English 
Italiano 
There is a club where to enter you have to be dead at age 27, after a life full of exaggeration, a life as cursed musicians. In a few take it into account but the real founder of this macabre group is Robert Johnson, one of the greatest blues guitarists, who died just at 27 years old, August 16, 1938 under mysterious circumstances. He had not inconsiderable talents as a guitarist and a huge rocker, Eric Clapton, said of him: “In my opinion Robert Johnson is the most important blues musician who ever lived, I have never found anything more deeply intense.”
When Johnson was young he was not a good guitarist and his voice was not that of the great Johnson of the ’30s, the one who had sold his soul to the devil, a Voodoo demon by the name of Papa Legba. In his songs spoke of “a devil on my trail”, and that devil began to chase him since the night in which, disappointed by its poor music performance, he sat down on the edge of a desolate crossroad. That night Papa Legba asked Johnson’s soul in exchange for extraordinary gifts, the soul in exchange for a blues guitar able to go down in history.
Since that night no one had heard from him until a year later, when he returned with extraordinary musical talent. Since that night Robert Johnson became the greatest exponent of the delta blues, he became a legend. To date, no one knows how Robert Johnson died: there are those who speak of poisoning, some of a number of stab wounds, others call into question the black magic. Nobody even knows where is his tomb, near Greenwood there are three tombstones in his name in the church of Mount Zion there is an obelisk inscribed with all the titles of his songs, in the cemetery of Payne Chapel a plaque returns the engraving “Resting in the blues”, while in the north of Greenwood along Money Road, in the cemetery of the Little Zion Church, there is another plaque in his name, recently restored by Sony Music.
Johnson was 27 years old when he died, like Kurt Kobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones and many others. It could be coincidence or they had also signed the pact with the devil: a talent unheard of in exchange for the soul. If so, then Papa Legba was present also when the Cream played, for the first time since Johnson’s death, Cross Roads in front of thousands of wild young people, and when, in ’69, Mick Jagger was performing in the Midnight Rambler on the stage of Madison Square Garden, when Jim Morrison recounted the murder of his father and incestuous love with his mother, when Nirvana smashed tools in some local Seattle. It’s probably coincidence, but one thing is certain: none of the members of Club 27 aspired to heaven.
