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Speaker 1: Hello, It's Richard mcclinsmith here with a couple of announcements.

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Speaker 1: After the amazing success of last year's Crimewave at Sea,

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Speaker 1: I'm excited to announce that we'll be setting Saiale again

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Speaker 1: next year February eighth to the twelfth of twenty twenty seven.

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Speaker 1: I can't tell you enough how much I enjoyed this

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Speaker 1: last year, and I'll be participating fully next year with

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Speaker 1: the show. So he fancies some spooky true crime on

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Speaker 1: a cruise round the Bahamas, This one's for you. Go

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Speaker 1: to Crimewave at seed dot com for more information. Tickets

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Speaker 1: will go on sale on Friday, February thirteenth, so listen

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Speaker 1: out for more announcements there. Further to that, I'm also

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Speaker 1: hugely excited to say I'll be attending crime Con US

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Speaker 1: and UK this year. So for the US we're going

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Speaker 1: to be in Las Vegas twenty eight to the thirty

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Speaker 1: first of May. Go to Crimecon dot com to buy

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Speaker 1: ticket and use voucher code unexplained for ten percent off.

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Speaker 1: And in the UK we'll be in Birmingham on April

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Speaker 1: the twenty fifth and London on the third and fourth

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Speaker 1: of October. These are all really special events that do

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Speaker 1: a lot to put survivors of crime front and center,

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Speaker 1: and I'm really honored to be taking part for crime CONUK.

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Speaker 1: Go to Crimecon dot com UK to buy tickets and

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Speaker 1: again use voucher code Unexplained for ten percent off. You

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Speaker 1: can also find all the links on my website at

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Speaker 1: Unexplained podcast dot com. Forward slash events. In British society,

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Speaker 1: at least, we tend to prefer that people wear their

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Speaker 1: talent lightly. But such attitudes tend to come with a

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Speaker 1: few caveats, largely to do with class and race. For

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Speaker 1: those that we might consider to be in the higher

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Speaker 1: reaches of the British class system, it's all very well

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Speaker 1: speaking quietly about your achievements when you already occupy a

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Speaker 1: comfortable and privileged place in society. There is no need

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Speaker 1: to boast, for example, because your place, as it were,

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Speaker 1: is self evident and secure. However, should you dare to

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Speaker 1: come from a position of decidedly less established privilege when

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Speaker 1: your talent starts to attract fame and attention, then be

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Speaker 1: prepared to do battle with the court of public opinion

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Speaker 1: at the first sign of weakness, or the moment you

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Speaker 1: commit a supposed social faux pas. We see it every

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Speaker 1: time we open a tabloid newspaper in the gossip columns

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Speaker 1: detailing the latest celebrity mishap. More often than not, it's

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Speaker 1: hard not to sense the quiet implication that the subject

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Speaker 1: has committed the ultimate sin of forgetting where they came

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Speaker 1: from or failing to know their place. Things become even

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Speaker 1: more complicated and sinister. Even if we believe talent to

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Speaker 1: be something that is not necessarily earned, but bestowed upon us.

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Speaker 1: For some talent is simply a gift given to the

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Speaker 1: individual by God, and should therefore be encouraged, regardless of

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Speaker 1: the perceived merits of the recipient. As the Bible says

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Speaker 1: in Matthew five point fifteen, one shouldn't light a lamp

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Speaker 1: and hide it under a bushel. Instead, they should put

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Speaker 1: it on a stand where it can give light to

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Speaker 1: everyone in the house. So what then, of those who

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Speaker 1: are prodigiously talented but don't, according to the lords of society,

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Speaker 1: fit the mold of someone who should be you're listening

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Speaker 1: to unexplained and I'm Richard mc lean smith. It was

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Speaker 1: a bright close evening in May nineteen thirty four, and

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Speaker 1: the stars were flung out across the purple mississippy sky

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Speaker 1: like crumbs on a picnic blanket. The crooked branches of

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Speaker 1: the region's tupelow trees stood out like grasping fingers, and

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Speaker 1: a full moon bled its terrible light across the dusty trail.

