A Bluesman’s Tangled Legacy : Robert Johnson died in 1938, but his genius survives, with rockers singing his praises and a gold-selling box set. Now a court tries to sort out who reaps the financial gains.

Robert Johnson--King of the Delta Blues, guitar marvel, womanizer, hobo, pact-maker with the devil--has never been more popular than today, more than half a century after his premature death in 1938 at age 27.

The illegitimate son of a Mississippi Delta sharecropper left a legacy of only 29 recordings, but that music, including such tunes as “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Me and the Devil Blues,” has fascinated and inspired generations of musicians and fans.

The music seems as fresh and captivating today as it did at the time of Johnson’s death in rural Mississippi of pneumonia, after the bluesman drank whiskey allegedly laced with strychnine by a jealous husband.

Johnson’s long trek back into the public eye began in 1990, after Columbia Records released a box set of two albums containing all his work. “Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings” sold an astonishing 500,000 copies, won a Grammy and influenced other labels to dig into their own vaults for blues reissues. There is now a thriving industry that stokes the Robert Johnson flame, including books, plays, docudramas, limited edition guitars, movie scripts and even a U.S. postage stamp.

*

But in a twist that could have come from one of Johnson’s own songs, none of the more than $2 million generated by the musician’s legacy has been paid to Johnson’s heirs.

His estate has been frozen in litigation for five years, as courts and attorneys try to untangle the complex and not always well-documented genealogical web that Johnson left behind.

A handful of claimants appeared in 1990, the same year the box set started generating royalties: Robert Johnson’s half sister Annie Anderson, an Amherst, Mass., resident in her 70s; a distant cousin in Ohio named George V. Ball, believed to be in his 80s; a nephew in his early 30s, Robert M. Harris, in Annapolis, Md., and an illegitimate son named Claud Johnson, who was born in 1931 and lives in Mississippi. All are making a legal claim that they are the rightful heirs to the estate.

“It’s a tragedy, because those who believe they’re the rightful heirs have not seen but a few dollars,” says Stephen Nevas, the Washington-based attorney who represents Anderson and Harris. “All these years they’ve been caught up in this morass.”

The claimants, who have had to cool their heels because of the backlog in the Mississippi court system, are hopeful that the state’s Supreme Court will finally rule next year on Claud Johnson’s appeal to have his case reinstated (in the ‘80s he failed to establish himself within the required time limit under a new law granting illegitimate children inheritance rights). After that issue is resolved, a Leflore County, Miss., court will determine who the Johnson heirs are. And then, finally, some relatives may get some money.

*

Now, aside from the record company, there is only one person who makes money--a lot of it--from Robert Johnson’s legacy: Stephen C. LaVere, a blues historian from Glendale who obtained the rights to the Johnson estate from the musician’s half sister Carrie Spencer in 1973.

In the early ‘70s, LaVere tracked down Spencer, who was living quietly near Washington, and signed a contract agreeing to split any proceeds from Johnson’s work and name. In exchange, Spencer, who died in 1983, gave LaVere two photos of her half brother, which she had tucked away years earlier in her Bible.

“I told her, ‘I don’t know what we’ve got here, but I’m willing to do the work and share the profits if you’ll assign me the rights,’ ” recalls LaVere, now 51, sitting in a Glendale office filled with historic photos, recordings and blues memorabilia.

To date, LaVere says, he has paid more than $1 million into the Johnson estate. Under LaVere’s agreement, that would mean he has kept another $1 million. Craig Brewer, attorney for the estate in Greenwood, Miss., confirms that the estate, which is being held in trust during the litigation, contains in excess of $800,000 after payment of taxes and expenses.

“Robert Johnson’s marketability to the general public has really taken off, and Steve LaVere is responsible for that,” Brewer says. “If not for him, there might simply have been no royalties to be recovered by the heirs.”

But others take a harsher view of LaVere’s role.

“There’s an entirely different story here than what Steve LaVere would tell you, and there’s a question as to whether he should rightfully be getting half the estate,” says Joann Yates, the daughter of claimant George V. Ball.

