Since I recently shared news on Facebook, I'll share news here. My book on the devil and the blues tradition, BEYOND THE CROSSROADS, is in the early stages of final approach. University of North Carolina Press is the publisher. Pub date is October 2. It's available now for preorder on Amazon. My copy of the bound galleys came in yesterday's mail, so for the first time I can actually hold something like a book in my hand.
My publisher is looking for a few indy bookstore gigs; I'm looking for a few campus gigs. I'd love to come to a college or university near you some time this fall or winter and talk for 45-60 minutes about the subject, which seems to have universal appeal to those who have any interest in the blues. If you've got a gig, please contact me at my university email: agussow@olemiss.edu
Longtime members here may remember that I started a thread back in 2008 or so, asking for suggestions about devil blues recordings. I ended up creating quite an archive of such songs. My sole criterion for inclusion was that it be a song whose lyrics (and usually whose title) referenced the devil and/or hell. I also included a handful of blues whose lyrics don't do that, including Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues." (Crossroads mythology is something I explore at length in the long fifth/final chapter of the book.)
Here's a Spotify playist I worked up from the book's appendix. I'm guessing that it contains 95% of what's in the appendix. I didn't write about all these songs, but I said something, even if only in passing, about most of them.
The book is by no means only a lyric analysis. In some sense it's a sociocultural, historical, and proto-theological analysis that gives me a rich context for then embarking on lyric analyses.
In the last section of the final chapter, I tell the story of Clarksdale's "the crossroads" location and monument. In order to tell it, I did a lot of archival research and also interviewed eighteen people in Clarksdale and elsewhere in Mississippi. So it's partly an historical account and partly a journalistic account.
When you write an in-depth monograph about a subject like this, and when you strive to think critically about the range of issues that arise, you end up arguing--as I do--that a lot of prior commentators have gotten things wrong. I don't particularly enjoy making enemies, but there are some people in the blues scholarly and blues touristic world who won't be particularly happy about what I have to say, including David Evans (one of my dissertation advisors and a referee for an early version of the manuscript), Elijah Wald, Ted Gioia, Ali Colleen Neff, the Delta Blues Museum, and Clarksdale Mayor Bill Luckett.
A four thousand word extract from the Robert Johnson chapter will be published in the October/November issue of Living Blues. On-sale date is October 1. It offers what I hope will be taken as a surprising new argument about the sources of RJ's orientation towards the supernatural.
There's virtually nothing about harmonica in the entire book. I make a passing mention of Sterling "Mr. Satan" Magee, but he's hardly there, either. The book is simply an attempt--the first sustained attempt in blues scholarship--to explore the devil/blues connection both broadly and deeply. I look at the 1986 film "Crossroads" and Clarksdale's crossroads in the final chapter because, I argue, a surprisingly extensive and longstanding devil/blues tradition ends up getting profoundly narrowed over the past fifty years into "Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads." That tableau is the first thing that many people mention when I mention the book's subject--as though it's surely going to be mostly about that. But it's not. It's about everything APART from that. But it's also about that. And of course in order to sell it, we're accenting that element in the cover art.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on May 07, 2017 6:08 AM
Congrats Adam. Sounds very interesting. I really enjoyed your Blues Talk series. I wished it got more in depth on a few areas. This was surely one of them. Looking forward to checking out the Book.
Keep us posted on places in which you goto talk about the book. Hopefully one is close enough for me to come. University of Delaware or Temple University in Philly would be a good place I would think.
Congratulations on the book, I look forward to reading it when it becomes available.
I have thought a bit about the myth of “selling one’s soul to the devil” and I have been exploring this take a bit. Here is one take on it I have considered. Perhaps you address this in your book.