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Speaker 1: Unnamed animals could be heard howling into the darkness for miles,

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Speaker 1: and through it all came the footsteps of a young

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Speaker 1: man plodding tirelessly along the road. Twenty one year old

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Speaker 1: Robert Johnson had endured a tumultuous few days. He'd only

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Speaker 1: been with his wife, Coletta for less than a year,

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Speaker 1: but after it emerged that he'd fathered a child with

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Speaker 1: another woman named Vergie May Smith, Johnson was flung out,

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Speaker 1: and so he hit the road to follow his dream

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Speaker 1: of becoming a traveling bluesman. He'd shown some early promise

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Speaker 1: playing at the various shotgun shacks and illicit shabines that

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Speaker 1: were dotted around the American South. He could play a

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Speaker 1: mean harmonica, but even after a short apprenticeship to the

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Speaker 1: master of House Blues azayah Ike Zimmerman, older contemporaries like

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Speaker 1: Son House remembered that the young player was hopelessly bad

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Speaker 1: when it came to the guitar. Back when he'd been

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Speaker 1: apprenticed to Zimmerman, there were whispers that his tutor liked

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Speaker 1: to make the young bluesman practice with him in a cemetery.

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Speaker 1: He claimed that it was because they'd be undisturbed by

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Speaker 1: anyone eavesdropping, But before long, rumors began to circulate that

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Speaker 1: the two men were undertaking something far more nefarious under

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Speaker 1: cover of darkness, something which involved the supernatural and the

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Speaker 1: conferring of knowledge from worlds beyond our own. Blues music

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Speaker 1: was already beginning to cross over into the white mainstream

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Speaker 1: from a mainly black folk tradition, and Johnson figured that

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Speaker 1: if he could master the guitar the way he'd mastered

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Speaker 1: everything else, there was a solid opportunity to make his

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Speaker 1: fame and fortune. So, with a bindle slung over one shoulder,

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Speaker 1: a ten dollar guitar strapped to another, and a single

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Speaker 1: dollar bill tucked into his right shoe, Johnson decided to

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Speaker 1: make the roughly two day hike from Cohoma County in

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Speaker 1: his native Mississippi to the bright lights of Memphis, Tennessee.

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Speaker 1: Where and when Johnson appeared next is a matter of

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Speaker 1: some conjecture. It might have been at a humble duke

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Speaker 1: joint in Memphis, Tennessee, or in Helena, Arkansas. It might

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Speaker 1: have been playing for a select few friends and acquaintances

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Speaker 1: at a tavern or saloon in one of the many

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Speaker 1: one horse towns that Johnson passed through during his years

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Speaker 1: of itinerancy. Either way, what we do know from anecdotal

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Speaker 1: evidence is that wherever it was, Robert Johnson was said

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Speaker 1: to suddenly be possessed of a talent for playing the guitar,

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Speaker 1: which he'd never shown before. To many who saw it,

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Speaker 1: his fingers seemed to slide across the frets of his

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Speaker 1: battered old guitar in a way that suggested they'd been

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Speaker 1: possessed by some other agency. And it wasn't only Johnson's

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Speaker 1: playing that raised eye. It was the sudden caliber of

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Speaker 1: his songs who On November twenty third, nineteen thirty six,

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Speaker 1: Robert Johnson appeared at the general store of one Henry

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Speaker 1: Columbus Spear, who'd become legendary in the city of Jackson, Mississippi,

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Speaker 1: as a talent scout and broker for some of the

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Speaker 1: biggest names on the burgeoning blue circuit of the day.

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Speaker 1: William Harris, Ishman Bracy, Charlie Patton, and Evans Son House.

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Speaker 1: After playing only a few tunes for him, Spear was speechless. Immediately,

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Speaker 1: he put Johnson in contact with an English record producer

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Speaker 1: named Don Law. Law brought Johnson to Room four one

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Speaker 1: four of the gun To Hotel in San Antonio, Texas,

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Speaker 1: and for the next two days, the young musician recorded

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Speaker 1: several of what would later become absolute standards of the genre.

