Robert Johnson Estate: 1998

Anderson's control of the Johnson estate seemed secure. On February 19, 1992, however, a retired gravel truck driver from Crystal Springs, Mississippi, filed a petition in which he claimed to be the son and sole heir of the dead guitarist. Claud Johnson swore that his mother had told him throughout his childhood that Robert Johnson was his father.

Claud Johnson's initial claim was dismissed after Anderson's attorneys argued that Johnson had missed a statutory deadline for presenting himself as an heir. Under a Mississippi law designed to equitably settle all existing pre-1981 claims by "illegitimate" children seeking inheritances from intestate fathers, such claims were required to be filed and adjudicated within three years of July 1, 1981. Claud Johnson's claim was filed years after the 1984 deadline.

When Johnson appealed, the court focused on his contention that Anderson had not performed her administrative duties properly. Appellate judges agreed that Anderson's failure to properly open the Johnson estate in 1982 and seek out possible heirs had benefited her, to the detriment of Claud Johnson. On March 26, 1996, the court reversed the earlier ruling. Waiving the 1984 deadline in the interest of fairness, the court allowed Claud to prosecute his claim to be Robert L. Johnson's son and heir.

The paternity issue came before the Leflore County Court on October 12, 1998. Claud Johnson's birth certificate, which identified his father as "R. L. Johnson, laborer," was introduced to establish that Claud was born on December 16, 1931. His mother, Virgie Jane Cain (formerly Smith), testified in a videotaped deposition that she had been intimate with Robert Johnson—and Johnson alone—in March 1931, nine months before Claud was born. The tryst, Cain said, took place in a wooded area by a Copiah County road.

Elderly witnesses agreed that there had been a relationship between Virgie Smith and Robert Johnson. Eighty-year-old Eula Mae Williams startled the court when she testified that she had watched Virgie and Robert making love in the woods in March of 1931. Williams unapologetically testified that she too had been in the woods with a man, with whom she witnessed what must have been Claud Johnson's conception.

On October 15, 1998, Judge Jon Barnwell declared that Claud was the son of Robert Johnson. The judgment entitled Claud to an inheritance of over $1.3 million. Lawyers for Anderson and Harris contested the ruling, questioning the identity of the "R. L. Johnson" listed on Claud's birth certificate and arguing that a note on Robert Johnson's death certificate suggested that he suffered from syphilis and was therefore sterile. Despite uncertainty about where the musician was actually buried, attorneys also wanted DNA proof of kinship between Claud and Robert Johnson.

On June 15, 2000, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the Leflore County decision, ruling that Claud Johnson was in all likelihood the son of the blues master. The court dismissed the scribble on the back of the death certificate as unreliable. Robert Johnson's 1931 marriage to a woman who died giving birth to a stillborn child further suggested to the court that he had not been sterile. In rebuffing the demand for DNA evidence, the court borrowed an image from Johnson's "Me and the Devil Blues."

Such proof "would be nigh impossible to obtain since Johnson's grave site is unknown," wrote Justice Mike Mills. "As far as we know, Johnson is buried down by the highway side, so 'his old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride.'"