Written in the early '80s, when blues scholarship was just beginning to unearth important new details about the life of the singer, guitarist, and songwriter, Greenberg's script follows the young Johnson from cotton field to juke joint as he pursued his muse. His abrupt transformation from a ham-fisted blues acolyte into a singer and guitarist of riveting intensity, famously rumored as a deal with the Devil, is inevitably a central plot development, and Greenberg honors both the factual evidence (the influence of guitarist Ike Zinnerman) and the Faustian explanation. Johnson's subsequent triumphs as a performer are laced together with the hardscrabble poetry of the songs themselves, as Greenberg uses blues lyrics to underscore the harsh realities of Mississippi Delta life.
Less obviously, Greenberg re-creates a world where telephones, automobiles, and phonographs coexist with conjurers, devils, and mojo hands. Johnson himself was a cryptic loner whose obsession with his music and immersion in it were paralleled by his descent into alcoholism. While invoking potent and pertinent dualities of sin and salvation (Johnson's early blues peers mirrored--and sometimes became--Bible-thumping preachers), Greenberg does not soften the hard price Johnson paid. His relentless womanizing is neither romantic nor particularly titillating; when the story reaches its inevitable conclusion, with the singer's death from poisoned whiskey, the moment is both tragic and squalid. --Sam Sutherland