Robert Johnson

The blues pioneer's life and death is shrouded in myths, the most popular of which has Johnson selling his soul to the devil in return for musical talent. There are plenty of stories surrounding Johnson's 1938 death at age 27, most of them involving a woman and her jealous boyfriend, who poisoned Johnson's whiskey. In 2010, bluesman David "Honeyboy" Edwards repeated this account, claiming he was there, while blues historians maintain that Johnson probably died from an illness such as syphilis.