Robert Johnson, Dallas, TX, 2018

On Sunday, June 20, 1937, banjo player Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery had just finished his morning recording session with the band he was in, The Light Crust Doughboys. English-born record producer Don Law had set up a makeshift “field recording” studio in the Brunswick Records warehouse located on the third floor of the Vitagraph Building at 508 Park Avenue in Dallas, Texas that Warner Brothers had built as a film distribution center, where this recording took place.In the stairwell, as Smokey was leaving, he recalls passing a black man carrying a guitar case who was on his way up — Robert Johnson was headed upstairs to do his afternoon session that would include “Hell Hound on My Trail”, “Love In Vain”, “Malted Milk” and seven other ground-zero blues classics. Another one of the precious few sightings of the shape-shifting, near-mythological bluesman who remains more like a charcoal drawing, a whisper, than someone who ever walked the earth.Here is that stairwell.

Archival pigment print on baryta 315 gsm, acid-free, 100% cotton-fiber paper.