I realize that Johnson is talking about the court battle that determined he was Robert Johnson’s heir, and perhaps the current legal skirmish being waged over Carrie Thompson’s photos. On the way back to my car, Michael Johnson apologizes for not being more helpful. He is wearing a T-shirt advertising the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the music and the memory of the artist, which is run by another of Claud’s sons, Steve Johnson.

“My dad just got shell-shocked by that case,” Michael tells me. “They put him through a lot of stuff. To actually prove who you is”—he switches to the second person, though he is clearly talking about his dad—“they ask you a thousand questions. Hell, they tried to scrutinize him like he wasn’t nothing, you know, man?”

“The Face Doesn’t Lie”

In late summer 2007, Schein’s attorney, John Pelosi, submitted the photograph to John Kitchens, the lawyer for the Johnson estate, to see if there was any way of authenticating it. Kitchens’s father, Jim Kitchens, had been the lead attorney in Claud Johnson’s fight to be named heir of the Johnson estate, but he had since turned the day-to-day handling of the estate over to his son, who turned 30 this year and was all of 12 when the Johnson boxed set was released. Not surprisingly, when John Kitchens saw a copy of the photo, he wasn’t exactly floored. “I didn’t know who it was,” he says. But Kitchens remembered reading about a forensic artist who, that August, had reportedly determined the identity of the sailor kissing the nurse in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous *Life-*magazine photo of Times Square on the day World War II ended. The artist’s name is Lois Gibson and she works for the Houston Police Department. She is also a graduate of the F.B.I. Academy Forensic Artist Course and was deemed “The World’s Most Successful Forensic Artist” in The 2005 Guinness Book of World Records because, at the time, her sketches and facial reconstructions had helped net more than 1,062 criminals.

Kitchens sent Gibson a copy of Schein’s photo, along with reproductions of the Hooks Bros. portrait and the photo-booth shot. Gibson compared the facial features in each of the three photos and reported back with a pretty startling conclusion: “My only problem with this determination is the lack of certainty about the date of the questioned photo,” she wrote in her report to Kitchens. But, she continued, if Schein’s photo “was taken about the same time as, or a little earlier than,” the photo-booth self-portrait, “it appears the individual in [Schein’s photo] is Robert Johnson. All the features are consistent if not identical.”

“If the time frame is right, it’s him,” Gibson tells me when I call her up in Houston. “The face doesn’t lie.” She also points out that if Schein’s photo does depict Johnson, he’s probably younger—possibly two to four years younger—than he appears in the photo-booth self-portrait (which would mean that Schein’s photo had been taken years before the picture Johnny Shines remembered from 1937).

Kitchens is cautiously optimistic about Gibson’s assessment. “Based on the findings, we’re going to get behind it,” he says. “It is impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that this is Robert Johnson,” he adds, pointing out that the few living souls who knew Johnson when he was alive haven’t seen him in 69 years. “But we strongly believe that it is.”

When I meet Schein at a Greenwich Village restaurant to discuss Gibson’s findings, I expect him to be ecstatic. But, actually, he seems slightly conflicted, and I soon realize why. Schein has enjoyed his long strange trip through Robert Johnson’s past and isn’t ready to let go. Although he tells me he thinks Gibson “did a wonderful job” with her analysis, he says he doesn’t agree with her findings that his photo depicts a Johnson who is younger than the man in the photo-booth shot. “I’ve been delving deep,” Schein tells me, and though he still hasn’t been able to crack the make and model of the guitar in his photo, he has come up with a theory about the chronology of the three pictures: They were, he says, all taken within a year of one another. The Hooks Bros. photo was taken first, the self-portrait second, and his photo third, which would make it the latest photo of Johnson, instead of the earliest. His reasoning for this, he explains, is that his photo comes after Johnson has recorded his 29 songs and come away with several hundred dollars, probably the most money he’d ever made. As a result, he doesn’t need to borrow a suit from his nephew, as he did in the Hooks Bros. photo. He can afford his own duds and more. “You got the money from the record deal. People recognize you. You got your own suit,” Schein says. “You’re traveling around. You’re drinking better whiskey. You’re eating better food. Guess what? You’re going to look a little better.”

It is just a theory from a man who plays guitar and works with musicians, a man who respects Robert Johnson, who knows his music, and, after studying his life, feels like he knows Johnson a bit, too—a man who wants to believe that Robert Johnson was singing the blues, but that he wasn't always living them.

Frank DiGiacomo is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.