📍Robinsonville, MS 38664, USA
1918 – 1931“I was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in May 1911, and I had a mixed-up childhood, with three different men as my father before I was seven. For years I lived in Memphis with my mother's former husband, Charles Dodds, and went to school there, learning arithmetic, reading and music, and my older brother showed me the basics of the guitar. Then, around 1919 or 1920, I went back to my mother, who had married a sharecropper named Dusty Willis, near Robinsonville, in the flat cotton land of the Delta, close to the Mississippi River. We lived on the Abbay and Leatherman plantation, at Commerce, where most of the Black families worked in the fields. Dusty wanted me to work the cotton, but I had no interest in farming; I wanted to play music. I played the harmonica and the jew's harp, and some folks called me Little Robert Dusty. In Robinsonville I met the great Delta bluesmen, Willie Brown, Charley Patton and Son House, and I followed Son House everywhere, pestering him to teach me, but he and the others thought I was a nuisance and didn't think much of my guitar playing. In 1929 I married Virginia Travis, and I was heartbroken when I lost her and our baby the next year. I went away for a while, and when I came back to Robinsonville, my playing had changed so much that Son House couldn't believe it, and people started saying I had made a deal with the devil at the crossroads. I travelled all over, playing on street corners and in juke joints, and in 1936 and 1937 I recorded twenty-nine songs, including Cross Road Blues and Sweet Home Chicago, that inspired generations of musicians.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today