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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
Crossroads meaning
Crossroads meaning
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littleeasy
30 posts
Jan 25, 2011
9:55 AM
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I have a few questions concerning the song crossroads. What is the significance of going to rosedale and take my rider by my side. And was Willie Brown a friend of Johnson's or a ficticious character. Fill me in. thanx
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groyster1
787 posts
Jan 25, 2011
10:05 AM
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original post deleted refer to the next post in the answer to the question
Last Edited by on Jan 25, 2011 12:25 PM
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kudzurunner
2285 posts
Jan 25, 2011
10:10 AM
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Rosedale is just a smallish town in the southern part of the Mississippi Delta. I presume that Johnson traveled through there. He was a musician who traveled a lot. "Take my rider by my side" means "bring along my girlfriend." (Or GF, as we might say today. LOL.) "Rider" is a euphemism for lover.
Johnson doesn't sing about Rosedale in "Cross Road Blues," he sings about it in "Traveling Riverside Blues." When Clapton and Cream covered "Cross Road Blues" as "Crossroads," Clapton shifted lines from "Traveling Riverside Blues" to the adapted version.
Willie Brown was a friend of Johnson's. He's not a fictitious character.
Nowhere in his recorded songs does Robert Johnson specifically sing about selling his soul to the devil. I'm certainly not the first person to note this fact: Gayle Dean Wardlow makes exactly the same claim in CHASIN' THE DEVIL MUSIC, and Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCullough also note it in their book about Johnson.
In speaking about the devil at all, we are breaching the forum creed. Since I am writing a scholarly book about the devil and the blues, and since I happen to run this website and forum, I'm going to make a one-time exemption and I'm going to ask both for the moderators' forbearance and the cooperation of the forum membership. I've recently published the first chapter of my book-in-progress in two successive articles in ARKANSAS REVIEW. The second article is entitled "Heaven and Hell Parties: Ministers, Bluesmen, and Black Youth in the Mississippi Delta, 1920-1942." In the article, I make the point that contemporary sociologists at the time AND black elders both agreed that the problem with young people (Robert Johnson's youthful peers and audience) was that they just DIDN'T believe in hellfire and brimstone anymore. They didn't "believe" in the devil. They didn't particularly believe in god. They were more interesting in drinking and dancing. The puritanical old folks framed this modern youthful attitude as a whole younger generation having "gone to the devil." That's hardly the same thing as selling your soul to the devil.
I'm going to post a long excerpt from that article below. I ask the moderators that we allow one long thread on the specific topic of Robert Johnson and the devil, and I ask forum members to keep to the topic--rather than, for example, than branching off into long lists of Catholic priest charged with pederasty, as happened on one notable occasion.
Here's the excerpt from my article:
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The New Rising Devil Class
Clarksdale and the surrounding Delta, including Memphis to the North, are particularly germane to the current discussion. This is true not just because the preponderance of available evidence comes from blues performers associated with those areas, but because the devil’s-music dispute was a generational conflict—modern black youth rejecting the strictures of conservative black elders—and because the sociology of the Delta was uniquely conducive to such a breach.
This is not to say that the conflict didn’t materialize elsewhere. Many commentators have remarked on the cynicism of black youth, northern and southern, in the decades between the World Wars. Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal identified a clear point of attitudinal divergence in the late 1930s between African Americans young and old over the question of church-endorsed behavioral proscriptions:
The denominations to which Negroes predominantly belong—Baptist and Methodist—attempt to exercise strict control over morals, and have a rather broad definition of morals. For want of a better term, we may say that they have “puritanical” standards of behavior….[T]he practices of gambling, drinking, drug-taking, smoking, snuff-dipping, card-playing, dancing and other minor “vices” are condemned…..These injunctions seem to have an effect on middle class Negroes, especially those who are ready to settle down….The bulk of the lower class, and the youth of all classes, seems to pay little attention to them.
The attitudinal alignment between the black lower class (which includes, presumably, both the working class and the criminal underclass) and black youth is intriguing, suggesting as it does that blues culture, and the behavioral freedoms it endorsed, was also a kind of youth culture during this period. Myrdal’s finding is supplemented by the testimony of Leila Holmes, a Holiness preacher in South Carolina, interviewed by the Federal Writers Project in 1939, who thought pop culture—commodified songs and dances—was the devil’s way of claiming the young. “The younger generation in Columbia is just ruined. The songs they sing are plumb outlandish. They dance somethin’ scandalous, day and night, by these nickelos [nickelodeon-style jukeboxes]. Instead of being in school tryin’ to learn how to be decent, they out cuttin’ the buck day in and day out, steppin’ in every trap the devils got set for ‘em.”
