Everyone's heard the story. Just a man, an acoustic guitar, recorded in a two room house. But the performance, both vocally and the style of guitar playing, would shape and influence three different genres of music; blues, country-western, and later rock-n-roll. No one could refute it.

This list focuses on what was essentially a re-issue when it came out '61. Johnson's influence actually predates this release by another 2 or 3 decades. But say what you want to about young white artists ripping off old blues artist, blues as a genre enjoyed a renaisance when budding rock stars (like Clapton, Page, Richards) got a hold of this album and broke away from the purely pop format of the early '60s artists that had started to distance themselves from rock's early Sun Records sound.

Unfortunately for our message board's sake, this is one of those things where the story of this man's influence has been told and re-told so many times, that while it's inclusion on a list like this is inevitable, it isn't very revelatory, or at this point even interesting.

I'll tell you what is revelatory (if you're interested). The latest CD release of his work (at least the most recent to my knowledge). I used to own the two CD box set (The Complete Recordings from the late '80s) and while it was a nice two-CD set,including a big booklet with bio and written testimonies by blues-rock luminaries like Clapton and Keith Richards, the sound quality was terribly shrill and made listening to more than a few songs at time a chore. Of course, the original recordings are ancient and one could only expect that they didn't sound much better on vinyl in '61. But the 2004 re-release of King Of The Delta Blues Singers (vol 2) brings way more fidelity, much lower noise floor, and much more importantly, a more intimate and listenable experience (even if two-thirds of the songs you'll hear have been covered dozens of times by dozens of artists). If you hadn't already plunked down bucks on one of the numerous compilations of Johnson's 30 some odd songs, then now is as good a time as any.