Robert Johnson's birthplace

Robert Johnson was born, most likely in 1911, in the Damascus community north of Hazlehurst, Mississippi — a small Copiah County town in the piney hills south of the Delta. His mother was Julia Majors, who had separated from her husband Charles Dodds before having Robert with a man named Noah Johnson. The exact date and full circumstances of his birth are among the many biographical mysteries that surround him: the official record of his life is thin almost to the point of vanishing, and researchers have spent decades reconstructing it from census entries, marriage records, and the memories of people who knew him.

Hazlehurst's claim on Johnson is one of birth rather than upbringing — the family moved when he was young, and he spent his adult years wandering the Delta, playing juke joints and street corners. But the town has embraced the connection, and in 2008 his original birthplace house was moved from its original location on Damascus Road (displaced when Highway 55 was built) to downtown Hazlehurst, where it was placed behind the Heritage House Cultural Center on Downing Street and designated as part of the Mississippi Blues Trail. The simple wooden structure gives a tangible sense of the rural Mississippi poverty from which Johnson emerged.

Visitors can see the birthplace house behind the Heritage House at 201 Downing Street. Hazlehurst also hosts an annual Robert Johnson Blues Festival each October, bringing musicians to the town that gave one of the most mythologised figures in American music his first breath. The Mississippi Blues Trail marker at the site tells his story with appropriate care for what is known and what remains, after all these years, uncertain.