I actually find this notion, which is back in circulation, to be based more on contemporary ideas about 'how a blues man should sound' than on any historical facts.

As a student of Johnson's music and life and author of "Robert Johnson/At The Crossroads" as well as a teaching DVD on Johnson's music, I find nothing out of the ordinary in Johnson's tempos or pitches. And neither Johnny Shines, nor David 'Honeyboy' Edwards, nor Robert Lockwood, Jr. nor anyone else who we know heard Robert or played with Robert, has ever mentioned that the recordings were too fast. On the contrary, everyone of those folks have said, in so many words, 'Yup. That's little Robert.'

I believe that well-meaning amateur musicologists and blues lovers are simply trying to shape Johnson's sound to their own liking, rather than taking the recordings at face value. Perhaps they are measuring his recordings against recordings of some of the elder statesmen of the tradition who survived later in the century and who we have had a chance to hear, like Honeyboy Edwards, or Johnny Shines, or Son House.

Johnson wasn't in his seventies, eighties or nineties. He was 25 when he cut his first recordings, including his Crossroads Blues.

Here are my questions:

Is anyone suggesting that the record producers sped up Louis Armstrong's recordings a decade earlier? Or Blind Willie McTell?

Are people repeating this idea suggesting that Johnson's masters were all sped up, including the pieces that were never released?

It seems to me that any objective – rather than subjective – evaluation of Johnson's sound and recordings has to take them at face value.