ROBINSONVILLE
Robinsonville
Robinsonsonville is the home of the Abbay Leatherman plantation where Robert Johnson spent his yournger years. (See Johnson bio on the Greenwood page.) It is also where the young Johnson would pester Son House and Willie Brown. When they played juke joints in the area and took breaks, Johnson would grab a guitar. His singing and playing was atrocious to the point where they'd finally have to run him out of the joint After several years of woodshedding, Johnson returned to the area as an accomplished bluesman giving rise to the legend that he had made a pact with the devil.
Robinsonville is also the location of the Kirby-Wills Plantation, home of blues singer\pianist Louise Johnson, romantic interest of Charlie Patton and Son House. Charlie Patton also wrote a 1929 blues number, Joe Kirby Blues referring to the Kirby-Wills owner.
Today, Robinsonville has wide boulevards, casinos and hotels. But tucked away here and there are the remnants of the pre-World War II blues Delta.
Abbay & Leatherman office building, built in the 1830s.
Old Jail adjacent to the Abbay & Leatherman office and built about the same time, now the Commerce Baptist Church
Kirby-Wills Plantation
Foster's Cafe, an old juke joint. Steve Cheseborough's Blues Traveling, on page 51, has a photograph of this building bearing a still legible sign identifying it as such. When I took this photo in July of 2005, the sign above the storefront had been removed, vines and other growth removed from the masonry and and a new "for lease" sign added.
Music: Robert Johnson, Stop Breakin' Down Blues
Dust cover from Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta reviewed on READING page
ROBINSONVILLE
