The Douche Tablet

Elijah Wald and Preston Lauterbach interview Jim O'Neal, founding editor of Living Blues magazine and the research director of the Mississippi Blues Trail. Jim tells of crossing paths with Robert Johnson's memory during his long career as a journalist in Chicago and Mississippi. He shares audio of a 1980 interview with a musician named James Banister who volunteered some fascinating information touching on the subject of Robert Johnson's unrecorded repertoire while offering the strangest rumor ever recorded about the cause of Johnson's death. Jim also shares audio of the great piano player Memphis Slim who weighs in on Johnson's taste in women in a 1975 interview, not long after Slim's return to the U.S. from Paris.