“Early this mornin’ when you knocked upon my door, And I said ‘Hello, Satan. I believe it’s time to go. Me and the Devil, walking side by side..” – Me and the Devil Blues, Robert Johnson.
You’ve heard the story, or some version of it. The legendary Blues singer Robert Johnson went to the crossroads at midnight and made a pact with the Devil. Robert would become the best guitarist in the world and enjoy fame and glory while in return the Devil would keep his eternal soul. Pretty crazy. Or is it? I mean, have you heard Johnson’s Music? It certainly has something different about it. Some say you can hear two guitar parts on the records, which would have been impossible to achieve at the time of recording. This was way before you could make an entire album on your phone or iPad. The very early days of recording when even overdubbing one extra instrument was not possible. He only did two recording sessions in his short life and it’s not for us to know what exactly happened at those sessions. We’re here to ponder not so much if he actually did sell his soul, but rather, what would make people think he did? And not just people at the time. It’s a story that has been circulating for nearly a hundred years at this point and an idea that has captured many an imagination across the generations…
Robert Johnson’s personal life…
Let’s start with the man himself. The recordings that are left to us have a haunting, melancholic and ominous vibe to them. An unworldly feel. Did Robert Johnson himself think the Devil was after him? He certainly did little to squash any rumours circulating. Maybe Johnson deliberately played on peoples’ fears and prejudices, writing such songs as the seminal, ‘Cross Roads Blues’ in which he describes going to the crossroads, falling down on his knees and begging the lord above to save him. There are also, ‘Hellhound on My Trail’ and ‘Me and the Devil Blues’.
The time he lived in, and where he lived, were both pretty crazy compared to what most people know today. (OK, I speak for myself, I have no idea how mental your situation is.) He was born in 1911 in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. The American Civil War had ended only about 50 years before, meaning, his grandparents on both sides would have been slaves. Throughout his lifetime Jim Crow laws still haunted the southern states. When Johnson was still a baby his mother and step-father were forced to leave their home and relocate because of a dispute with a lynch mob. On top of that WW1 and the Great Depression were just around the corner. Maybe, in the midst of all that, he felt somewhat doomed.
His personal life continued to have its share of tragedy. He married in 1929 but his wife and child died in childbirth a year later. This may have been a turning point at which he decided to pursue a life as a musician instead of a sharecropper. Around this time he left his home in Robinsonville and disappeared for a couple of years. It’s thought that he went back to Hazlehurst, possibly in search of his biological father. This two year period is crucial to the myth. Before he left he was remembered as someone who played the harmonica and jaw harp but not to any great standard. And his guitar playing was so bad it actually annoyed people. However, when he reappeared he was a master musician. People couldn’t understand how he’d progressed so quickly. He had an savant-like ability to hear a new song just one time and then play it perfectly. He became known for blues but could play all the popular styles of the day and had a way of enchanting audiences wherever he went.
For the rest of his life he was a wandering musician. He played dances, juke joints and street corners all over the Mississippi region and beyond. Women loved him and he frequently got in trouble for flirting with other men’s wives when out playing gigs. His demise came when he was allegedly poisoned by a disgruntled bar owner outside of Greenwood. Witnesses remember him being too friendly with the man’s wife and that he drank from an unsealed bottle of whiskey whilst on a break from playing. Before the end of the night he was already too sick to perform and after two days of abdominal pain and bleeding from the mouth Robert Johnson was dead. This gruesome and dramatic ending may have further fueled the rumours that the Devil caught up with him in the end.
Life in Mississippi was certainly very religious and itinerant womanising, gambling, drinking musicians were most likely treated with disdain and suspicion by decent society. Here is just one example of how serious people in the delta took religion. The family of Robert’s wife, Virginia Travis, who had died in childbirth, reportedly believed that her death was a punishment from God for Robert choosing to sing secular songs. Music for worship? Fine. Music for Saturday night juke joints? The Devil’s work.
