The Search for Robert Johnson is a 1992 British television documentary film about the American Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, hosted by John Hammond, and produced and directed by Chris Hunt. In the film, Hammond journeys through the American Deep South to pursue topics such as Johnson's birth date, place and parents, his early musical development, performances and travels, romances, his mythic "pact with the devil," his death in the late 1930s, the discovery of possible offspring, and the uncertainty over where Johnson is buried. Throughout, Johnson's music is both foreground and background, from recordings of Johnson and as performed on camera by Hammond, David "Honeyboy" Edwards, and Johnny Shines. Produced by Iambic Productions, the documentary first aired on BBC's Channel 4. Documentary Blues musician and "keeper of the flame" John Hammond described his journey into the American South as "the quest of a lifetime". His father, record producer and jazz impresario John H. Hammond, had planned and advertised for Robert Johnson to perform at Carnegie Hall, but Johnson died prior to the concert. The film is loosely organised around field work by Johnson researcher Robert "Mack" McCormick. Throughout the film, Hammond travels to locations where Johnson lived, performed, recorded, and purportedly where he died, and interviews two of Johnson's girlfriends and blues musicians who knew him, as well as two noted blues researchers. Locations include the "Delta, the floodplain of northwestern Mississippi, on into Arkansas and Texas, and into southern Mississippi, where he was born and died." The film has been noted for its presentation of new evidence, at the time, about Johnson's life. Hammond describes Johnny Shines arriving in Helena, Arkansas, hearing there was a guitar player who thought highly of himself, and going to meet him. Shines re-enacts, with Hammond standing in for Johnson, the performance battle he had with Johnson on opposing street corners in Helena, where the two played and sang to pull away the other man's crowd of listeners. In the re-enactment scene, Shines gradually draws onlookers away from Hammond, "cutting heads," as described by Barbara Schroeder. Interviewing Willie Mae Powell, once Johnson's girlfriend, Hammond plays for her Johnson's recording of "Love in Vain" which she had not heard before. When Johnson calls out Willie Mae's name in the song, she is visibly surprised. In the first documented interview with Claude Johnson, son Gregory and grandson Richard, Claude's birth certificate is shown, as he