Panmankey.com

I'm not much of a modern blues fan.  I grew up loving Led Zeppelin, and since then I've been a devotee of British Blues, but not so much the American version.  There is an exception to that though, I love the old, real, Mississippi Delta Blues.  Those blues aren't played through a Les Paul either, or an amp for that matter, I like the old muddy acoustic guitar and a scraggly voice blues of Robert Johnson and Leadbelly.  Songs that are only a few yards removed from field hollers and spirituals.

 

Of course the blues are a lot farther from field hollers than most of us think.  Like anything else, the blues were 50% organic inspiration and 50% commercial calculation.  The earliest "blues" artists were professional musicians like W.C. Handy and Ma Rainey, and while they might have been inspired by something that preceded them, they infused the blues with an early commercial sensibility.

 

It's easy to cloud your mind when talking about the blues with visions of dirty juke-joints, bluesmen hitch-hiking across the country, and scorned women in every town, but young men didn't become involved in the blues to live a life of poverty.  Guys started playing the blues in the 1920's for women, money, and fame, the same reason people become rock stars now.  No one dreamed about becoming a poor blues singer.

 

That's why men went down to the crossroads to get their guitars tuned.  You went down there about midnight to see the big black man (or sometimes dog), and that's where you learned to play the blues.  Today those journeys to the crossroads are all about "selling your soul to the Devil," but the petitioners at the crossroads never called the figure they met there the Satan or Lucifer, and only rarely the devil, and that was probably due to the influence of the white man more than anything else.  Sure, sometimes they sacrificed a chicken or three (and sometimes a blind rooster, yes the rooster had to be blind), but all kinds of cultures practice animal sacrifice.  It's not as rare as we think.

 

Some of you are thinking, "Mankey, you're nuts, there was nobody at the crossroads," but there are a lot of people who claimed to see something on those Mississippi nights.  As someone who believes in the truth of spiritual experience (regardless of faith), I can't dismiss those claims out of hand.  It's likely that something happened to them to make them think they saw something.  Perhaps they had an out of body experience, or a visitation of "power" or "energy" that felt like the presence of a deity or a powerful conjurer?  In some ways the "truth" of an encounter matters far less than the "belief" in an encounter.  If someone felt they had an experience at a crossroads, maybe it provided the encouragement and self-confidence to really play that guitar and put some conviction in that voice.

 

The crossroads myth was certainly not an invention of the early 20th Century, it has roots in Africa going back for centuries, possibly before the time of Christ.  Africa has a long tradition of crossroads deities, gods like Egba and Eshu who open the way for new possibilities and teach wisdom.  As African Religion changed and morphed in the New World, it's not surprising that details were forgotten.  Religion becomes superstition, superstition finds new life as magic, and an almost forgotten secret becomes reinvented into something that becomes useful again.  

 

It's easy to forget how important magic was in the African-American experience in the early 20th Century.  Hoodoo wasn't just a term confused with voodoo, it was a valuable, and tangible, magical path that produced real results.  People believed in it whole-heartedly.  Robert Johnson sang of it in some of his greatest songs.  "Come On In My Kitchen" has Robert singing about his girlfriend's nation sack (or mojo bag) and the consequences that come from taking something out of it.  "Hot Foot Powder" sounds like a gag gift today, but in the 1920's was a real magic powder said to rid one of bad neighbors, or to cause an ex-lover to be forever unsatisfied.   That was all in the music, and was sung about plainly and as a matter of fact, because to many at the time it was.  

 

Robert Johnson was basically unknown when he died.  He recorded only a small handful of songs, and of his surviving recordings, many of are faster or slower versions of the same song.  Johnson's recorded work consists entirely of his acoustic guitar and his haunting voice, no overdubs, no edits, and no backing band.  Johnson has a minor hit with the song Terraplane Blues in 1937, and by minor hit I mean minor, it sold only 5000 copies.  Johnson wouldn't become a star until long after he died in 1938.  When British kids started to listen to American Blues in the late 1950's, Johnson's work was rediscovered, and he was reborn as "The King of the Delta Blues." 

 

A few things about Johnson's recorded work stand out.  The first is the guitar work, simply outstanding, and sometimes it sounds like there is more than one guitar at work (which has always made people think supernatural things).  The second is his sense of melody, the chorus to "Love In Vain" is infectious, and sounds like modern rock and roll (no wonder the Rolling Stones covered it/stole it in 1969).  Johnson influenced all the British Blues Rock Bands:  The Yardbirds, Zeppelin, Clapton etc.  His fingerprints are all over rock and roll.  

 

Johnson's music helped to cement the rather sinister idea that he sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads.  Though accounts differ as to whether he claimed such a thing or not (and I'm in the "not" camp) his music plays at the edges of such an idea.  In "Me and the Devil" he sings of Satan knocking at his door and him replying "Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go."  In the actual song, Satan comes across more as an "evil spirit" than the Prince of Darkness," but words have power.  Other songs which contributed to the image of Johnson dancing with the devil were the road-weary "Hellhound on my Trail" and "Crossroads Blues."

 

These days we tend to scoff at the supernatural, and laugh at claims of the fantastic, but now and again we all look over our shoulder and wonder if there's something else out there.  One of the reasons I love the early blues so much is that you can hear that little something in the voices of those guys that implies there's something else out there.  Whether or not Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil or Legba, his audience believed it was possible, and a lot of his modern audience wonders about it too.  It's easy to dismiss the supernatural in music when Marilyn Manson is more joke than threat, but listening to the early blues makes me a little nervous about what all might be out there.