ON a stifling Saturday in Texas in June 1937 a twenty-six-year-old African-American musician, Robert Johnson, stepped to the microphone in a makeshiftrecording studio in a disused warehouse atop a Buick showroom. Johnson had grabbed a ride westfrom his native Mississippi to make it to the recording session in Dallas, one more journey in alife that had been spent by and large on the road. In contemporary parlance, he was asongster: an itinerant guitarist and maker of songs who scraped together a living wherever hefound it, performing on street corners and in juke joints in the Deep South, sometimesdrifting north, even reaching New York City, but always heading south again. Thathe recorded at all came down largely to luck; luck, and the exigencies of the GreatDepression, which cut deeply into record company profits and forced the so-called‘race record’ companies, which sold to an almost entirely black market, tolook for cheap talent, Southern performers with local reputations who might appeal to regionalmarkets. Johnson was one of many who caught a talent scout’s ear in the Mississippi Deltain the late 1930s. On that Saturday in Dallas he recorded fifteen songs, among them ahaunted blues called ‘Hellhound on my Trail’.