The Crossroads

The junction of the old routes of Highways 61 and 49 at Clarksdale was locally the crossroads by the 1930s, and blues audiences later took it for the crossroads, where Robert Johnson is said to have met the devil at midnight and traded his soul for the ability to play. Almost none of that attaches to Johnson in his lifetime. He recorded Cross Road Blues in San Antonio in November 1936 and Me and the Devil Blues in Dallas in June 1937, and while the second has the devil knocking at the door, neither song describes a bargain; the appeal in Cross Road Blues is to the Lord, and what it describes is a Black man stranded at a country junction after dark, which in Mississippi in 1936 was danger enough. The legend arrived after the records did. Columbia reissued him in 1961 as King of the Delta Blues Singers, Cross Road Blues placed first, and in 1966 the critic Pete Welding published an essay in Down Beat quoting Son House to the effect that Johnson had dealt with Satan. Welding never produced the tape and no transcript survives. A comparable story had been told about a different musician, Tommy Johnson, by his brother LeDell, and printed in David Evans's 1971 book; whether it transferred between them is disputed. The motif is far older, running back to Legba and Eshu in West African tradition, and the folklorist Harry Middleton Hyatt collected seventy three Southern accounts of going to a crossroads for a skill. Mississippi settled the argument by statute in April 1999, and the three steel guitars there, over a thousand pounds, are by a local metalsmith, Vic Barbieri. The highways were rerouted in 2004 and old 61 became Highway 161, so the pavement is not the pavement.