson (in Brian Jones' flat) he wondered who the second guitarist was. There wasn't one. Johnson could drive the rhythm and play spooky lead lines at the same time, to a degree that nobody has been able to match. He also had a remarkable voice, veering from slyly lascivious to painfully sad to hell-haunted, depending on the nature of the song. And this is one of the main points about his work. He was a pro. He wasn't just some unusually spooked country boy, although he was clearly obsessed with themes of damnation and vengeance. He could, by all accounts, play whatever he wanted - a tune as innocuous as "My Blue Heaven" is said to have been in his repertoire. The best glimpse we get of the party-dude side of Johnson is his sprightly "They're Red Hot", which sounds like nothing else on the whole album. But fans agree that his best stuff is about lonely roads at twilight and the feeling that he will never get home, or that if he does, there is only something worse there waiting for him. His lyrics are the finest poetry you're likely to find in the Delta blues idiom, and I include Skip James in that. And that, as any Skip James fan will testify, is saying something. A shame, then, that CBS (as it was then) decided to entrust the liner notes to a man painfully! addicted! to exclamation marks!, not to mention a man far more fascinated by the oral accounts of Johnson's life than in saying anything enlightening about his music - and that the songs should be rigorously sequenced with master-take-accompanied-by-alternate-version. The result is that, when we put this album on to listen to all the way through, we hear most of the songs twice before we get to the next one. The differences are fascinating enough, to be sure; but would it have killed them to put the alternate versions on a separate disk, so that we could have chosen from two different Johnson sequences depending on our mood? As it is, this is a stupidly "scholarly" sequencing arrangement. The liner notes, while full of interesting information, are fatally marred by the author's tabloidesque style. It would've been better to get someone who really cared about Johnson's music and could write well - even Greil Marcus, whose chapter on Johnson in "Mystery Train" is the best thing he ever wrote. As it is, we have only the testimonies of Keith Richards, and a fascinating essayette by Eric Clapton to go on. Clapton writes - righteously - that before he heard Johnson, every other blues singer had sounded as though they were calculating the effect, whereas Johnson sang as though he didn't care whether or not people liked to hear him. This is as good a description of listening to Johnson as I can think of. This is, unfortunately, the best-mastered, best-sounding, most complete edition of Johnson's work. Pity it wasn't put together with a bit more thought.
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