Yates and her attorney declined to say more because of the pending litigation. Nevas, the attorney for claimants Anderson and Harris, also declined to discuss details of the case because of the litigation.

The situation in some ways echoes a recently resolved matter concerning the legacy of a more recent guitar icon: Jimi Hendrix. In July a settlement was reached in which the late rocker’s father, James Al Hendrix, regained control of his son’s music and image, which generate in excess of $4 million a year. Two years ago the elder Hendrix, who had been paid less than $2 million during the past 20 years, filed a fraud lawsuit against an attorney he had hired after his son’s 1970 death, claiming that the attorney had sold the rights to the Hendrix music catalogue without his consent.

At this point no one has filed any legal challenge against LaVere. However, “once the Mississippi court resolves this matter of the heirs, there will be a thorough and careful review of Mr. LaVere’s conduct from Day One,” attorney Nevas promises.

LaVere, for his part, defends his actions and says he has done everything according to the law. He says that if not for his careful tending of the Johnson flame, in fact, there would be no estate to fight over.

But until the courts decide to whom Johnson’s estate belongs and those heirs take up the matter of rights with LaVere, the strange reality is this: The descendants of a poor rural black musician haven’t seen a penny of his earnings, while a savvy white businessman thousands of miles away in Los Angeles has turned the musician’s life and songs into an ever-fattening cash cow.

LaVere protects the Johnson name and likeness, threatening legal action against anyone who uses the musician’s image without his approval. His targets have included cartoonist Robert Crumb, who once drew a portrait of Johnson and had T-shirts made of it.

“I assert rights of publicity whenever I think it’s appropriate,” LaVere says firmly. “The Robert Johnson name has been misused for so long. So whenever there’s money to be had, I ask for it.”

LaVere also licenses Robert Johnson commemorative guitars, T-shirts, postcards, statuettes and refrigerator magnets and has organized a Robert Johnson Memorial Blues Festival in Greenwood, Miss.

In recent years, Johnson has become a romantic, sought-after icon in advertising and other media.

The Anheuser-Busch Co. has a license from LaVere to test-market a beer called Crossroads, named for the signature Johnson song. A 1992 documentary titled “The Search for Robert Johnson,” narrated by blues musician John Hammond Jr., was produced for British television and is available in the United States on video. And a docudrama on Johnson’s life called “Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl,” narrated by actor Danny Glover and starring Los Angeles blues singer Kevin Moore, who goes by the name Keb’ Mo, is in post-production. LaVere is looking for a distributor, with hopes of a national theatrical release.

During his brief life, Johnson cloaked himself in mystery. He was a rambling, solitary musician who went by different names, disappeared for months and romanced many women but had no permanent address. Even after decades of research by blues historians, many periods of his life remain undocumented.

To top it off, the photographs of Johnson that LaVere got from Spencer are the only two in circulation, a phenomenon almost impossible to imagine in our media-saturated age. And reproductions of those images are zealously guarded by LaVere.

“It’s amazing: The guy died at 27, but the phenomenon lives on,” says Larry Cohn, who produced the Johnson box set and now produces Sony Legacy’s roots and blues series.

“What makes him so appealing--any way you cut it, even if you take away the mystique that he sold his soul to the devil--is that you have a genius, someone who was so far advanced,” Cohn says.

Rock critic Peter Guralnick, who wrote an acclaimed 1994 biography of Elvis Presley and the 1992 book “Searching for Robert Johnson,” has gone so far as to call Johnson the father of rock ‘n’ roll, adding that the musician was “a fiercely incandescent spirit who had escaped the bonds of tradition by the sheer thrust of genius.”

And he’s not alone. In his 1975 book “Mystery Train,” critic Greil Marcus wrote that “Johnson’s vision was of a world without salvation, redemption or rest. . . . Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me.”

All the fuss might seem extreme for those who haven’t heard Johnson’s eerie wail, chilling lyrics, masterful guitar and emotional honesty in songs about beating his woman to make himself feel better (“Me and the Devil Blues”), impotence (“Dead Shrimp Blues”) and rambling (“Cross Road Blues”).

