7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7

annual concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Eight

of Jackson’s records sold more than a million copies each.

Jackson was enormously popular abroad; her version of

“Silent Night,” for example, was one of the all-time best-

selling records in Denmark. She made a notable appearance

at the Newport (Rhode Island) Jazz Festival in 1957—in a

program devoted entirely, at her request, to gospel songs—

and she sang at the inauguration of President John F.

Kennedy in January 1961. In the 1950s and ’60s she was

active in the civil rights movement; in 1963 she sang the

old African American spiritual “I Been ’Buked and I Been

Scorned” for a crowd of more than 200,000 in Washington,

D.C., just before Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King,

Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Robert Johnson

(b. c. 1911, Hazlehurst, Miss., U.S.—d. Aug. 16, 1938, near

Greenwood, Miss.)

R

obert Johnson was an American blues composer, guitar-

ist, and singer whose eerie falsetto singing voice and

masterful, rhythmic slide guitar influenced both his con-

temporaries and many later blues and rock musicians.

Johnson was the product of a confusing childhood,

with three men serving as his father before he reached age

seven. Little is known about his biological father (Noah

Johnson, whom his mother never married), and the boy

and his mother lived on various plantations in the

Mississippi Delta region before settling briefly in

Memphis, Tenn., with her first husband (Robert Dodds,

who had changed his surname to Spencer). The bulk of

Johnson’s youth, however, was spent in Robinsonville,

Miss., with his mother and her second husband (Dusty

Willis). There Johnson learned to play the Jew’s harp and

harmonica before taking up the guitar. In 1929 he married