In the myth, the talent is conveyed instantly when the contract is signed, and the payment is due at a later, undetermined date, usually at a time that maximizes pathos. In reality, payment is made up front, friends are ignored, pleasant pastimes are given up, opportunities to earn income are passed on, scorn is endured etc. as countless hours are spent perfecting one’s craft. At some point, the new talent breaks upon the scene possessed by that deadbeat shirker who in no way deserves to possess it. It certainly makes me feel better to know that they obtained their talent in an immoral deal that is beneath me to do, and that they will pay dearly for in the future, than to think they got it because they had more determination, perseverance, grit and ability to delay gratification than I do.
Last Edited by STME58 on May 07, 2017 11:38 AM
Adam, there is a very successful indy bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont that also has a café and tons of traffic, including many tourists. Here is the contact info: Northshire Bookstore
4869 Main St, Manchester Center, VT · (802) 362-2200
I mention the Jerry McCain song in the book. I'm not sure it's a joke! I'd never thought about that.
Again, I should note that the tenor of this thread absolutely confirms the premise on which my book was written: these days, when the subject of the devil and the blues comes up, the conversation invariably bends towards crossroads transactions. Yet four out of the five chapters of the book are about other aspects of the devil/blues tradition--including the idea that when most black southern folks said, "He's sold his soul to the devil, playing music like that," they weren't thinking about crossroads, they were making a much more general indictment that accrued to anybody who, in that time and place, made non-sanctified music. But most of my book isn't about that, either. It's about other ways in which the devil was invoked in a multitude of blues songs, from men who said "I've got ways like the devil," to women who cried "The devil's gonna get you!" at unfaithful lovers, to men who complained "I been dealin' with the devil" as a way of talking about mean and spiteful women.
Finally, even if we do allow the conversation to drift back to crossroads transactions, it's important to remember that a folklorist named Harry Middleton Hyatt went out in the 1930s and did interviews with a range of black southerners in Maryland, the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia. He collected 30-odd tales of crossroads transactions in a much bigger book, in a section called "Sell Soul to Devil." None of the accounts mentioned blues. Few of them mentioned the guitar. None of them were set in Mississippi. They mentioned skill at card playing, violin, accordion. Some of them were set in graveyards rather than crossroads. In most of them you have to go to the location in question seven, or nine, times. Sometimes you go at midnight; sometimes you go in "morning," meaning first light or dawn. For somebody who is looking for confirmation of the classic gothic image of, say, Robert Johnson and a guy with horns, they don't really offer confirmation. And again: not a single one of them uses the word "blues." There's absolutely no reason why we should think of the blues as special in that respect, or of crossroads rituals in the black South as uniquely connected with the blues. THAT is purely a creation of white romantic imaginations.
But that last fact is partly a function of the fact that crossroads folklore on American soil is a sort of uneven blend of European and African elements. Probably more European than African, but there's definitely some African in there. And when you're talking Africa and crossroads, you're talking about Esu/Eshu/Legba, who was somewhat different than the American/European devil. In the African model, you didn't go to the crossroads, like Faust, to sell your soul and risk eternal damnation. You went there to commune with an orisha, a tricky, capricious, but also enlivening spirit, one who could transform your life and send you in a new direction.
That's the spirit, BTW, in which I called on Sterling Magee in the third chorus of my version of "Crossroads Blues." I vividly imagined the scene: standing at the crossroads in Lafayette County where HCH kicked off in 2010--a few folks here will remember that weird and marvelous moment!--and calling on him as I attempted to transform myself from a harp player into a one-man band. I never once envisioned myself "selling my soul to the devil." I imagined myself calling on Sterling's wisdom, since he, too, had once transformed himself from an instrumentalist into a one-man band.
In other words, and to sum up the paradox, there is so SOME extent a continuity between black southern religious folk in the 1930s and white romantics of today in attitudes towards soul-selling in a blues context: for both, the devil is real, and a player in the transaction. But for African American blues musicians in the 1920s and 30s, including (for what it's worth) Robert Johnson, the idea that blues was "devil's music" or that hellfire and brimstone were your fate if you messed with it--that was just what the old folks said. Far more black blues players than not insisted that the blues WASN'T devil's music. They resented the charge. That was just moralistic propaganda that self-interested ministers and aging black parishoners were trying to throw on them.
