Robert Johnson's Grave

Robert Johnson died on 16 August 1938 at the Star of the West plantation north of Greenwood, twenty seven years old, having recorded twenty nine songs in two sessions. His death certificate names the burial place only as Zion Church, and there is more than one, so for sixty years nobody could say which. Three now carry a stone for him. The Atlanta band the Tombstones paid for one at Payne Chapel in Quito in 1990. Columbia Records and public donors put up a one ton obelisk at Mount Zion near Morgan City in 1991, through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. And in 2002 the researcher Stephen LaVere paid out of his own pocket for a marker in the cemetery beside Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church on Money Road, a few miles north of Greenwood. That third one is where the Mississippi Blues Trail put its official gravesite marker, and the reason is a witness rather than a document. In 2000 a woman the Blues Trail records as Rose Eskridge, then eighty four, said her husband Tom had dug the grave. She had been twenty two, and she remembered carrying water out to him from the Wade place, the same Star of the West plantation where Johnson had died, and the grave going in under a pecan tree at the back of the Little Zion churchyard. She also placed Jim Moore, the name written as informant on the death certificate and until then a blank, and described the plain wooden box. How he died is its own argument: the certificate says syphilis and records no doctor in attendance, and the famous poisoned whiskey story is testimony gathered decades afterwards.