Jukeboxes came to the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s, and their presence bespoke a secular, urbane modernity—since they played the latest hits by Louis Jordan, Fats Waller, and others—that was as alluring to the young as it was unnerving to their parents. If the prewar Delta was not, as it has sometimes been depicted in blues mythologies, a premodern backwater suffocated by white sadism and veiled by hoodoo moons, neither was it quite as swimmingly up-to-date as Harlem, Chicago, and other urban centers, although the currents of attitude and feeling carried by pop music helped narrow the difference. This gradient helps explain some of the passion that drove the Great Migration, a hunger not merely to escape oppression but to embrace what was already half-known from evidence that had percolated into the Delta: sheet music and recordings, pop songs (such as “St. Louis Blues”) covered by wandering guitarists, but also a more generalized attitude of youthful rebellion and devil-may-care sophistication propagated by both the white bohemians of the so-called Lost Generation and the black bohemians known as New Negroes. Many of the latter—Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman—were themselves migrants from the hinterlands, but so too were Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Young black and white urbanites of the 1920s had their own notable investment in devil-themed blues, one that can’t wholly be distinguished from the devil’s-music dispute in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South. Cultural currents flowed both ways, and black youth who remained in the Delta were not immune to the siren-song of modernity. Modernity just took a little longer to arrive down home.
The most detailed and insightful survey of African American life in the Mississippi Delta during this period is the Fisk University–Library of Congress Coahoma County Study made in 1941 and 1942, a collaborative effort that brought folklorist Alan Lomax together with a trio of black academics: musicologist John W. Work, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Jr., a doctoral student in sociology. It was a vexed partnership in certain ways; Lomax’s role as the study’s official (white) figurehead remains a point of scholarly debate. But the study, parts of which show up in Lomax’s memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1993) and the bulk of which shows up in the manuscripts by Work, Jones, and Adams collected in Lost Delta Found (2005), goes a long way towards dispersing the gothic mists that seem to shroud discussions of the pre-war Delta, particularly when the devil and the blues are the subject at hand. Most notably, all four men agree on the rough outlines of a four-generation schematic that helps explain why the devil’s-music dispute took such a potent form in the region. Adapting Jones’s terms, I’ll call these generations “the river generation,” “the railroad generation,” “the automobile generation,” and “the young moderns.”
The river generation, according to Jones, were those who, by the early 1940s, had lived into their 70s and 80s. They were the pioneers who cleared and settled the Delta. They drained swamps, cut down trees, hauled out stumps, and built the levees. They were men, most of them, and they had a pioneer vitality and rough-hewn, secular tastes. Lomax interviewed an eighty-six year old fiddler named Alec Robertson, a survivor from this period. He had “fiddled for the devil for fifty-seven years,” he told Lomax, before suddenly getting religion with the help of his Holiness ladyfriend at the age of 75. “The devil had his hands on me principally,” he admitted. “I’d do anything a person could do—dip snuff, chew tobacco, drink whiskey, cuss, and run around….I used to be rough, but, since I got religion, it changed all them old habits.”
The men of the river generation were tamed and supplanted by the railroad generation, the men and women who came after the country had been opened up. “They are people, now between the ages of fifty and seventy,” writes Jones, “who found the frontier pushed back, the river dwindling in importance, and the era of the railroad beginning”:
People belonging to this second generation [of black Delta residents] are now old, but they are still strong and vigorous. Having come with the first orderly regimes established after the frontier, they still represent order. They frown alike on the violence of the pioneer life they found and the disorderly life of the present. Mrs. Reed, referring to one of the pioneer heroes, remarked, “I just couldn’t stand him. He was the kinda man didn’t have no respect for nobody—for himself and nobody else. He was a devil.” The present, in contrast to the orderly past which she helped to develop, seems confused and disorderly to her as well as to her contemporaries. Their world reached its flowering around the First World War and suffered a collapse later which has never been quite understood…In the active lives of the second generation the church became the dominant institution of the community.
This second generation might just as well have been called the church generation—or the devil’s music generation, since it was people of this age who leveled that charge at the songs and guitars favored by the generation that followed, and who whipped those blues-struck children into line. Rev. William Hooker (b. 1871), who saw his daughter courted by a young bluesman named Tommy Hollins and lost both his wife and his son John Lee to another bluesman named Will Moore, is an exemplar of the railroad generation. So, too, is Muddy Waters’s grandmother Della (b. 1881), who told Muddy, when he first picked up a harmonica, “You’re playing for the devil. Devil’s gonna get you.” This generation built Baptist and Methodist churches throughout the Delta, then watched their membership rolls dissolve as the Great Migration swept through in the aftermath of the Great War. This generation also demonized the blues, transforming the restless, good-timing music into symbol of all that was wrong with the modern world.
The third generation in the black Delta was the blues-inventing generation, the generation that built the juke joints. Born between 1890 and 1910, Charley Patton, Son House, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, and Skip James belonged to this generation. Like their Lost Generation equivalents, the young people of this generation lived in a rapidly changing world that had been liberated by the automobile and, in the war’s aftermath, a sense that many of the old rules were no longer in effect. “They have no pleasant memories of the isolation and stabilization before motor transportation arrived,” writes Jones. “[T]hey have enjoyed the freedom of movement the ‘good road’ brought as they rattled about in the second-hand cars their cotton money bought….Electric lights in the church and electricity to make their nickels bring music out of ‘Seeburgs’ [jukeboxes] and radios are their pride.” Although their parents might see the church and the devil’s music as incommensurable, this generation wasn’t quite so sure: Patton, House, and James each found different ways of preaching the blues, reconciling (or merely exchanging) the roles of preacher and bluesman.