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Speaker 1: I Believe, I'll Dust my Broom, Sweet Home Chicago, Terraplane Blues,

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Speaker 1: and an especially mysterious track known as cross Road Blues,

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Speaker 1: which Johnson seemed reticent to furnish with any added context

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Speaker 1: or illuminating detail. A few months later, in June nineteen

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Speaker 1: thirty seven, Law arranged for Johnson to finish his recording

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Speaker 1: at a makeshift studio in Dallas. He set down a

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Speaker 1: total of twenty nine tracks, most of which seemed to

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Speaker 1: emerge perfectly, formed in little more than two or three takes,

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Speaker 1: and for someone so inexperienced, Law was a little taken

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Speaker 1: aback when Johnson insisted did the songs not exceed three

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Speaker 1: minutes in length, almost as though some kind of spell

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Speaker 1: might be broken, should he deviate from it, given how

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Speaker 1: slap dash the recording process had been. The first single

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Speaker 1: released by Johnson, Terraplaine Blue, who did remarkably well commercially,

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Speaker 1: selling over ten thousand copies. Most, if not all, of

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Speaker 1: the tracks Johnson taped between November nineteen thirty six and

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Speaker 1: June nineteen thirty seven still survived today. When a young

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Speaker 1: Keith Richards first heard the record in the early nineteen sixties,

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Speaker 1: which had been introduced to him by bandmate Brian Jones,

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Speaker 1: Richards was spellbound. Richards would later tell interviewers, when I

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Speaker 1: first heard it, I said to Brian, who's that Robert Johnson?

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Speaker 1: He said, yeah, but who's the other guy playing with him?

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Speaker 1: Because I was hearing two guitars, it took me a

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Speaker 1: long time to realize he was actually doing.

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Speaker 2: It all by himself or was he.

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Speaker 1: Tragically, for Robert Johnson, he wouldn't get to enjoy much

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Speaker 1: more more of the success that the early sales of

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Speaker 1: Terraplane Blues seemed to promise. On August sixteenth, nineteen thirty eight,

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Speaker 1: at the age of twenty seven, Johnson died from unknown

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Speaker 1: causes near the city of Greenwood, Mississippi. Because his death

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Speaker 1: wasn't reported widely at the time, we are left with

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Speaker 1: several competing theories as to what actually happened. No formal

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Speaker 1: autopsy is known to have taken place, and because of

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Speaker 1: the inherent racism of the American South at that time,

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Speaker 1: it is likely that the authorities decided instead to make

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Speaker 1: do with a pro former examination of his body to

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Speaker 1: file the death certificate quickly. Some have speculated that he

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Speaker 1: died from complications related to untreated congenital syphilis. Others have

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Speaker 1: focused their attention on events immediately preceding Johnson's death, where

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Speaker 1: it was known that he'd secured a residency for a

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Speaker 1: few weeks at the Three Forks Club in the village

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Speaker 1: of Itabina, about fifteen miles west of the city of Greenwood, Proper.

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Speaker 1: According to another contemporary of Johnson's, David Honeyboy Edwards, Johnson's

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Speaker 1: predilection for the company of women may have contributed to

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Speaker 1: his untimely death. In this version of the story, Johnson

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Speaker 1: was seen flirting with a married woman one evening after

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Speaker 1: finishing one of his sets. The woman had been drinking,

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Speaker 1: and in a quiet interlude between songs, a bottle of

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Speaker 1: whiskey materialized and was offered up to Johnson, seeing that

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Speaker 1: the bottle had been tampered with before it was placed

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Speaker 1: in front of him. When Johnson went to take a

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Speaker 1: swig from it, the young honey boy Edwards, who claimed

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Speaker 1: to be with him at the time, knocked it out

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Speaker 1: of his hand. Already drunk from a long night of

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Speaker 1: drinking on stage with its band, Johnson admonished Edwards. Then

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Speaker 1: the woman's husband is said to have arrived and encouraged

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Speaker 1: Johnson to drink. He accepted the invitation graciously and set

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Speaker 1: about knocking the whiskey back. Not long afterwards, it said

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Speaker 1: that Johnson began to feel ill. He was escorted back

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Speaker 1: to his room in the early hours of the morning.

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Speaker 1: Over an excruciating three day period, Johnson's condition worsened before

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Speaker 1: he finally died in a convulsive state of severe pain,

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Speaker 1: having supposedly been poisoned by the jealous husband. Many years later,

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Speaker 1: American musicologist and folklorist Robert mac McCormick claimed to have

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Speaker 1: tracked down the elusive husband and elicited a confession from

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Speaker 1: him that he poisoned Robert Johnson with strychnine. He refused

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Speaker 1: to reveal the man's name, saying that the confession was

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Speaker 1: given to him in confidence. But the mystery of Robert

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Speaker 1: Johnson's tumultuous life and death didn't end there. I went

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Speaker 1: to the cross road, fell down on my knees, asked

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Speaker 1: the Lord above, have mercy now, save poor Bob if

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Speaker 1: you please, sings Robert Johnson on the startling cross Road Blues.

