The Search for Robert Johnson

The Search for Robert Johnson
Directed by	Chris Hunt
Produced by	Chris Hunt
Starring	Johnny Shines David Honeyboy Edwards
Narrated by	John P. Hammond
Music by	Robert Johnson
Cinematography	Paul Bond, Ken Morse
Edited by	Stuart Davidson
Production company	Iambic Productions
Distributed by	Channel 4
Release date	1991 (1991)
Running time	53 minutes (TV). 72 minutes (VHS, DVD)
Country	UK

The Search for Robert Johnson is a 1991 UK television documentary film about the Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, hosted by John Hammond, and produced and directed by Chris Hunt. In it, Hammond travels through the American Deep South to pursue topics such as Johnson's birth date, place and parents, his early musical development, performances and travels, romances, his mythic "pact with the devil," his untimely murder in his late twenties, the discovery of possible offspring, and the uncertainty over where Johnson is buried. Throughout, Johnson's music is both foreground and background, from recordings of Johnson and as performed on camera by Hammond, David Honeyboy Edwards, and Johnny Shines.

Blues musician and "keeper of the flame" John Hammond described his journey into the American South as "the quest of a lifetime". His father, record producer and jazz impresario John H. Hammond, had planned and advertised for Robert Johnson to perform at Carnegie Hall, but Johnson died prior to the concert.

The film is loosely organised around field work by Johnson researcher Robert "Mack" McCormick. Throughout the film, Hammond travels to locations where Johnson lived, performed, recorded, and purportedly where he died, and interviews two of Johnson's girlfriends and blues musicians who knew him, as well as two noted blues researchers. Locations include the "Delta, the floodplain of northwestern Mississippi, on into Arkansas and Texas, and into southern Mississippi, where he was born and died."

The film has been noted for its presentation of new evidence, at the time, about Johnson's life.

Guitarists Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, blues researchers Gayle Dean Wardlow and Robert "Mack" McCormick, childhood acquaintance Wink Clark, Nat Richardson, a "juke house" owner's son, Delta blues musicians David Honeyboy Edwards and Johnny Shines, girlfriends Willie Mae Powell and 'Queen' Elizabeth, discovered son Claude Johnson, his son Gregory and grandson Richard, Greenwood Councillor David Jordan, and cemetery attendant Miller Carter were all interviewed for the film.