The fourth generation, the young moderns, consisted of black Delta residents born later than 1910, which is to say the 30-and-under crowd. These are the familiar superstars of the Delta blues, many of whom ultimately ended up in Chicago as part of the second Great Migration after World War II: Howlin’ Wolf (b. 1910 but coming into his own slightly late), Robert Johnson (b. 1911), Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson (1913), Willie Dixon (1915), Elmore James (1918), John Lee Hooker (1920), B. B. King (1925). To list those names now is to be confronted with a pantheon of blues elders, the “old school,” so it comes as a shock to see them in social context as the teenagers and twenty-somethings they were when Louis Jones came to Coahoma County in 1941. “Youths and children,” observed Jones, “try to get a grip on life in the midst of a disintegrating past and a fascinating present….They pick cotton, play their games, follow their parents through a routine of living, and go to school. They sing the songs currently popular on the radio and the juke boxes and learn others as they hear them sung by older people at home and in the fields.” The truth is, the younger bluesmen were perched, in attitudinal and behavioral terms, on the cutting edge of this generational cohort; they were style-setters among the young moderns. Not everybody was happy about the style they set. Samuel C. Adams interviewed an unnamed woman from the railroad generation who viewed Clarksdale and its young people as hopelessly fallen and the contemporary church as incapable of saving them:
When I was a girl I didn’t go into town and stay out all of the night. Mothers just not raising their girls right; allowing girls to smoke cigarettes, ride automobiles, drink, and do everything. And the church don’t say nothing about it. These younger folks calling themselves having a good time. They drinks whiskey, they gambles, and they goes to town….They want to go to town to raise all kind of devilment. And you know there ain’t very much right in our cities now. There used to be special places to raise the devil, now the whole city. They got a class now that oughta be called the New Rising Devil Class.
The King and Anderson Plantation, on which Adams conducted most of his research, was a huge enterprise located directly adjacent to Clarksdale, a town of 12,000, roughly 10,000 of whom were black. Clarksdale, which according to Adams had nine Negro juke joints, eight Negro churches, and one hundred Negro ministers, was treated in his study as “the seat of urban influence” vis a vis the plantation. One of John Work’s informants, an elderly male Sunday school teacher in Clarksdale and another member of the railroad generation, confirmed the unnamed woman’s claim that young moderns in the town—and the Delta as a whole--were manifesting far too much independence of mind:
“[T]he devil didn’t seem to have much of a chance in the hills….But now you take down here…Mobility is very great, and the ordinary community controls that you find up in the Hills…well, you don’t find them here….
Not so long ago I was teaching Sunday School to a group of these boys and girls around here, and we was talking about using one’s talents. You know how God gave every man certain talents, and some used them wisely and others used them foolishly…
Then several inquisitive souls began to want to know if a person could use his talents successfully—and be a sinner? They talked about the gambler, the card shark, the policy operators, and finally they got settled down on Blues singers.
They wanted to know if it was a greater sin to let one’s talents lay aside or to use one’s talents in the wrong way, yet share the profits with the church. You can see what sort of things these youngsters got on their minds. Yes sir! They’re getting all modern. They talked about Ella Fitzgerald who makes her living singing the blues. Some thought that singing the blues was her talent and they couldn’t see how that was wrong, especially if she shared her profits with the church.
No, the church ain’t like what it used to be—the days of eye-balls-a- drippin’ and skulls-a-bilin.
A crucial point emerges from the testimony of these two members of the railroad generation: the devil was alive and well in the Delta in 1940, but he lived primarily as a rhetorical strategy deployed by the old folks to express their disapproval of young moderns—including the Delta bluesmen--who simply didn’t take religion, much less hellfire-and-brimstone sermonizing, very seriously. To rhapsodize, as Greil Marcus famously did, that the blues singers “sang as if their understanding of the devil was strong enough to force a belief in God out of their lives,” is to miss this point. What the blues singers of the automobile generation and the young moderns understood was that their elders, struggling to maintain control, were determined to smear them--their music, their new freedoms, their comparative religious irreverence or indifference--with the devil’s brush, including insults like “New Rising Devil Class.” What they took very seriously indeed, virtually all of them, was the need to insist that blues was not “devil’s music,” regardless of what their elders and religiously-minded peers might say. A few, of course, decided to mock their elders not by fighting the charge but by embracing it, transforming it into a badge of honor, an emblem of insouciant modernity.
