The last video is so full of shit that I just don't know where to start. It recycles every last idiotic piece of misinformation about RJ.
I've spent the past 18 months working on a book about the devil and the blues, and a couple of months ago I finished the first long (70 page) chapter. Although Robert Johnson isn't the focus--the devil-theme in the blues is much larger and more comprehensive than one charismatic blues musician and the crossroads myth that people have saddled him with--writing the chapter did give me a chance to think hard about his song "Me and the Devil Blues."
Here are a couple of things to think about:
1) Ministers and bluesmen, especially in Clarksdale and the Delta, were in direct competition for women, money, and prestige. Both ministers and bluesmen slept with multiple partners and worried about making money from their audiences. The difference was, bluesmen could brag about sleeping with women and they could openly make their pitch for money. Ministers were forced to remain circumspect about whoring, and they were also forced to claim that the money was for doing "the Lord's work." Bluesmen accused them of hypocrisy; this stung. Ministers called blues "devil's music" because they resented the competition.
2) From 1917 through the mid-1920s, the Great Migration decimated black Methodist and Baptist congregations in the Delta. Ministers depended on their congregations to pay their salaries and to raise the $$$ that each minister was required to raise for foreign missions--required by the church higher-ups, that is. The Great Migration hurt Delta ministers: their pride, their pocketbooks, their reputations. The bluesmen urged black Delta folk to ramble, to feel and act on their restlessness. Delta ministers called blues "devil's music" because it seemed as though the Devil, and his blues-singing accomplices, was doing everything he could to dismember their congregations. The ministers' congregants picked up on the cry.
3) If you look at what blues performers from Clarksdale and the Delta actually said about the blues--above all, in interviews with LIVING BLUES and in their autobiographies--you find that 90% of them insisted, in precisely these words, that "blues is NOT the devil's music." But the old folk, the parents, the ministers, they said, constantly demonized the music. Blues is NOT the devil's music. That's what virtually ALL Delta blues players insisted. "Devil's music" was merely the bad publicity inflicted on the music by the old people, and by many church people who had been hoodwinked by the preachers and their angry accusations--accusations driven by economic and erotic competition.
4) A surprising number of Delta bluesmen, including John Lee Hooker, Sunnyland Slim, lots of 'em, had fathers who were ministers. The "devil's music" dispute was really an oedipal struggle, a struggle between stern fathers and errant sons.
5) According to a number of sociologists who studied religious life in the Delta during the period when Robert Johnson was living and playing in the Delta, the problem with young black people in Mississippi is that they just didn't take religion seriously. They laughed at and mocked the ministers; they held "Heaven and Hell" parties at their churches in which they made light of "sinful" activities. They were anything but devil-haunted. They didn't BELIEVE in the devil. This is what Hortense Powdermaker found in Indianola in the early 1930s. This is what John Work found in Clarksdale in 1941. One crabby old woman in Clarksdale in 1940 insisted that young folk were raising so much hell that they should be called the "New Rising Devil Class." They raised the Devil all the time, everywhere. Blues, to these black elders, was "devil's music" because young people were going to the devil. So to speak. Young people were getting all "modern"; women were smoking and staying out late in the cafes. How horrible!
6) Robert Johnson was a member of this young cohort of flagrantly irreverent young black people in the Delta. "Me and the Devil Blues" is the only blues song ever recorded that uses the name "Satan." Why does RJ use that word? Because it was the name that Christian true believers used in gospel songs. He was deliberately tweaking old folk. It's a bragging song about how bad he is, walking side by side with the devil. He was one of the few blues performers who, instead of denying the devil's music charge, decided to embrace is as a kind of reverse publicity, for the sake of giving his irreverent young black audience a culture hero, and for the sake of deliberately mocking & tweaking the uptight old folk. "I'm BAD, baby, and I don't care who knows it. You wanna date me?"
7) Robert Johnson didn't believe in the devil. That's why "Me and the Devil Blues" has two lighthearted asides--one in which he fondly chastizes his woman, the other in which he says, "I don't care WHERE you bury my body when I'm dead and gone." Church people cared deeply where they were buried. They wanted to be buried in their church plots. RJ, once again, was mocking church people and their uptight old-fogyish ways. That went over well with his audience of young folk who, like him, thought the whole devil's-music charge was hogwash.
Last Edited by on Sep 13, 2009 8:30 PM
"The last video is so full of shit that I just don't know where to start. It recycles every last idiotic piece of misinformation about RJ."
You're right about that, Adam... it provoked a lot of mixed reactions at the site where I found it.... didn't know whether I should post it or not, but since RJ is a household name in the blues world and everybody here knows his name (and most likely his story) I did... (still don't know if it was the right thing to do though...)
Thanks for taking the time to share your (well informed) views...
PS Looks like you've got a very interesting book in the making. ---------- DutchBones Tube
