Three Forks Store — Robert Johnson's Last Concert, Greenwood

The Three Forks Store near Greenwood, Mississippi, is the location where Robert Johnson is believed to have performed his final concert, shortly before his death on 16 August 1938. According to the most widely accepted account, Johnson had been performing at a Saturday night dance at the store when he was given whiskey that had been poisoned — allegedly by the husband of a woman Johnson had been paying attention to. He became ill that night and died three days later, reportedly at a house in Greenwood. He was approximately 27 years old. The precise location of his death and burial remain subjects of dispute and uncertainty.

The circumstances of Johnson's death are consistent with the shadowy quality of his entire life: he left almost no documentary record, and what is known of him has been assembled from the memories of contemporaries, the evidence of his recordings, and the mythology that grew up around him after his death. The Three Forks store — a country juke joint at a rural crossroads in the Delta — represents the world he inhabited: working-class African American social life in the Deep South, Saturday night dances, the physical dangers of being a travelling musician in Jim Crow Mississippi.

The Three Forks Store site is in Leflore County, several miles from Greenwood. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker acknowledges the location. The surrounding Delta landscape — flat, agricultural, dotted with the small communities and crossroads stores that formed the infrastructure of blues music — gives a powerful sense of the world Johnson navigated. Johnson's grave — disputed between three possible sites — is another Blues Trail destination in the surrounding area.