Johnson’s playing style and it’s influence on other musicians…
But before we get fully into religion in Mississippi, a little more about his Music itself and its influence on later musicians. Although he was known locally in his lifetime and some of his songs had done well enough as singles to afford him a name, his fame grew mainly after his death. Particularly during the 1960s Blues revival when musicians like Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and Robert Plant (to name just a few) all referenced him as a major influence. And that was after the first wave of 40’s and 50’s Chicago Blues players such as Muddy Waters had been influenced by him and his contemporaries. He was one of the first musicians to record blues songs as 3 minute pieces that could fit onto a 78 disc. Before Johnson it was much more a folk style and not really commercial in the way it was about to become. His playing style was also groundbreaking, Johnson being one of the first (maybe the first on record) to play a kind of bass line and melody at the same time on the guitar that mimicked ragtime/blues piano. It sounded like two instruments, not one. This technique has been copied, refined and developed thousands of times since, but back in the 1930’s it was new and exciting. And because of the way Music was consumed back then (and for sometime after) it retained mystery and ambiguity and was hard to emulate. There were no Youtube tutorials giving you a breakdown of a song in 15 minutes. No streaming platforms where you could listen to a song repeatedly until you got it. Very few people were able to record their Music and not everyone who liked Music even had a record player to hear those that did. In those days maybe you’d hear a certain song a handful of times in your life or maybe just once at a live performance. I’m sure all this helped to create an air of mystery around early records and on top of that they were scratchy and unclear, adding to the other-wordly feel.
Christianity in Mississippi and the legend of Faust…
But before the legend of Robert Johnson enthralled rock and roll rebels from the 1960’s onwards there was a pious religious society rubbing up against a world of juke joints and Music bars. A changing world that had been born out of decades, if not centuries, of trauma and tension.
Let’s quickly rewind and think about how Mississippi even became Mississippi. The French ruled the area from 1699 to 1763 when they ceded it to the British, who had been vying for power in the area since the 1730s, but who then ceded it to the newly established United States in 1783. Under France there had been state enforced Catholicism.
After independence there was a shift away from state controlled religion to the radical idea that people could choose their own church. Soon Mississippi was attracting Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians and other protestant evangelical faiths. The ‘Great Revival’ began in the 18th century as a movement amongst the plain folk. It was based on the ideas of Martin Luther and rallied against the control of the established church. It attracted many people and spoke to those marginalised from traditional society, for example free Africans or women. Even slaves started to convert, most likely to the annoyance of their masters. (But this wasn’t new. It had been common for slaves in the colonies to convert to Christianity for a long time. So much so that by as early as 1706, at least 6 colonies had legislation making it clear that being Christian wasn’t enough to earn the right to be free.) Anyway, in the south after independence there was a period of relative religious harmony and freed blacks along with whites were often part of the same church. Things started to change from about the 1830s however as the evangelical Lutheran movement began to shift away from being the religion of the ordinary people to being the religion of the establishment. There had been an economic boom over the previous decades, (thanks largely to having an abundance of free labour), and now more and more people were moving up the social ladder and getting closer to the elite slave owner class. As the church gained popularity its demographic changed and more wealthy and powerful people joined. The evangelicals started to abandon their stance as cultural revolutionaries and were now becoming the defenders of the hierarchical social system that relied on slaveholding and patriarchal households. This trend continued up to the civil war, which was lost by the south and resulted in the abolition of slavery.
All this to say that the most popular religion in the area – before, during and after Robert Johnson’s time – was Lutheran influenced protestantism which had its roots in 17th century Germany. And this could explain why there is such an obvious Faustian element to the Robert Johnson legend. The story of Faust selling his soul to the Devil is an old Germanic legend about a discontented scholar who exchanges his soul for a more exciting life. Some say that the Robert Johnson legend is basically a re-imagining of the Faustian legend but set in Mississippi instead of northern Europe. Maybe. But there is another element to consider before closing the story there.
African religion in America…
There was another popular religion that is more hidden from the history books. Hidden because it was practised away from the gaze of authority for so long – Hoodoo. It seems Hoodoo was practised widely amongst African descendents. After slavery had ended and the Great Migration was underway, Hoodoo spread across the country along with the millions of people now free to move and look for work and homes outside of the south. It seems it was no small thing.
Hoodoo is directly related to the religious practices of the Bakongo people who come from Central West Africa, which is where a very large number of slaves were taken from. It’s estimated that 40% of all slaves were taken from this area. It’s a geographically huge area, so how can we say with confidence that the secret religion of slaves in the southern colonies was directly linked to a West African religion dating back (at-least) hundreds of years?