To me, that was one of the most fascinating and underpublicized discoveries of the whole research process. Three sociologists who studied the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s, John Dollard, Hortense Powdermaker, and Charles S. Johnson (two white, one black), all came to the same surprised conclusion: black youth in the Delta of that period were amazingly irreverent. They just didn't buy the hellfire-and-brimstone ideas that the older religious folk embraced. They were young, fast, "modern." They didn't believe in the devil and hell. They mocked preachers--they thought preachers were just in it for the money and the sex (and fried chicken.) That was Robert Johnson's cohort. He was basically on the cutting-edge of that attitude. So those people who talk about him as devil-haunted have it completely backwards. When he sang "Me and the devil was walking side by side," he was swaggering. He was laughing. He was intentionally cultivating the disapproving-adults-with-big-shocked-eyes. That made him hip.
Other commentators, including some very good blues scholars, never talk about this prevailing attitude of irreverence among young black folks in the Delta, but it's the single biggest takeaway from the sociologist's reports. And Coahoma County--Clarksdale--was, according to Charles S. Johnson, head and shoulders above the rest of the black South in terms of youthful skepticism about organized religion. That's because it was, for its time, a modern town, with fast new paved highways, cafes, lots of musicians coming through from north and south.
Remember Flip Wilson as Geraldine? "The devil made me do it." Johnson was hip because he could joke about that stuff.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on May 08, 2017 5:07 AM
The 18th violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini was accused by some in his time of having sold his soul to the devil..
Excitable folks in some of his audiences even went so far as to state that they could see the devil standing behind Paganini on stage and guiding lightning-fast playing.
"in order to discuss the devil in music, you have to go back to the beginning."
Absolutely. That's why it took me seven years to research and write the g-d d--ned book.
One thing to remember is that the Biblical devil--Satan--is himself a mish-mash of earlier deities and spirits from other traditions, including Zoroastrianism. Loki is in there, too, along with Pan.
I've always loved the topic. I've tried to attack it in my own way a couple times. We might have played this one out once or twice at an open mic. This recording though was the first time we ever practiced the whole thing through as a band though. We wanted a scratch copy to practice to. The guitar wanted another shot at working out a more interesting part, and the harp part was never meant to be put out like this, but I still think it's kind of a fun song, as songs about selling your soul to the devil go. It's written from the devil's perspective. It was supposed to have dueling harp players in the final version. (The band broke up before we got that far.) (edit- oops, that was an even rougher version!)
I can remember when I was a kid there was a very real concern by some that percussion in the church could literally drum in demons. This was also a time of fears of "backwards masking" and other ways the demonic could be introduced to the unsuspecting through music. I also remember sermons on why Geraldine's "The devil made me do it" was not funny, and how to fend off the devil when he tempts you. Today in that same church, a drum kit sits on the platform. It is in a clear plastic cage though, perhaps to keep the demons contained should they enter the drummer. :-)
Interestingly, I looked at an old AC/DC album cover recently and I saw in it just that cheeky irreverence Adam attributes to Robert Johnson in his day. It is both amusing and sad that I could not see that at the time the AC/DC album came out.
I'll be barnstorming for the five or six weeks after pub date. We'll play Indianapolis and then Rosa's Lounge in Chicago in early November. Still waiting for the first advance reviews to come in. I've got two copies of the finished book in my hand. It thumps when you put it down on a table. All over but the shoutin'.
"One thing to remember is that the Biblical devil--Satan--is himself a mish-mash of earlier deities and spirits from other traditions, including Zoroastrianism. Loki is in there, too, along with Pan."
