Complete Recordings are solid facts in Stephen C. LaVere's meticulously researched liner notes, brief appreciations of Johnson by Keith Richards ("He was like a comet or a meteor that came along and, BOOM, suddenly he raised the ante, suddenly you just had to aim that much higher") and Eric Clapton ("I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson. His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice, really"), lyrics and photos. And, of course, we have the songs – digitally clarified and, as expected, at least as powerful and affecting as ever.

Robert Johnson recorded twenty-nine songs in 1936 and 1937 – alternate takes, previously bootlegged and only rarely revelatory, bring the total here to forty-one – and then vanished into the murky Mississippi Delta world of juke joints, voodoo lore, violence, grand plantation houses for whites and perpetually indentured black sharecroppers who worked in the cotton fields all week and were serious about their Saturday nights. Johnson was fatally poisoned by a jealous husband or boyfriend shortly before fame caught up with him in the person of Columbia's John Hammond, who wanted him for the historic 1938 Spirituals to Swing concert, at Carnegie Hall, in New York, Fame, finding nothing left but a legend, passed him by, but only for a while. Even in these last prosaic facts, the Myth lurks. In "Sweet Home Chicago," Johnson played and sang as if anticipating the effect his music would have on the electric-blues scene in Chicago ten years later, and the last line he sang at his last session posed a question to which he would soon find the terminal answer: "Well, now, can you suck on some other man's bull cow ... in this strange man's town?"

The Robert Johnson recordings are musical art of the highest order, as rich and transcendent as anything produced by an American musician in this century – surely only a racist or classist would argue otherwise. Was he really the greatest blues singer-guitarist-songwriter of all? Listening to Johnson in Frank Abbey's lovingly restored and remastered new versions, the question seems almost irrelevant. Johnson was a great one, all right, and a bluesman to the bottom of his soul. But at his most original, when he is also most chilling, Johnson blows genre considerations and invidious comparisons right out the window.

"Hellhound on My T