The word “irreverence” is particularly important in this context: it contradicts pretty much everything we have been taught to think about Delta religiosity and the Delta blues, the latter epitomized by the haunted figure of Robert Johnson. “He walked his road like a failed, orphaned Puritan,” insists Marcus, “…framing his tales with old echoes of sin and damnation. There were demons in his songs—blues that walked like a man, the devil, or the two in league with each other.” Yet the contemporary evidence cuts sharply against this portrait, suggesting instead that Johnson’s peers—his audience--had lightheartedly dismissed threats of hellfire that were the lingering inheritance of the Great Awakening. “[T]he Christianity of these Negroes,” writes Hortense Powdermaker of her Indianola subjects in the early 1930s, “is in essence quite different from that of the missionizing period, and of most local Whites today. Benevolent mercy rather than stern justice is the chief attribute of the Negro’s God….The accent has shifted from hell to heaven, from retribution to forgiveness, from fear to hope.” Church affairs, she added, were characterized by “gusto and hilarity.” Both John Work and Samuel Adams remark on a singular church event that took place in Clarksdale in the fall of 1941: a “Heaven and Hell” party given by the Y.M.C.A and Y.W.C.A. Business Club of the St. John Baptist Church. “In addition to its being a concession to the demands of the younger people for greater secular activity,” notes Work, “the ‘heaven and hell’ party represents temporarily at least a practical abandonment by the church of its former rigid community sanctions.” The elder of the church, Deacon Jones [!], tells Adams that “[a]ll the deacons…are going to stay away from the party. We are going to let them younger folks, you understand, have their way.” The party itself is described by a young female schoolteacher:
Well, I’ll tell you, it’s costing a dime to get in. You buys a ticket, which tells you which way you’ll be going—to Heaven, or to Hell. Now you can’t go to both of them. You got to do what the ticket says. Well, if you gets a ticket to Heaven they serves you ice cream and cake, and you just sits around and talks, and maybe plays games. But if you gets a ticket to Hell they serves you hot cocoa and red hot spaghetti—and they dance, play cards, checks, and do most anything.
If it’s hard for us to imagine a Baptist church in Mississippi in 1941 allowing its young parishioners to carve a temporary party-space called “Hell” out of its sanctified interior and sell tickets to the shindig, then we don’t know quite as much about the world that gave rise to the Delta blues as we thought we did. The aftermath of the devastation wrought on the Delta’s churches by the great migration of the 1920s, plainly, was a new readiness on the part of church elders to adapt to the needs and desires of a youthful, playful clientele.
The spirit of youthful irreverence indexed by the “Heaven and Hell” party and the aging Clarksdale informants quoted earlier shows up at various points in the blues tradition, refiguring the devil and hell in ways that subvert the old folks’ Manichean rigidities. “He Calls That Religion” (1932) is one example; it mischievously turns the tables on Deacon Jones, accusing him of the money-hunger and lust that were usually the bluesman’s cross to bear and consigning him to hell from the standpoint of righteous indignation. Two additional examples will clarify my point. The first, Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues” (1937), has often been cited as Exhibit A in invocations of the bluesman’s presumptive “closeness” to, spiritual alignment with, the devil and his implacable evil, and for obvious reasons:
Early this morning…when you knocked upon my door
Early this morning, whoo…when you knocked upon my door
And I said hello Satan…I believe it's time to go
Me and the devil…was walking side by side
Me and the devil, whoo…was walking side by side
And I'm going to beat my woman…until I get satisfied
She said you don’t see why…that you would dog me around
[spoken: Now baby you know you ain’t doin’ me right, dontcha?]
She said you don’t see why…ooooo…that you would dog me around
It must've be that old evil spirit…so deep down in the ground
You may bury my body…down by the highway side
[spoken: Baby I don’t care where you bury my body when I’m dead and gone]
You may bury my body…whooo…..down by the highway side
So my old evil spirit…can get a Greyhound bus and ride
Greil Marcus likens the opening stanza, with its “eerie resignation,” to “that moment when Ahab goes over to the devil-worshipping Parsees he kept stowed away in the hold of the Pequod.” Russell Banks, in an essay entitled “The Devil and Robert Johnson” (1991), psychologizes the bluesman and is profoundly disturbed by what he finds:
This is the work of a disturbed male psyche telling its frightening and frightened secrets. No apology, no rationalization, no denial. Just the awful truth of the sick need to beat a woman. By switching abruptly in a single verse from the flirtatious, slightly heretical image of a man striding side-by- side with the devil to the image of that same man making the terrifying promise that he will beat his woman until he gets his satisfaction, Johnson imbues the figure of Satan with radical sexual complexity and power, and gives to his raw little narrative a chilling believability that utterly transforms the romantic convention of the male figure in thrall to the devil.
Eerie, frightening, awful, sick, terrifying, raw, chilling, and in thrall to the devil: nothing playful here! Or is there? Elijah Wald has argued that “an unbiased reader, unaware of the Johnson legend, might see quite easily” that “as far as the lyrics go, this is meant to be a funny song,” but much of the humor, I suggest, is contained in the two rapid-fire spoken asides. Both of these asides are directed at the woman that the singer claims he’s going to beat “until he gets satisfied”; their combined effect is to undercut the seriousness of his threat by establishing a kind of lighthearted, intimate bond with the woman over which his bravura self-projections hover rather than loom heavily. Although the idea may shock some white intellectuals, the blues lyric tradition is rife with comic braggadocio in which both male and female blues singers threaten to wreak havoc on members of the opposite sex—a form of rhetorical play that purges aggression, entertains audiences, and, not least, expresses the singer’s bruised affection for one he (or she) has no intention of actually mistreating. Eerie resignation? A frightened young man? Marcus and Banks have, I think, completely misread Johnson’s tone, and they are not alone.