That reference to Loki will confuse some people - I've seen people assert that Scandinavian mythology is the ur-mythology: in spite of first being written down 2,000 years AFTER Homer was written down, I asked? I didn't get a reply.
Among the 50 books on my floor bookmarked on page 10 are books on cult psychology (religions are cults with official status, therefore religions are a sub-set of cults), the anthropology of Voodoo (and Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson is a must-read if you haven't read it) and the prose and verse Eddas. Afaicr, the Norse gods are all descended from Priam of Troy (Aesir means "Asians") and Loki comes from the Turkish reception of Ulysses. I assume your Loki is some kind of Jungian archetype.
I once Amazon-reviewed a book of negro spirituals which I said was sad stuff - Christianity inflicted upon slaves together with their slavery as some kind of sweetening package. Amazon refused to publish it. Since then I've learnt more from Voodoo about the sneaky ways "Christianity" can be received by people who don't really want to receive it. In truth of course, Christianity can be received any way it suits someone - look at the GOP, or the slavers. My point being, Satan can be anyone or anything you want him to be.
I may buy your book if it's cheap enough, Adam (I have high hopes for its content), but it will probably end up on my floor bookmarked on page 10.
My name is Andrew and I'm a TVholic.
Sigh. ---------- Andrew. -----------------------------------------
Last Edited by Andrew on Sep 08, 2017 11:54 PM
Andrew i feel i must of missed something in your diatribe..but what exactly is the significance of "page 10"? As an aside,there are 4 religions that can claim plus or minus a billion adherents, yet they all believe they are right...sometimes they will kill you if you were not born into their particular belief system. Or even if (in the case of Christians and Muslims particularly) you interpret the dogma differently than the established regime. Therefore it is all happenstance as to what particular belief system any one person ends up belonging to.(and therefore whom you are willing to kill) Talk of Devils ,Pan ,Loki etc etc is just mythological bullshit. I think the Professors summation of the situation in Mississippi in the early years of the Blues is spot on.
The significance of page 10? It's that I haven't got very far with them because I watch too much TV!
I'm not sure why you think it was a diatribe, unless you have misunderstood the religious references - before WWII African Americans didn't have a lot of contact with anything but Christianity, so they will have used its mythology. ---------- Andrew. -----------------------------------------
Last Edited by Andrew on Sep 09, 2017 8:11 AM
"before WWII African Americans didn't have a lot of contact with anything but Christianity, so they will have used its mythology". The first part of this sentence is quite wrong, at least if you're talking about other religions. A measurable number of American slaves were Muslims; they were imported from countries where Islam, brought initially by Arabs, presided. Keith Cartwright's READING AFRICA INTO AMERICAN LITERATURE talks about the phenomenon of literate Muslim slaves from Senegal. They were men of the book. Their religion was Islam, not Christianity. Of course later, in the 1930s--before WWII--W.D. Fard and then Elijah Muhammad promulgated a very different Black Muslim theology.
Finally, straight through the entire slavery period and very much persisting into the middle decades of the 20th century, hoodoo was an important black folk religion. John the Conqueror Root, mojo bags, tracking, Hot Foot Powder, charms, etc. Christians tried to dismiss it as heathenism and "superstition," but it was plainly a form of black folk religion.
So no: before WWII, African Americans had a lot of contact, of various sorts, with religions other than Christianity. But Christianity certainly prevailed within black communities, in the urban North as well as the rural South, and the devil, absorbing a range of influences and inflections, became a key figure, especially in southern places like Clarksdale, Mississippi, where you had a lot of black religious ambition--a desire to build and expand churches--colliding with urban influences: jukeboxes filled with modern swing music and the attitudes it conveyed; touring minstrel shows featuring a range of acts from up north (Clarksdale often had several large shows at the same time during cotton harvest season), and a majority black population looking for entertainment and disinclined to listen to the old folks' warnings about "going to the devil."
