Page 86 - Blues Festival Guide Magazine 2015

to take a piece of the cotton flower sticking out from a beer
bottle vase.
I've since placed a chunk of the cotton tuft inside the
body of one of Rob's guitars, gave the seed to his mother
to propagate – which it has – and have taken to calling
my good boy Robert “Johnson” Europe because, well, it
just feels right.
I'd also taken an orange guitar pick from Mr. Johnson,
something my Rob has convinced me he won't miss. Neither
Roberts are known for using a pick when playin' the blues.
And as Mr. Stolle at Cat Head assured me back in
Clarksdale the next morning – shortly before Rob and I stood
on the same section of the Mississippi River levee Robert
Johnson did more than a century ago – musicians share.

Gianna Volpe learned blues from her father, a Cajun
The Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art Store in Clarksdale, MS Image by Chuck Lamb
keyboardist and karaoke enthusiast who first taught his little
I'd insisted on hunting down Robert Johnson “the old girl a blues ditty “‘bout a doggy walkin’ down the street
fashioned way." True to form for a dead bluesman, we found who didn’t have enough to eat,” before instructing her to
Robert Johnson's best-known gravestone under a creepy tree parrot a blues ending to any song she heard. Volpe is an
toward the back of a boneyard in Greenwood, MS. award-winning writer and photographer from New Jersey
Though we said no words to Robert Johnson that night, who now lives on Long Island’s East End and can be found
Rob left a glass medicine bottle slide on the legend's anywhere on the Web under the handle “AgentJaneFox.”
headstone, then handed me a rose petal and instructed me She is 27 years old.

84 Blues Festival Guide 2015