I was a student at Iowa when I wrote ‘Stones in my Passway, Hellhound on my Trail’. The entirety of the research consisted of listening to the [Robert Johnson] album twelve million times, reading the liner notes twice, and deciding – seeing, knowing – the true version of Robert Johnson’s death. For period detail I went down to Gabe and Walker’s [now Gabe’s in Iowa City] where my friend Blue Phil Ajioka was taking a break between sets and asked, ‘Phil, what kind of guitar did Robert Johnson play?’ Phil said, in his bluesman’s basso, ‘That’d be a Harmony Sovereign.’ Story over.