It was only the third image of the guitarist who, according to legend, sold his soul to the devil, his estate claimed. Now 49 signatories say that’s not true

More than four dozen music historians, writers, producers and musicians are disputing the authenticity of a photograph of legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson, pitting them against the musician’s estate over his legacy.

At issue for the dissenting scholars is a photo that the Johnson estate said it had authenticated in 2013 with the help of a forensic artist. With only two extant, confirmed photos of Johnson, the musician whose legend says he won preternatural talent in a bargain with the devil, a third would be extraordinarily valuable.

But in a lengthy article, the historians dissect the claim with help from forensic anthropologists, and declare that there is no substantial evidence to support the claim that the photo is of Johnson.

“Within the blues community the photo just got to be kind of like a joke in a sense,” said Bruce Conforth, a professor of American culture at the University of Michigan. “But all these signatories, we finally all got together and said, ‘Well, you know it’s time for this to no longer be a joke. It’s time to really put an end to this.”

The 49 signatories include Conforth, blues historians Elijah Wald, David Evans, Steve Tracey and Gayle Dean Wardlow, the Johnson biographer who found his death certificate in 1968. They write that Johnson’s “legacy has been subject to misuse and exploitation”, and that “it has become almost a sport to claim” a Johnson photo or guitar.

“It’s not about history and it’s not about music,” Wald said. “It’s about money. I understand that everyone who finds an old painting in their attic wants to think that it’s a Da Vinci, but we don’t tend to say, ‘Yeah, you could be right!’

“If it’s a fact that that is a picture of Robert Johnson then it’s worth a fortune. If it’s of any one of a hundred really, really good singers or guitar players of that generation, it’s not worth anything, and that’s kind of sad.”

Conforth, Wald and their co-signatories “call for an end to this, and similar attempts to capitalize upon Johnson’s fame and mythology”.

“Historical scholarship relies on evidence,” Conforth said. “And if you look at the alleged authentication of that photograph there really wasn’t a piece of evidence, there was opinion. Historical fact is never validated by opinion; it can only be validated by evidence.”

The argument against the claim that the photo shows Johnson is long and assiduously detailed in the ways it casts doubt. They note that two men who knew Johnson, Robert Lockwood and David Edwards, both failed to identify Johnson in the photo.

They note the unknown provenance of the photo – it appeared on eBay listed by a seller who suggested it might show a young BB King – in contrast to the two proven photos taken by Johnson’s stepsister. They note that the two men in the photo wear “stylized zoot suits” and hats whose fashions matched the mid-1940s – and that Johnson died in 1938.

They line up and superimpose the other photos of Johnson and deliver the observations of forensic anthropologists from North Carolina and Italy, paying special attention to ears. “The authentic Johnson has a differently shaped ear, complete with a visible earlobe that appears to be missing in the [alleged] Johnson. As stated elsewhere in this report, ear shape is a tremendously reliable method of forensic identification, perhaps as accurate, or even more so, than fingerprints.”

Backward buttons, tie stripes and a left-hand wristwatch evince a reversed photo, which the researchers say calls into question the authentication by the estate. They make note of a prop guitar in the picture, and suggest that the “square bony eminence” that the estate’s expert saw may be “the result of computer photo enhancement”.

They note that the estate’s forensic artist made no definitive statement, saying “it appears the individual is Robert Johnson”, and that she is not a forensic anthropologist by training. (The artist’s manager did not return a request for clarification.)

Responding to the dissenters, John Kitchens, attorney for the Johnson estate, wrote a reply to some of their criticisms. “I will not pretend that the Estate did not want this photo authenticated,” Kitchens admitted, but stood by Lois Gibson, the artist hired, saying she “was not hired to study the significance of left-sided vs. right-sided buttons or stripes on a tie or a ring on a finger or strings on a guitar. She was hired to analyze distinct facial features.”

“We thank those of you who recognize this as Robert Johnson and hope you realize the months-long process involved in authenticating the photo,” he concluded. Kitchens did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Asked about the photo criticisms, Michael Johnson, grandson of Robert and a member of the Robert Johnson Foundation, said “Oh, I have a comment,” but declined to elaborate on the record and referred an official statement to Kitchens.

Johnson casts a titanic shadow of the history of blues and rock in the United States, because of both his musical innovations and the mythology that sprang up around him. Growing up in rural Mississippi, Johnson harassed older blues musicians to teach him for years and eventually set off to wander the south as an itinerant musician.

At some point, his quick mastery of the guitar transformed into a story about how Johnson had struck a deal with the devil, which then mutated into various folk stories and legends: the Faust of American music. Between 1936 and 1938 he recorded a total of 29 songs, including Cross Road Blues and Love in Vain, which foreshadowed the prominence of riffs and formal composition in later blues – and the eventual adoption of blues by the white and black musicians who developed American rock.

Johnson died aged 27 in Mississippi, and like his life his death – some say murder, others say syphilis or pneumonia – remains largely a mystery.

“When Robert Johnson died he stopped being a person and he started being a myth,” Conforth said, noting that after his work was rediscovered the forces of marketing took hold of the story. By the 1990s he was a platinum-selling artist, his image on T-shirts and his influence clear in the music of Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and the Muscle Shoals studio.

Steve Berkowitz, a producer at Sony, told NPR in 2011 that the mythology was the “heart and soul of the marketing plan”. “We always knew the music was great. But a guy sells his soul to the devil at midnight down at the crossroads, comes back and plays the hell out of the guitar, and then he dies. I mean, it’s a spectacular story.”

“There are reasons to be very excited about Johnson, but the reasons people tend to be excited about him tend to be completely wrong,” Wald said. “It becomes so people don’t have to listen to the stuff any more, because to them he symbolizes the roots of rock and roll – even though he was the last of the early era, not folk blues but already pops blues.

“Honestly I think listening to him in the context of his own world and times is much more interesting than listening to him as the roots of the Rolling Stones or Jack White, but we all have to make that journey in our own way.”



In the 1990s and 2000s Johnson’s family fell to fighting over the proceeds from the two undisputed photos, and in 2014 the Mississippi supreme court ruled that Claud Johnson, the musician’s son, retained rights to the two undisputed photos of his father.

“If Robert Johnson had not existed somebody would’ve had to invent him, Conforth said. “Johnson the icon is just so prototypically American. It really speaks as much about American mythology as it does about the blues.”