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Speaker 1: But in the wake of his untimely death, some began

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Speaker 1: to wonder if, instead of the Lord, it was some

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Speaker 1: one else entirely whom Robert Johnson had pleaded to for

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Speaker 1: help while on his knees at those cross roads, had

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Speaker 1: as some began to wonder, he died so young because

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Speaker 1: that was the price of some kind of bargain that

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Speaker 1: he'd made. A few years after Johnson's death, a strange

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Speaker 1: story began to take shape regarding an apparent detour that

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Speaker 1: Johnson took after he set out all those years ago

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Speaker 1: as a budding but limited twenty one year old musician

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Speaker 1: to find fame and fortune in Memphis, Tennessee. Some say

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Speaker 1: it was his old mentor, Ike Zimmerman, who gave him

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Speaker 1: the instructions. On the next full moon, he was to

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Speaker 1: head out to the crossroads near the Dockery plantation in

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Speaker 1: the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Whereat midnight a visitor

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Speaker 1: would appear that would finally help him realize his ambition

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Speaker 1: to become the greatest blues player of his generation. And

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Speaker 1: perhaps Johnson did just that, and made his way out

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Speaker 1: to that perfectly ordinary, nondescript crossroads at the next full moon,

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Speaker 1: only to find suddenly, at the stroke of midnight that

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Speaker 1: all the nocturnal ambients that had so filled the air,

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Speaker 1: the cicadas, singing, owl's hooting, the wind blowing, had disappeared completely.

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Speaker 1: Perhaps it was then that the figure he'd been told

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Speaker 1: to expect made him self known, a peculiar looking man

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Speaker 1: dressed smartly, put in unusual clothes for the age, who,

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Speaker 1: on seeing Johnson with his guitar, offered to show him

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Speaker 1: some licks of his own, before handing the instrument back

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Speaker 1: to the young man with a wry smile, And perhaps

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Speaker 1: on taking it from him, it was only then that

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Speaker 1: Johnson noticed how peculiarly long the man's fingers were, or

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Speaker 1: the strange fire that seemed to glow in his eyes.

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Speaker 1: And maybe Johnson asked the strange man to teach him

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Speaker 1: everything he knew, to which the man said he would

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Speaker 1: be more than happy to on one condition that Johnson

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Speaker 1: sell him his soul in return, And perhaps it was

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Speaker 1: then that Johnson happily signed it away. Many will be

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Speaker 1: familiar with Christopher Marlow's classic Elizabethan drama Doctor Faustus, in

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Speaker 1: which the eponymous Faustus sells his soul to the devil

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Speaker 1: in return for knowledge and power. However, the notion of

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Speaker 1: the devil's bargain or Faustian pact as its roots in

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Speaker 1: much earlier cautionary tales about mortals making unwise covenants with

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Speaker 1: divine beings. Perhaps the most famous example is the Greek

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Speaker 1: myth of Orpheus and his Descent into the underworld, where

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Speaker 1: the hero makes an agreement to retrieve the soul of

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Speaker 1: his love Eurydicy, on condition that he doesn't once look

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Speaker 1: behind him as they ascend back into the mortal realm.

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Speaker 1: But as Orpheus approaches the surface, he is suddenly overcome

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Speaker 1: with doubt, turning at last only to see the soul

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Speaker 1: of his beloved being pulled away from him forever. But

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Speaker 1: what if there were some truth to the idea. Perhaps

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Speaker 1: the most well known historical example of a deal with

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Speaker 1: the devil is the case of Bavarian born seventeenth century

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Speaker 1: painter Johann Christoph Heitzmann, who claimed to have signed not one,

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Speaker 1: but two pats for his soul in sixteen sixty eight.

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Speaker 1: After Heitzman became an orphan and was left destitute at

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Speaker 1: the age of seventeen, he claimed that the devil appeared

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Speaker 1: to him and offered him a contract signed in ink

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Speaker 1: and another signed in his own blunt. For nine agonizing years,

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Speaker 1: Heisman apparently subsisted as the devil's bounden son. When the

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Speaker 1: date finally arrived in sixteen seventy seven for the relinquishment

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Speaker 1: of his soul, Heitzmann took sanctuary at a monastery in

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Speaker 1: the Austrian town of Mariotsel. There a series of exorcisms

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Speaker 1: was said to have been performed, culminating in the devil

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Speaker 1: giving back the contracts and Heightsman taking vow to join

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Speaker 1: the brotherhood of Saint John of God. The artist would

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Speaker 1: eventually die in seventeen hundred, leaving behind a famous triptych

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Speaker 1: depicting his ordeal. Of course, we only have Heitzman's word

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Speaker 1: to take on this, and even if we are to

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Speaker 1: believe that such a fabulous story played out. There are

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Speaker 1: a number of other explanations for what actually took place.