Any reading of the song must begin by framing it within the contexts I’ve elaborated in this chapter—above all, the emergence of the young moderns onto the stage of the black Delta, animated by a restless irreverence through which they distinguished themselves from, and tweaked, the humorless religiosity of their elders. According to Michael Taft’s concordance of prewar blues, “Me and the Devil Blues” is the only blues song in which the name “Satan” appears, although it’s quite common in the spirituals (“Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down,” etc). Johnson’s opening stanza, in other words, establishes intimacy with a devil-figure or devil-principle in a startlingly bold way, one calculated to offend religious pieties and, not coincidentally, to accrue cool-points among young moderns. Since Johnson’s generation was already being slandered as the Delta’s “New Rising Devil Class,” the entire song—with its invocation of the devil-as-comrade and its parading of the singer’s “old evil spirit”—may be seen as a cocky declaration of guilty-as-charged. “I’m bad, baby,” the singer laughs, “and I don’t care who knows it.” The devil-may-care attitude towards burial expressed in the final stanza is a direct affront to churched elders, since they most definitely did expect to be buried in their churches’ graveyards. The final line of the song again strikes a jarringly modern note, conflating spiritual concerns with a relatively new mode of interstate transportation, Greyhound buses, one that distinguished the restless young of Johnson’s generation from the railroad generation and the stodgy Pullman coaches they aspired to.
Framed in this manner, “Me and the Devil Blues” begins to emerge not as the tortured romantic confession Marcus and Banks would have us believe, but as something closer to a put-on: a flirtatious dialogue between the singer and his “baby” edged with braggartry, complaint, and a modicum of tenderness, all of it enlarged in a slightly cartoonish way through the singer’s calculated invocations of the devil. More precisely, I read the song as determined to keep both readings—romantic confession and put-on—in dialectical tension. The “you” in the opening stanza is the singer’s woman, knocking on his door after a presumptive late night out carousing, but it’s also his long-simmering rage at her misbehavior that suddenly crests as he rises from his sleepless bed, prepared to slap her around. The “devil” is simply that rage, acknowledged and embraced. But the third stanza upends this reading. The tortured syntax of the A line, with its repeated “you”’s, make it unclear who is doing the dogging around and who is complaining about it—i.e., who is to blame here--and the singer’s spoken aside is a tender complaint rather than a furious threat. Truth be told, there is no rage in the song as Johnson sings it. This becomes apparent when the recording is compared with another recording from the same period, Roosevelt Sykes’s “Hospital, Heaven, or Hell,” where the singer is trembling with audible fury at being two-timed:
You shall surely die baby if I should happen to live
You shall surely die mama if I should happen to live
I’m gone take something from you baby that I really ain’t able to give
I can’t forget you mama…and it ain’t no need of me tryin’
I can’t forget you baby….and it ain’t no need of me tryin’
If I don’t kill you right away, I declare I’m gonna leave you dyin’.
Johnson, by contrast, is cool, playful, almost flippant as his song moves towards its conclusion: a trickster flown with the wind. He cares too little, not too much. The persona through which he speaks here is in thrall to nobody—not his baby, certainly not the devil—and couldn’t care less about the religious folk whom his song is sure to offend. He is “evil” only in the sense of being contrary, self-directed, impossible to pin down. Like John Lee Hooker’s “Burnin’ Hell,” “Me and the Devil” is a young modern’s declaration of spiritual independence, one that works its magic spell by deliberately scrambling the Manichean certainties of the elders who dominated the Delta’s religious landscape.
Last Edited by on Jan 25, 2011 10:30 AM
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timeistight
13 posts
Jan 25, 2011
10:21 AM
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Rosedale is a small city near the Mississippi river, approximately 120 miles south-south-west of Memphis.
If you believe everything you hear, then Johnson sold his soul repeatedly at pretty much every country intersection in the state.
A less romantic interpretation of the song is that a crossroad of two highways is a good place to "flag a ride," particularly if you don't care which way you're going, since you get traffic in four directions.
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What?
Last Edited by on Jan 25, 2011 10:23 AM
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groyster1
788 posts
Jan 25, 2011
10:31 AM
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when john hammonds jr interviewed with johnny shines,johnny let hammond know what he thought of what I called a myth about robert johnson-its in the documentary search for robert johnson thats the last I have to say about this topic-scouts honor
Last Edited by on Jan 25, 2011 10:36 AM
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kudzurunner
2286 posts
Jan 25, 2011
10:39 AM
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I'm playing that documentary for the first meeting of my grad seminar this afternoon. (The seminar is called "Robert Johnson, the Devil's Music, and the Blues.")
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toddlgreene
2555 posts
Jan 25, 2011
10:42 AM
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Wow, Adam-with all that devil-talk, i almost had to break the glass on my Emergency Ban Hammer!
Just kidding of course.