We do know that when the Portuguese first started trading in the region in the late 15th century, the Kingdom of Kongo was a well organised centralised power with many trading centres. Geographically it was massive, had several core provinces all governed by one ruler and its sphere of influence extended into neighbouring kingdoms. It also had a coherent set of religious beliefs, which were widely practised and continued to be observed even when large numbers of people converted to Portuguese Catholicism. In fact it seems that Bakongo beliefs and customs were practised simultaneously with Catholicism. Similarly, it seems that Hoodoo was practised simultaneously with Christianity amongst Africans brought to the states. It wasn’t a case of picking one or the other. You could do both.
The most relevant aspect of Bakongo/Hoodoo religion for our story is the Bakongo Cosmogram. It depicts the movement of the sun, the seasons and the 4 movements of life – conception (spring), birth (summer), maturity (autumn) and death (winter). The spirit world and the physical world are separated by the ‘Kalunga Line’. People are conceived in the spirit world and return there to be with their ancestors when they die. They are born and live in the physical world. They are born and live in the physical world. Bakongo people have a ‘dual soul-mind’ and are able to exist in both realms at different points in their life. The Kalunga Line is a boundary between the two worlds and is often represented by water. During the years of slave trading the line became synonymous with the Atlantic ocean – captured people believing that they were being taken to the land of the dead, never to return. The only way back to life would be to re-cross the line somehow.
The cosmogram has a physical form in Hoodoo called, wait for it, ‘the crossroads’. Cosmograms have been found in churches in Georgia and Virginia as well as several plantations from South Carolina to Texas. Rituals are performed to communicate with spirits or ancestors and this supernatural crossroads symbolises communication between worlds. People can make offerings to spirits to try and change their fortune. More than that, there is a spirit in Hoodoo known as ‘the man of the crossroads.’ This spirit may have links to the Yoruba Eshu-Elegba who is also a crossroads spirit, is the deity in charge of orderliness and also has the nickname, ‘he who creates problems for the innocent’. A kind of trickster (devil?) but one who you could bargain with and who could influence your fate, an intermediary between the Gods and humanity.
So what really happened at that crossroads?
Back to Robert Johnson. What was he doing at that crossroads at midnight? Which devil was it? Was he bargaining with an African spirit and trying to alter his fate or was he making a pact with the Devil from the Christian tradition in order to write his name into history? Could there even be an atheist explanation for the less spiritual readers?
There has been extensive research on the life of Robert Johnson and there actually is a crossroads in Mississippi, situated near a plantation he used to live on, where he is believed to have gone one fateful night. Why go there unless you’re going to try something out? My guess would be that he was erring on the Hoodoo side of things rather than the Christian. The outsider, underground nature of Hoodoo seems to fit with the rebel Bluesman image we have of Johnson. (There are even some tantalising Hoodoo references in some of his lyrics. Go and look up ‘hot foot powder’.) Why is the crossroads so important to the legend? It is definitely significant in Hoodoo tradition but not really a thing in Christian practices. Lastly, there are more details to the story we haven’t mentioned yet. During his mysterious two year absence he reportedly spent time with some one called Ike Zinnerman who he learnt guitar from. The story goes that they would go to graveyards at midnight and practise for hours and hours. Is it possible he just put in enough practice in the space of a couple of years to become a maestro? Who knows, but practising in graveyards at midnight seems to reinforce a Hoodoo bias in the tale. For example we know of Hoodoo doctors using cemetery dirt in magic powders. During slave uprisings people would rub the powder on themselves for protection as the dirt could conjure ancestors. I wonder if the ancestors could help with other things like learning new skills, or provide protection from a cruel and unforgiving world.
Obviously it’s impossible to know what really happened at that crossroads and what really happened at the end of Robert Johnson’s life. But it’s hard not to wonder. Was it murder by poisoning – the work of a jealous husband? Was it time for him to pay his price to the Devil? Or perhaps, similarly to Faust who was eventually saved by an angel, a Hoodoo spell set him free and sent him back across the Kalunga line to be with his ancestors…
Sources for this article:
wikipedia – robert johnson, hoodoo, faust
“Robert Johnson: the complete recordings” (album)
histroyengine.richmond.edu – university of richmond
pewsresearch.org
“Mande Music” – Eric Charry
histroy.com
stackexchange.com
mhistorynow.mdah.ms.gov