Hell Week: Cross Roads Blues

Robert Johnson: Cross Roads Blues [purchase]

Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry: The Devil’s Gonna Get You [out of print]

Lightnin’ Hopkins: Devil Is Watching You [purchase]

You can’t have a series on the devil without getting into the blues. Satan figures prominently in the original “devil’s music.”

Well-known legend has it that Robert Johnson received his gift of guitar-mastery in exchange for his soul as part of midnight transaction at a crossroads on the Mississippi Delta. Read about the details here.

Now please indulge a personal story:

As a young college student fascinated with roots music, I borrowed the family station wagon and dragged three friends from Ann Arbor down to New Orleans for spring break. Instead of chasing bikinis in Florida like most normal college guys, we toured the great spots of American musical history: The Grand Ole Opry, Preservation Hall, Louisiana bayou country, The Mississippi Delta, Beale Street, Graceland, etc. It was a fun trip.

One of the highlights was our ill-fated attempt to find a suitable crossroads on the Mississippi Delta for purposes of selling our souls to the devil in exchange for musical talent. We didn’t figure Highway 61 would do, considering that by 1987 it was a fairly major thoroughfare. So we went in search of dirt cross roads and ended up getting my dad’s Pontiac Grand Safari stuck in the foot-thick muck of some Mississippi-farmer’s cotton field. (I had no idea how we were going to explain the presence of four bespectacled Midwestern college boys with a stuck station wagon and a guitar.) Luckily, we were able to dredge our way out of the mud before being discovered.

After our muddy experience in the cotton field we decided to try our luck at a Highway 61 rest stop just south of the Tennessee line. Unfortunately, the devil did not make an appearance—despite our tuneless renderings of Cross Roads Blues.