Tim Barker

I was surprised to learn, reading Alex Abramovich’s piece on Robert Johnson, that ‘I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom’ may have been ‘written in an open A tuning apparently original to Johnson’. The younger Mississippi bluesman Elmore James (who, as Abramovich notes, reshaped American music with his electrified cover of ‘Dust My Broom’) used an open D or E tuning. Regarding the original...