High Fidelity is an excellent and record-centric movie starring John Cusack based on the novel of the same name by Nick Hornby about a record store owner and former DJ who sees life through the lens of popular music.

When he gets upset, he rearranges his vast record collection to console himself. Due to his obsession with records and order, Cusack's character - along with the two obsessives who work for him in the record store - organizes his life with Top 5 Lists: Top 5 Most Memorable Splitups, Top 5 Songs About Death, Top 5 Songs to Lead Off An Album, Top 5 Songs About People With Swollen Heads (I didn't know there was one, let alone five of these), etc. There are dozens of albums mentioned in the movie (which is a very faithful to the book other than moving the setting from London to Chicago).

In the spirit of the many (but not nearly enough, yet) lists being formulated on Blogcritics, I will pick my Top 5 Albums Mentioned in High Fidelity, which also has a cool soundtrack, but we won't talk about that now.

Robert Johnson - King of the Delta Blues Singers
Robert Johnson was born in rural Mississippi in 1911. Nothing in Johnson's childhood foretold his eventual status as the greatest bluesman of all time. Johnson's first wife died in childbirth when he was 19 and she was16, and for the next year Johnson wandered about the Delta.

He returned home on a melting summer Saturday night with a strange air about him, dragged his guitar into the local roadhouse, and while bluesmen Son House and Willie Brown took a break with most of the crowd outside, Johnson began to play. His anguished yet supple singing and startling guitar accompaniment drew a gasp from the crowd outside.

Word quickly spread that Johnson had "sold his soul to the devil to get to play like that." Word of Johnson"s prowess spread as he traveled to St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit and New York. Eventually Johnson made his way to San Antonio to record with the great blues and country producer Don Law.

Law recorded Johnson's entire 29-song body of work direct-to-disc in a San Antonio hotel room in November, 1936, and in a Dallas warehouse in June of 1937.

Johnson was so shy that he turned to face the wall when he recorded. He wasn't shy around women, though: Johnson was poisoned to death by a jealous husband at a roadhouse in 1938.