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Todd L. Greene, Professor of Meaningless Trivia
Last Edited by on Jan 25, 2011 11:13 AM
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Tin Lizzie
185 posts
Jan 25, 2011
10:44 AM
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http://www.luckymojo.com/crossroads.html
The specific idea that rural blues musicians "made pacts" with "the devil" for earthly good fortune is an oft-repeated misunderstanding of the crossroads ritual. Some Christian blacks of the early 20th century themselves confused the issue by calling the entity one meets in the ritual "the devil," but i have found no evidence that they ever called him "Satan" or "made pacts" with him in the medieval European sorcery tradition exemplified by the Faust legend. Furthermore, as will be seen below from several examples, the crossroads deity did not grant good fortune, wealth, or power, as the European-American Christian devil is believed to do. He was a teacher of manual dexterity and mental wisdom.
When African-Americans born in the 19th or early 20th century told interviewers that they or anyone they knew had "sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads," they did NOT intend to convey thereby that the person in question was an evil, hell-bound anti-Christian. The confusion arises in the eyes of white interpreters who don't understand that the crossroads deity is a survival from polytheistic African religions and that he has been assigned the only name he can be given in a monotheistic religion.
The traditional colours assigned to the African crossroads spirit are red and black, and the spirit himself is given offerings of alcohol and sacrificed animals, so it is easy to see why Christian slaves and their masters conflated him with "the devil" (e.g. Satan, the "Adversary" to the monotheistic god in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions). However, the crossroads spirit is not Satan. Nor is he evil, harmful, deceptive, or cruel in the sense that the Judeo-Christian devil is. He is a revered spiritual entity from a polytheistic religious system. No "black arts" in the medieval European sense are needed to call upon him or gain his favour. He is a teacher and guide, the opener of the way.
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Tin Lizzie
Last Edited by on Jan 25, 2011 10:46 AM
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littleeasy
31 posts
Jan 25, 2011
11:00 AM
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Well, I'm getting the feeling without actually knowing Robert Johnson personally at the time he wrote the song, the actual meaning of the lyrics are up to personal opinion.
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MrVerylongusername
1524 posts
Jan 25, 2011
11:03 AM
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As Adam says he doesn't talk about selling his soul, his communication in this song is the other way - to God to have mercy. If you read the lyrics, you might interpret the song as being about a choice in the face of desperation and adversity -trying to find a way out. A metaphorical crossroads perhaps?
Or maybe it's literal. I've been stood on the roadside hitchhiking as nightfall approaches. The consequences for me would have been uncomfortable, but not serious. For Johnson a beating by the local cops for vagrancy was probably his best hope... his worst fear, the cause of his plea to the Heavens
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kudzurunner
2287 posts
Jan 25, 2011
11:34 AM
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Personal opinion is important, but limited. Schizophrenic people, for example, have all kinds of personal opinions, but we're leery of some of them: we talk about people being "out of touch with reality." So the mere fact that they're personal, and opinions, doesn't make them plausible.
This doesn't mean that any individual's personal opinion about what a specific song means is worthless. But some opinions are grounded more securely in, for example, social and historical context that may help us understand what the artist might have meant by a song's lyrics, or what the artist's audience at the time might have taken from those lyrics. It's that sort of interpretation that I tried to offer in my article.
Popular music sometimes gains its power by drawing on the power of myth; by implying more than it actually says in so many words. And some songs, for various reasons, make themselves available to those who would load them down with mythic weight--even if a scholar offers good reasons for not burdening them with quite so much weight.
There's nothing to prevent people from being fascinated by Robert Johnson because they've heard about the crossroads-soul-selling story, just as there was nothing wrong with people believing in the legend of the Headless Horseman retailed by Washington Irving in his Legend of Sleepy Hollow. We need good legends. But it's important to distinguish between legends and other forms of truth: biographical truth, sociological truth, etc. UNLESS, of course, we're heavily invested in magic and don't want scholars (such as me) to come along and mess with our magical beliefs.
Not every scholar agrees with me. Julio Finn, in THE BLUESMAN, argues that RJ was a hoodoo practitioner, and he connects RJ with a much larger tradition of such stuff in New Orleans and the Caribbean. (From an African American studies perspective, it's been important for some scholars to insist that RJ encountered Legba at the crossroads rather than sold his soul to the devil there, as a way of promoting the African-cultural-survivals line of argument and undercutting the "devil's music" scholars such as Paul Oliver.) Mack McCormick, a legendary figure of blues scholarship, has insisted to several writers of blues books--although never in published writings of his own--that people in the Delta were talking about Robert Johnson's soul sale as early as the 1940s, long before white rockers came along and started pushing the story. But suppose that is true? Those black Deltans may well have been members of what I'm calling the railroad generation: religious people who were demonizing him, casting aspersions. Or RJ may have spread such stories as a way of captivating public attention while not "actually" having sold his soul. (It's not clear to me how one actually sells their soul, BTW. I think it works much better as a metaphor.) What my research establishes beyond a doubt is that the context for RJ's songs was a context of notable irreverence towards religion: towards god, but also towards adults who inveighed against the drinking, smoking, and dancing of young people, and towards the "hellfire and brimstone" sermonizing of those same adults. Which is to say: Robert Johnson's core audience of young black people in the Delta, by and large, DIDN'T BELIEVE IN THE DEVIL. Or, more precisely, they took that sort of devil-talk with a big grain of salt. It's all there in the scholarship that I drew on, including a range of sociological studies at the time. Young black people in the Delta just didn't take religion very seriously, and there is NO sign that they engaged in "devil worship." Nor is there any strong evidence that Robert Johnson did so.