But Johnson’s posthumous influence is enormous. Among the artists who have recorded his songs are Eric Clapton (“Crossroads”), the Rolling Stones (“Love in Vain”) and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (“They’re Red Hot”).

Robert Johnson was born in 1911 in Hazelhurst, Miss., the 11th child of Julia Major Dodds and a field hand named Noah Johnson. His stepfather Charles Dodds fled to Memphis, Tenn., after a dispute with a local white family.

Johnson spent his childhood on plantation labor camps and with Dodds in Memphis, according to Samuel Charters, who wrote the 1967 book “The Bluesmen.” Robert’s stepfather wanted him to work in the cotton fields, but the boy rebelled and took up wandering instead.

Johnson married early, but his wife died in childbirth at 16. He married again but roamed the rails from Mississippi to Canada, playing Saturday night dances headlined by prominent musicians such as Charley Patton, Son House, Willie Brown and Howlin’ Wolf. At the evening’s end, he would select a woman in the audience and ask softly if he could stay with her.

Fellow musicians said that he could listen to a song once and play it back note for note, but that as a young man he got booed off the stage when he picked up the guitar. At 19 he disappeared for a year. Upon his return he was a virtuoso, and musicians spoke of his uncanny ability to make his instrument sound like three guitars at once.

People said he must have made a deal with the devil, who, legend had it, appeared at a country crossroads under a cottonwood tree at midnight. To some, Johnson’s left eye, which was marked by a cataract, also bespoke the devil.

Researchers say that claiming ties to Satan was a common boast of the time. Delta bluesman Tommy Johnson (no relation) claimed it, as did bluesman William Bunch, who billed himself as “Peetie Wheatstraw, the devil’s son-in-law” and “the high sheriff from hell.”

Johnson eventually came to the notice of H.C. Speir, a talent scout who owned a music store in Jackson, Miss. Speir sent the young musician to cut “race records”--done on a shoestring and sold to the growing African American market.

Using an unaccompanied acoustic guitar, Johnson recorded in a San Antonio hotel room, then in the back room of a Dallas office building. By the standard of the day, the records were hits and sold several thousand copies.

But trouble came Aug. 13, 1938, when Johnson played a roadhouse called Three Forks outside Greenwood, Miss. Someone sent Johnson a half-pint of whiskey believed to have been tainted with poison, possibly by the husband of a woman Johnson had been flirting with.

Within three days, he was dead, his body so weakened by the poison that he succumbed to pneumonia. Only months later, music scout John Hammond--whose signings have included Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen--tried to recruit Johnson for a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, only to learn that the singer was dead.

Johnson’s fame didn’t really take off until the 1960s when British rock stars, including Clapton and the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, raved about Johnson’s virtuoso skills and a new generation of musicians began performing the classic songs.

In the 1970s, LaVere and Mack McCormick, a reclusive Texas blues historian who has been writing a Johnson biography for more than a decade, each located Johnson’s surviving relatives independently.

Meanwhile, although two Johnson albums had been available on vinyl through Columbia Records, no one had put together a box set until 1990, when Cohn, a blues lover who had been president of Epic Records in the late 1960s, worked with Columbia on the project. The first pressing was 20,000 copies.

“Normally if you can sell 7,500 or 10,000 copies of a blues record you’re doing very, very well,” Cohn says. “But within a week it was sold out. People were screaming for the thing.”

Many rock guitarists who knew that Led Zeppelin’s “The Lemon Song” was lifted from Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues” were eager to hear the original. The box set became a smash crossover hit.

Royalties started pouring in to LaVere, who shrewdly set about expanding and licensing the Johnson name. And in Mississippi, relatives of the long-dead Johnson began filing claims.

Today, those heirs still wait, hoping that they won’t be too old to enjoy the fruits of their famous relative’s legacy when the court verdict finally comes in.

And on one of the many sites in Mississippi where Johnson’s bones are said to lie, fans have erected a tombstone and carved the following words from “Me and the Devil Blues”:

You may bury my body

Down by the highway side

So my old evil spirit

Can get a Greyhound bus and ride.