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Speaker 1: Sigmund Freud revisited the case in nineteen twenty three, and

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Speaker 1: it was his belief that what Heisman experienced was a

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Speaker 1: lifelong affliction with what he termed demonological neurosis or an

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Speaker 1: advanced form of schizophrenia in today's modern parlance. But there

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Speaker 1: are more modern examples of the Faustian pact at work,

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Speaker 1: which defy and even supersede the publication of Freud's study

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Speaker 1: into Heizmann. We are not so sophisticated that we have

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Speaker 1: jettisoned the old mythologies entirely. They still linger in the

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Speaker 1: high way. We speak about talented people who have flown

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Speaker 1: too close to the sun and burned out before their time.

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Speaker 1: It is no accident, for example, that rock and roll

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Speaker 1: is still referred to as the Devil's music, or that

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Speaker 1: we link the term so closely with the so called

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Speaker 1: twenty seven Club, a term linking musicians as diverse as

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Speaker 1: Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse,

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Speaker 1: all of whom died at the tender age of twenty

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Speaker 1: seven and first among them was Robert Johnson. Blues historian

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Speaker 1: Pete Welding had the opportunity to sit down with one

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Speaker 1: of Johnson's contemporaries, Son House, for a Rolling Stone profile

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Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty six. When he asked the elderly legend

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Speaker 1: about his brief association with the traveling bluesman during the

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Speaker 1: depression year of the nineteen thirties, House seemed to have

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Speaker 1: no doubt where the talent had come from. He sold

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Speaker 1: his soul to the devil to play like that, House

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Speaker 1: said to Welding, to his mind and many others. It

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Speaker 1: was the only explanation for Johnson's sudden mastery over the

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Speaker 1: sliding blues scale, which just a short time before had

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Speaker 1: eluded him so perceptibly. Perhaps there was an element of

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Speaker 1: professional jealousy that hot young players from the UK like

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Speaker 1: John Mayle, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were beginning to

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Speaker 1: tout Johnson as an influence. Indeed, the fact that the

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Speaker 1: likes of House had struggled for decades to support themselves,

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Speaker 1: only for mainstream white audiences to suddenly pay attention to

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Speaker 1: the art form after it had been adapted by men

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Speaker 1: who looked like them must have been a source of

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Speaker 1: great frustration. Now there was an opportunity to have some

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Speaker 1: fun with Johnson's legend. He had, after all, left pressure

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Speaker 1: little behind in terms of his history, and it's plausible

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Speaker 1: to think that the likes of House was putting his

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Speaker 1: tongue firmly in his cheek at his gullible new white

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Speaker 1: audience's expense. Whatever the truth of House's intentions may have been,

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Speaker 1: there is no doubt that it must have come as

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Speaker 1: a shock when the relatively unknown Johnson suddenly made his

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Speaker 1: appearance as a fully fledged, accomplished blues guitarist sometime in

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Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four or thirty five. We can almost imagine

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Speaker 1: Son House sitting there nursing a glass of tepid beer,

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Speaker 1: smoke swirling around his weather beaten face in an old

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Speaker 1: shotgun shack as the evening kicks into gear. Perhaps he's

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Speaker 1: taken his woman out for the evening, the two of

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Speaker 1: them just waiting for the next high energy jive to begin.

