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News > July 2009
Robert Johnson - The Musical!
Well, perhaps not a musical, but a play with music, and on the face of it pretty good music too - Naughty Jack is on slide duties and we loved his CD a while back (read the review here) , plus there's a 20 strong choir as well as an 'acoustic blues ensemble'. Below is the press release and video trailer...
Brutal, poetic and ultimately devastating, Cross Road Blues recreates one of the most compelling myths in American music: Robert Johnson’s alleged pact with the devil, hatched out at a crossroads one dark Mississippi midnight.
David Walter Hall will be directing a new version of his sell-out play Cross Road Blues as part of the Hackney Empire’s Spice Festival this July. Musicians featured in the performance will include violinist Sophie Solomon (formerly of Oi Va Voi, and now a successful solo artist, film composer and theatrical arranger), bassist Simon Little (The Divine Comedy, Clare Teal, Duke Special), guitarist Chris Allard (Jacqui Dankworth Band, Jamie Cullum) and slide guitar virtuoso Adam Morley aka Naughty Jack. It will also feature a twenty-voice choir, the Elysian Singers.
Mario Vernazza will play the part of the Stranger, and Christopher Clyde Green will play Robert Johnson himself.
Previously performed as a fringe two-hander, receiving five-star reviews and sell out crowds, the play has now been reinvented on a Wagnerian scale. The addition of an expansive choral score, performed by a twenty-voice choir accompanied by a six-piece acoustic blues ensemble, promises to make this a unique and truly frightening piece of theatre.
"Creates an atmosphere of creeping, uncanny terror that grips from the start and never relinquishes ... mesmerising." - The Scotsman
The music for the performance has been composed by pianist Michael McHale, winner of the 2009 Terence Judd/Hallé Award, and a rising star in the classical world. The score features close interaction between the musicians and the actors, with both improvised and composed sections. It employs a blend of jazz, blues, African rhythms and classical harmony, in a uniquely symbiotic arrangement with both naturalistic and verse dialogue.
Cross Road Blues is a graphic play, containing potentially offensive language including racist abuse and explicit descriptions of rape and murder.
"Robert Johnson is the most important blues singer that ever lived. I have never found anything more deeply soulful. His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice." - Eric Clapton
"Johnson is part of why I am what I am." - Robert Plant
"Robert Johnson showed us how really weighty subjects like DEATH, and the DEVIL, can be expressed in a very interesting way in rock 'n' roll."
-Keith Richards
Robert Leroy Johnson (Born 16th August, 1938) was an American blues musician, among the most famous of Delta blues musicians. He was one of the most admired and influential Delta blues artists despite his short life and the small number of recordings that he left. His songs, such as "Sweet Home Chicago", "Come on in My Kitchen", and "Crossroad Blues", are blues classics that influenced a generation of musicians and laid the foundations for rock and roll music.
Johnson was a gifted singer, guitarist and songwriter whose life story is shrouded in mystery and legend. Only two photographs are known to exist of him and he recorded only 29 songs before his death in 1938 at the age of 27. Many of his contemporaries believed that he met the Devil at a lonely crossroads at midnight and made a deal to sell his soul in return for becoming the greatest blues musician of all time.
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