My choice of words was poor. I apologise. It was a stab at deciphering indigo's point. Christianity prevailed. That wasn't in doubt.
I had already mentioned Hoodoo/Voodoo/Vodun/Vodou. The impression I got from the Hornimann museum book on it was that it has Catholic elements in order to pretend to be a reception of Christianty, but my memory is atrocious.Anyway, clearly it's transparently not Christian. I kept wanting to say it was a cargo cult, but then I realised I couldn't remember any details about cargo cults either. Back to the books. ---------- Andrew. -----------------------------------------
Last Edited by Andrew on Sep 09, 2017 11:40 AM
I hate to be persnickety, but you didn't actually mention hoodoo. You mentioned voodoo. They're not identical. Jim Haskins is particularly good on this point:
As for Loki: I mention Loki only once, in passing, merely to point out the the Biblical Devil / Satan isn't some fixed thing that was born intact and finished, but was, like many deities, a congeries of various belief-strands.
Blues itself is like that. One of the "bluesiest" elements of the blues is the long descending melismatic vocal strain--a field holler, which finds its way into the blues pretty early, although it is by no means an essential part of all early blues. (Lots of blues doesn't have much melisma. BB King, on the other hand, has a LOT of melisma.) Gerhard Kubik, in AFRICA AND THE BLUES, argues--persuasively, to my mind--that this element of the blues is actually Islamic. It gets into African vocal practice by way of Islam and the sort of vocal music made in the heavily Islamicized regions in Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, and elsewhere from which slaves were transported to America. So "blues vocals," such as they are, aren't just about "African cultural materials" working their way into New World musical practice. They're the Islamic strain--the Arab strain--in African culture inflecting black southern musical culture in America.
All this talk of African Islamic influence on the blues has enticed me to make my first post on the main forum.
A friend of mine recently alerted me to a band called Tinariwen, who are based out of Mali and Algeria. Apparently they've won multiple Grammies so I expect I'm quite late to the party here. Here are two of my favourites from them:
"Gerhard Kubik, in AFRICA AND THE BLUES, argues--persuasively, to my mind--that this element of the blues is actually Islamic. It gets into African vocal practice by way of Islam"
Yes, the part of sub-Saharan West Africa slavers tended to take slaves from was at one time part of the Mansa Musa's empire. ---------- Andrew. -----------------------------------------
Last Edited by Andrew on Sep 10, 2017 1:13 AM
pythonbeg, you need to be careful about the whole this-sounds-like-this thing these days when Africa and America are what is being talked about. Africans have been listening to American blues for a while now. South Africans have been listening to, and being influenced, American jazz for decades. I was in a little fishing village in Senegal; I was part of a group of international scholars transported there for a blues festival. There was a blues guitarist playing. His name was Vieux MacFaye. His music sounded a lot like Chicago blues--because he'd listened to a lot of Chicago blues. This is what he's doing these days:
Fair point Adam. There can be a lot of confirmation bias in these things, although according to Wikipedia these guys hadn't heard any Blues music until they first toured America in 2001 (no citation is provided, make of that what you will). It's good music nonetheless.
That's interesting. I saw him in Jiloor, Senegal in January 2005. So it's certainly possible that he'd only been playing blues for three or four years at that point.