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Speaker 1: A hush descends over the room as a young Robert

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Speaker 1: Johnson shuffles onto the clapboard platform and takes his seat

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Speaker 1: on the stool. Then he takes his guitar out of

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Speaker 1: its tattered wooden case, leans forward toward the microphone and

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Speaker 1: starts to play a set of which no one has

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Speaker 1: ever heard the like before. Given that so little about

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Speaker 1: Johnson's actual life was committed to the written record, getting

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Speaker 1: to the bottom of whether he truly learned his trade

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Speaker 1: at the lap of a mentor who taught him in

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Speaker 1: a graveyard, or whether he sold his soul to the

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Speaker 1: devil at midnight on a barren crossroads near Docking, Mississippi,

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Speaker 1: or whether he really was murdered by a jealous husband

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Speaker 1: is nihon impossible. What we do know is that its

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Speaker 1: imprint can be found on so much, from delta blues

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Speaker 1: inflected records like the Rolling Stones is Let It Bleed

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Speaker 1: and Exile on Main Street, to less obviously conventional modes

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Speaker 1: of influence, like how it is now a standard that

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Speaker 1: a pop song should be only three minutes long. And

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Speaker 1: although there is something undoubtedly appealing about referring to rock

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Speaker 1: and roll, both to those who play it and those

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Speaker 1: who listen to it as the Devil's music, with Johnson

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Speaker 1: its devil son in chief, it's worth pausing for a

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Speaker 1: moment to think about what that idea really does. Because

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Speaker 1: the myth of Robert Johnson's selling his Soul was not

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Speaker 1: something that meaningfully followed him in life. He played mostly

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Speaker 1: in black establishments, places already viewed with suspicion by churches

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Speaker 1: and white authorities alike. To many in mainstream America, blues

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Speaker 1: musicians were considered itinerant, immoral, and dangerous. The music itself

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Speaker 1: was already seen as transgressive. The devil didn't need to

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Speaker 1: be invoked to make it suspect. But after Johnson's death,

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Speaker 1: the story takes on a different function. It begins to

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Speaker 1: do a kind of cultural work. The myth reinforces something

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Speaker 1: that many people were already comfortable believing, that this kind

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Speaker 1: of brilliance emerging from a poor young black man in

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Speaker 1: the Jim Crow South couldn't possibly be the product of discipline, intellect,

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Speaker 1: or intention. It had to come from somewhere else, somewhere darker,

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Speaker 1: somewhere other. In some ways, you might say, the legend

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Speaker 1: doesn't elevate Johnson, it diminishes him. It strips away the

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Speaker 1: hours of practice, the mentorship, the travel, the listening, the

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Speaker 1: pioneering innovation of combining various musical forms. All of that

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Speaker 1: is replaced with a supernatural shortcut. His talent was no

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Speaker 1: longer earned, it was given to him, and maybe for

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Speaker 1: white audiences encountering Johnson's music decades later, this framing was

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Speaker 1: often easier to accept, not through conscious malice, but through

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Speaker 1: something slipperia and more ingrained. It preserved hierarchy, It exoticized

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Speaker 1: black creativity. It cast the blues as primal, mystical, and dangerous,

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Speaker 1: as opposed to modern, innovative and authored. In all likelihood,

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Speaker 1: although he clearly had an aptitude for it, Johnson simply

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Speaker 1: practiced obsessively. He traveled constantly, absorbing the different styles of

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Speaker 1: different regions. He learned from older musicians like Iike Zimmermon.

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Speaker 1: He innovated with structure and narrative lyricism. It was genius

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Speaker 1: and in that sense perhaps even supernatural. But it isn't magic.

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Speaker 1: Its work well, that's my two cents. At least in truth.

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Speaker 1: We'll never know for sure exactly how Robert Johnson came

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Speaker 1: to possess the talent he did, or indeed why he

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Speaker 1: died at such a tragically young age. That will remain

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Speaker 1: forever tantalizingly unexplained. This episode was written by James Connor

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Speaker 1: Patterson and Richard mc clean Smith. Thank you as ever

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Speaker 1: for listening Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created

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Speaker 1: by Richard mc lean Smith. All other elements of the podcast,

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Speaker 1: including the music, are also produced by me Richard mc

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Speaker 1: clan smith. Unexplained The book and audiobook is now available

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Speaker 1: to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble,

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Speaker 1: Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the

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Speaker 1: show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to

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Speaker 1: get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the

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00:26:47,600 --> 00:26:50,320
Speaker 1: stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an

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00:26:50,359 --> 00:26:53,200
Speaker 1: explanation or a story of your own you'd like to share.

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Speaker 1: You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com

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Speaker 1: and reach us online through X and Blue Sky, That

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Speaker 1: Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash,

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Speaker 1: Unexplained Podcast.

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Speaker 2: A.

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Speaker 3: Recry It Came, and.

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Speaker 2: And any More Mone Blow an

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Speaker 3: Assassssssssss