Arguably the most influential figure in the history of the blues, Robert Leroy Johnson was at once a virtuoso guitarist, a gifted poet, and a skilled vocalist. Johnson, who emerged out of the Mississippi Delta in the early 1930s as one of the premier practitioners of the blues form, left a recorded legacy of just 41 songs. However, the tracks he laid down over two sessions in 1936 and 1937 became fundamental to the repertoires of other blues players and, after the "rediscovery" of the blues by white musicians in the 1960s, to blues-influenced rock artists everywhere. (Among the most covered and recorded Johnson compositions are "Crossroads Blues," "Sweet Home Chicago," and "Love in Vain.")

So prodigious were Johnson's skills on the six-string guitar, a legend (fostered by Johnson himself) grew up around him that he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for this...