Last Edited by on Jan 25, 2011 11:47 AM
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littleeasy
32 posts
Jan 25, 2011
11:47 AM
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I dont believe in magic, the band I play in are going to play this song so I started, as you say, getting into the song and was just trying to figure out what he was writing about. I know there is a lot of history with Johnson and I researched the story but I didnt know the significance of Rosedale and Willie Brown. I guess everyone else has asked themselves these questions. Appears as though not only was Johnson a very talented musician he has quite a talent with lyrics. The legend lives on! Thanks for everyones input. Oh, nice article Adam see ya in VA
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nacoran
3709 posts
Jan 25, 2011
12:30 PM
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Religious talk and literary theory in one thread! As an aside, I'd point out that we usually handle discussions of theoretical religion pretty well, and it's hard not to touch on religion in a forum that deals with the blues. The problem, when it happens, usually occurs when we go from discussing the practices of a particular religion to discussing the merits of a religion. That isn't necessarily something unique to the forum. John Lennon famously said The Beatles were 'More popular than Jesus'. It got him into all sorts of trouble. Some people thought (and what Lennon said afterwards supports this interpretation) that he simply meant that people were more interested in The Beatles than Jesus. There is nothing religious about it when it's interpreted that way; it's just a statement over what the youth seem to be interested in. Other people interpreted it as Lennon saying The Beatles were more important than Jesus, which pitted The Beatles against religion. Actually, if you compare it to the reactions in of the people in Adam's post it's actually a similar argument to the reaction to Crossroads.
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Nate
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Honkin On Bobo
597 posts
Jan 25, 2011
12:40 PM
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"-Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus. I'd still have to bum rides off people."
-Ferris Bueller
Last Edited by on Jan 25, 2011 12:41 PM
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kudzurunner
2288 posts
Jan 25, 2011
12:59 PM
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When we get a new forum and new website--and they are very much in process!--I'll figure out a new policy about specific discussions of the devil-and-the-blues issue. Obviously I have a heavy investment in the issue! I played with Mr. Satan, wrote a book called MISTER SATAN'S APPRENTICE, have released a music video called "Crossroad Blues," and am working on a big book about the subject. The subject fascinates me, but in a weirdly impersonal way--as a scholar without any emotional investment in the devil per se.
I'm aware that I'm playing with fire even to have posted all the stuff I've posted, given what the forum creed states and given how such discussions usually end up turning out.
My apologies for making a one-time exception for a big scholarly dump. Professor Gussow sometimes just needs to hear himself talking, plainly--especially on the second day of the new term. The moderators may allow this thread to continue for the time being, as long as we all make nice ("It's seminar time, ladies and gentlemen!"), but if rancor breaks out--and I promise it won't come from me--we should obviously shut this down.
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didjcripey
27 posts
Jan 25, 2011
2:00 PM
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I love to see this sort of discussion on the forum. The Blues has a rich culture and mythology and this is one of the things that makes it so interesting and great. Maybe its not the topic that needs to be banned, but those who are unable to keep it civil.
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Lucky Lester
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saregapadanisa
329 posts
Jan 25, 2011
2:58 PM
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We couldn't stress enough here the symbolism of crossroads in african-american culture.
In voodoo, crossroads are the territory of Papa Legba, who is the intermediary beetween humans and the spiritual world (i.e. the Lwas).
No ceremony in voodo could be done without first an invocation to Papa Legba.
From this position, he is also very much associated with everything concerning life, sex and creation (no small matter for a blues musician). Litteraly, he gives permission to speak.
These beliefs are very strong, and although I've never witnessed that in the South, it's still pretty common to see offerings lying at crossroads all over the West Indies today. I guess that in Johnson's time, it was pretty much there.
Johnson's story with the devil is to be understood (up to a certain point) in that light : a heavy symbolism retold through aculturation, in an "christian friendly" way.
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rharley5652
373 posts
Jan 25, 2011
4:15 PM
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AND HE SOLD HIS SOUL TO THE DEVIL TO BE THE BEST DAMN GUITAR PLAYER EVER !!
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Simply Unique Kustom Mic's By Rharley
Last Edited by on Jan 25, 2011 4:21 PM
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Miles Dewar
658 posts
Jan 25, 2011
5:02 PM
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?
See nothing wrong with what Joe said. It happens to be his personal experience. It was a Billiards reference if you did not understand.
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Stephen Hawking drives ME crazy sometimes. Also another loved fellow around here. Is that bad?
Last Edited by on Jan 25, 2011 5:05 PM
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nacoran
3717 posts
Jan 25, 2011
5:04 PM
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Joelee, some people just like to ask why. We all have our own creative processes. I agree that sometimes in the moment you can over-think things, but analysis can be an important part of consolidating knowledge. For fans, it can be just as much fun as the actual act. That's why you can watch pool on ESPN and they'll analyze all the shots for you.
There are harmonica fans. There are also history fans and anthropology fans.
saregapadanisa, I think from the context you mean invaluable. :)
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Nate
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Honkin On Bobo
599 posts
Jan 25, 2011
5:37 PM
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"In the poolrooms we used to call it "paralysis of analysis"..."