This will definitely be at the top of my too-be-read list. There's a fellow down in Houston named Roger Wood. He's retired from the Houston Community College system and is the go to guy on Houston Blues. He penned a great book about the blues in Houston called, natch, Down In Houston and also one on Texas Zydeco. He writes frequently for the blues mags and you two would hit it off. Search Roger Wood on Facebook and check out this site also; http://houstonculture.org/experts/wood.html ---------- Ricky B http://www.bushdogblues.blogspot.com RIVER BOTTOM BLUES--crime novel for blues fans available at Amazon/B&N, iTunes, iBook THE DEVIL'S BLUES--ditto THE OAXACAN KID--available now HOWLING MOUNTAIN BLUES--Ditto too, now available
Well, heck. The whole point of my post mentioning Roger Wood was to tell you to hook up with him to arrange a speaking gig in Houston. ---------- Ricky B http://www.bushdogblues.blogspot.com RIVER BOTTOM BLUES--crime novel for blues fans available at Amazon/B&N, iTunes, iBook THE DEVIL'S BLUES--ditto THE OAXACAN KID--available now HOWLING MOUNTAIN BLUES--Ditto too, now available
have almost finished the book and happy that it is left to readers discretion about the "event"at the crossroads....to me the crossroads represent the road north for those looking for better life in memphis or chicago in terms of employment
Since the book's official pub date, October 2nd, is only about a week away, I've uploaded a couple of preview videos in which I sketch out the book's contents in slightly different densities of detail. I'll post them both here. The first is about seven minutes long; the second is 25 minutes long.
Something very strange, almost eerie, happens halfway through the second video.
Here, just for the record, is my current gig list, including several radio appearances. I'll have books for sale at every gig except, perhaps, for the NHL gig in the UK, where the weight issue will keep me from playing book importer.
10/1/17: Clarksdale, MS - Levon's Bar & Grill (Blues Doctors, 3:30 - 6:30) Publication party for Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition! Books available for purchase and signing.
10/2/17: Cleveland, MS - Delta State University (paper on Clarksdale's "The Crossroads" presented at the International Conference on the Blues, 2-2:50 PM) Official pub date for Beyond the Crossroads!
10/6/17: Poughkeepsie, NY - WVKR 91.3 FM (on-air w/Nick Delay re: Beyond the Crossroads interview, 11 AM EST)
10/6/17: Sirius/XM channel 121 - "Tell Me Everything" with John Fugelsang (Beyond the Crossroads interview, 2:35-2:56 EST)
10/6/17: Helena, AR - King Biscuit Blues Festival (Blues Doctors busking, 4-8 PM)
10/7/17: Vicksburg, MS - Lorelei Books (Beyond the Crossroads talk, 4 PM)
10/10/17: Greenwood, MS - Turnrow Books (Beyond the Crossroads talk, 5:30 PM)
10/12/17: Oxford, MS - Thacker Mountain Radio (Beyond the Crossroads interview, 6 PM)
10/13/17: Jackson, MS - Lemuria Books (Beyond the Crossroads talk, 5 PM)
10/13/17: Jackson, MS - Fenian's Pub (Blues Doctors, 9-12 PM)
I managed to go home for a quick overnight to kiss my dog, pet my wife and pickup the latest stack of invoices. Lo and behold, my copy of Beyond the Crossroads was in the PO Box. I had three undisturbed hours this morning while in the chamber satisfying my decompression commitment to start it.
I will say I'm digging it, El Profesor.
---------- ~Buzadero Underwater Janitor, Patriot MBH poseur since 11Nov2008
Thanks, Buz. Amazon is calling. They've asking for your rave review. As Blanche DuBois told Stanley Kowalski--and I'm quoting from memory here--"I have always depended on the kindness of harp players."
"I laughed, I cried. I started leaving the light on in the woodshed. Adam Gussow manages to articulate that alchemy that shan't be mentioned aloud. I finished the book and found a Luciferous invoice in my Inbox. Recommended reading for anyone with an unrealistic elevated sense of the street value of their own soul"
---------- ~Buzadero Underwater Janitor, Patriot MBH poseur since 11Nov2008
I sold my soul for a cheese sandwich and some olive tapenade. It was Winnimere cheese and it was fantastic. The tapenade is still in my refrigerator. I didn't like it, but can't bear the thought of throwing away something that I've paid my soul for. ---------- Marc Graci YouTube Channel
Just got mine delivered from Amazon on Fri,( that's copy of the book, not soul, there are still a few things they don't carry, yet.) had time to read thru the introduction, WOW you sure don't mess around.
