SOURCE: "Searching for Robert Johnson," in Living Blues, Vol. 53, 1982, pp. 27-41.

In the following excerpt, Guralnick presents an evaluation of Johnson's achievements as a blues artist.

The sources of [Robert Johnson's] art will … remain a mystery. The parallels to Shakespeare are in many ways striking. The, towering achievement. The shadowy presence. The critical dissent that great art cannot come from a person so uneducated. The way in which each could cannibalize tradition and create a synthesis that is certainly recognizable in its sources and yet somehow altogether and wholly original. I am not arguing that Robert Johnson's art has a Shakespearean scope, nor is he a lost figure in an epic tradition, as some romanticists would suggest. As a lyric poet, though, he occupies a unique position where he can very much stand on his own.

His music remains equally unique. Not that it cannot be placed within...