I agree, one of my New Year's resolutions was to not ever analyze anything again.
I'm on my way outside right now...to make a sacrifice to the Sun...in hopes that he/she will rise tomorrow.
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nacoran
3719 posts
Jan 25, 2011
6:32 PM
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edit: Thanks.
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Nate
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Last Edited by on Jan 25, 2011 6:42 PM
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KingoBad
583 posts
Jan 25, 2011
8:15 PM
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Adam, We're on your front porch. If we don't get the lecturin' then we don't get your front porch learnin'.
So just keep playin' and a lecturin'. If we act up, just boot us off your front porch 'till we learn some manners...
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catfish row
10 posts
Jan 25, 2011
8:53 PM
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If I am not mistaken, the story of the selling of a soul to the devil was attributed to Tommy Johnson and the was somehow mistakenly attached to Robert. I have read that Tommy Johnson was known to boast of making a deal with the devil.
Willie Brown, incidently, was probably the most infamous accompianist in the delta, He recorded with Patton and House among many others. It is semi-popular belief that he was actually Kid Bailey using an assumed name. My opinion is that Kid Bailey is just another bluesman that Brown accompanied, although I like the thought that he could be Kid Bailey.
Charley Patton used the rider term in many of his lyrics, by the way. I'm a huge Patton fan.
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Stevelegh
43 posts
Jan 25, 2011
11:57 PM
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Perhaps when building the new forum, some thought may be given to adding some sub sections, such as a religion / politics section as well as a general chit chat / misc.
The more successful forums out on t'interwebz tend to do this to keep their members in one place, speaking with the friends they've made about subjects outside of the main section.
Granted, some of these sub sections do end up as cess pits, but by being separated from the main section, that means you have a choice about what you want to find. If you don't want to discuss O/T subjects, you just don't go there.
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Oisin
728 posts
Jan 26, 2011
2:20 AM
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When my Friend Adam (harp teacher) was younger he got a tax rebate and he and his friend did a tour of the US which included Chicago and the deep South.This was in the early 90s
He told me that in a club in Chicago he got talking to a couple of old guys who found out he played harp. They asked if he would play something but he didn't have a harp with him. Adam said they offered him a box of (extremely dirty)harps to play with but he turned them down.
They were invited to a party afterwards and there he was told that the "Sell your soul to the devil" ritual was till being practiced and one of the guys offered to take him through it, but he'd need to get some things together for it first.
Adam turned them down on the offer as he wasn't sure he wasn't been taken for a ride.
I often wondered if this is still going on...are there still people who believe in this and does the ritual exist? I don't want to get into any discussion about religion or beliefs but I am curious to know if it still goes on....is there a ceremony for selling your soul to the devil?
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Oisin
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RT123
68 posts
Jan 26, 2011
4:27 AM
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Great writing by Adam. I wanted to add a little to this thread with a question. I'm not really sure what my question is or how to ask it so I will start to ramble here for a minute. Let me start by telling you a little about me. I am almost 40, an African-American who frew up in the NorthEast in a middle class area. I was raised Roman Catholic and still am. I have many friends and family members of various religions and this is never a problem. The one taboo growing up was "The Devil". Not in regards to music or lifestyle, just in general. It wasn't talked about unless it was the worst evil. As I grew it seemed to be used by many as a metaphor for just something bad, or in a religious sense the person you meet if you live a bad life.
I didn't grow up in the "Blues" culture but it seems that the term Devil is used much more loosely. I am fine with that as it is a culture I am just starting to know. I just don't know if there are people that serious worship or believe there is good in that. If they do, that is there right and it is a free country to do that.
I have said this before, but the first week I was on here a member got kicked off for calling someone who said he wanted to kill Christians a jerk. Then there was a couple religion threads that were far from my beliefs as well. There were not mean spirited at all and I was not offended in the least bit. That really started me wondering. I started to think is the blues culture more than I know, is it against Christians? Does it just have a different view of religion in general? Or is it just a case by case, person by person choice? Is there some sort of "club" to put it another way that I dont know about? Are the influential members here of far different beliefs than I am? I feel a little naive about all this and there is probably nothing to it, but I had to ask. It doesnt bother me, I am here to talk harp anyway, it just seems like this is the right time to ask what I have been wondering about. Why would a section of the new website be called "Devil and the Blues"?
I think if we want to open that can of worms on the new website it may be more inviting for others to call it "Religion or Beliefs and the Blues". If not maybe we should keep that can of worms closed. Just my thoughts. You all seem like great guys and girls and I nejoy talking with you all about harmonica whatever your beliefs may be.
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kudzurunner
2289 posts
Jan 26, 2011
4:37 AM
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RT123s post makes clear that this thread has wandered off topic in precisely the way I worried that it might: into a consideration of religion-in-general and its place on this forum. I can tell from the residual smoke in the air that trouble has happened while I was asleep, too. Y'all understand now, if you didn't before, why this sort of topic just doesn't work here, and why the forum creed prohibits it. Dang.
This thread is locked.
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