A court in Mississippi has settled a wrangle over inheritance rights to the music of the century's most opaque genius, the extraordinary Robert Johnson: master of the blues, hobo, womaniser and pactmaker with the devil.
Ownership of Johnson's legendary songs and out-takes - the influence of which has resounded through the histories of jazz, blues and rock - now pass to his son born outside marriage, Claud.
Johnson was poisoned to death, intestate, in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1938. For the past six years, Claud Johnson has challenged two other relatives, Robert Harris and Annye Anderson, for rights to the haunting and haunted music of his father.
Anderson, who has been executor of the estate for several years, joined Harris in trying to block the claim which Claud Johnson brought in 1992.
But the Mississippi court threw out their argument that Claud had waited too long to bring his action, and decreed him owner of his father's "music, likeness and story".
Claud now stands to take at least a cut of future revenue generated by the music and other legacies - some $2 million to date, none of which has gone to Johnson's descendants.
Most of the money from record sales, limited edition guitars, books and film has thus far gone to Columbia Records and some to blues historian Stephen LaVere, who has devoted his life to researching Johnson's music and in 1973 bought limited rights from Johnson's now deceased half-sister Carrie Spencer.
Robert Johnson was born the grandson of slaves near Hazelhurst, Mississippi, in 1911. He was an illegitimate child whose mother, Julia Dodds, worked the first years of his life in migrant labour camps, before moving to Memphis to bring him up as Robert Spencer in a menage a trois. In 1920, Julia Dodds moved again, to Robinsville, Mississippi, where her son's music career began.
The young Johnson was a neglected child but soon met the masters of the Mississippi Delta blues, Willie Brown and bluesmanpreacher Son House, who were playing the "jook joints" in Robinsville.
First performing on the steps of the local courthouse, Johnson went on to synthesise everything that had come before him in the blues, and to dictate everything that would follow.
Johnson spent his life criss-crossing the Delta of the Depression years, finding a woman with whom to stay in every town, and went north to play the subterranean dives in the slums of Detroit, New York and Chicago.
He took the oral traditions of the rural blues - field hollers of defiance, chants of tribulation, and bottleneck guitar - stretched their limits musically and emotionally, and forged his own inimitable style.
Only 11 78 rpm records of Johnson's songs were released during his lifetime. As with so many artists of genius, his influence came later.
Bluesmen who took on the Johnson legacy included Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf, Johnny Shines, Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters and Elmore James, while among today's rock stars Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones claim him as a profound influence.
The themes of Johnson's music were despair, self-destruction, constant rambling, homesickness for places that had come with hindsight to represent happiness, and pursuit by demons.
His fervent music was so remarkable that he was commonly believed to have made a pact with the devil - at a crossroads and at midnight - in exchange for the gift of his voice and mastery over the guitar.
Johnson's most famous song, Cross Road Blues, concerns a rendezvous with the devil on a lonely intersection. It is a haunting work, derived from the African/slave cult of the trickster God Lagba, of whom Johnson no doubt knew, and who collected souls at a crossroads.
Johnson sang with a muffled diction, in a voice which is nonetheless passionate, intense and tortured. Listening to it is like having some raw, exposed nerve stroked just a little too roughly. With his spidery fingers, he played the guitar so that it sounds like three instruments at once.
Johnson's moods swung dramatically: he became progressively broodier and more pensive as he reached his mid-twenties, immediately enlivened by a few drinks, for which he lacked the head.
He was a small man, delicate, spindly, handsome and irresistible to women. Johnson's musical landscape of itinerant depravity is occasionally illuminated by the overt sexuality of classics like I Believe I'll Dust My Broom and the lachrymose tenderness of Kind Hearted Woman.
His first wife died in childbirth, aged 16, but Johnson married again, to "Callie" Craft, several years his senior. She kept and adored him, no one knowing she was his wife, until she suffered a breakdown and died shortly after Johnson left her to tour the Delta again in the mid-1930s.
At the age of 27, Johnson was reportedly poisoned by a house manager who had hired him to play, and saw the master flirting with his wife.
Sonny Boy Williamson, who was also playing, knocked the unsealed, laced whisky bottle out of Johnson's hand saying: "Man, don't ever drink from an open bottle. You never know what's in it."
Johnson retorted: "Man, don't you ever knock a bottle of whisky outta my hand!" before drinking a second open bottle and duly perishing.