Where Mahalia and Sam Cooke kept their eyes on the prize, Stax’s interracial house band, Booker T. and the MGs, like Sam and Dave in their “messing” mode, worried mostly about keeping the party hot. Listening to them, you couldn’t always tell how much of the fire came from the devil and how much from the Lord.
It was a problem Robert Johnson knew well.
13
Down at the Crossroads
If you were white and honest, the blues revealed things the upbeat America of the early sixties assured you didn’t exist. That’s why so many mid-South white boys—Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn of the MGs, songwriter-producers Dan Penn and Chips Moman, even Elvis before the velvet paintings filled in the blank spaces—fell in love with music that made desegregation sound like something more than an empty dream. Then again, if you were just white, the blues could make you swear off mirrors, never mind music with a harder edge than Perry Como. Dozens of white musicians bear witness to how black music helped them escape the suffocating communities they grew up in.
But for most black musicians, the blues evoked a deeper, more agonized relationship between the individual and the community. The crucial difference is that, in the black blues, evil retains its religious significance. Every note Robert Johnson played as he wandered the dark highways of America during the Great Depression reverberates with the reality of exile from a gospel community he knows is real. Widely honored as the most profound of the Delta bluesmen, Johnson wrote songs that testify to his anguished connection with a spiritual force. Johnson’s titles resonate with apocalyptic biblical images: “Stones in My Passway,” “If I Had Possession over Judgement Day,” “Hellhound on My Trail,” “Crossroads Blues.”
For white rockers like Eric Clapton, the crossroads mark a place of existential decision; for Johnson, they stretch over an abyss that’s both theological and social. Like most black Southerners, he knew the choice you make at the crossroads can determine everything. For a fugitive slave or a black man running from the Klan, every crossroads presented a choice of direction that could make the difference between slavery and freedom, life and death. Johnson’s anguished blues place the listener at one of the crossroads. You can hear the wind howl; you can’t quite be sure whether it’s covering the patroller’s baying hounds. No question that “Crossroads” points to the grounding of the blues in American racial realities. But there’s also no question that the sense you’re about to take an irrevocable step is something everyone feels sometime, somewhere. It’s the sense, as Robert Penn Warren’s narrator in All the King’s Men puts it, “that you are alone with the Alone, and it is His move.” One more cry from the guitar string, one more twisting chord from the gutbucket, and there’s no going back.
It’s a place where white folks have a choice of getting past white, of understanding something about what it means to live in a world without options other than the ones you can figure out for yourself right now. And you’ve got no time to think about where that step might take you, to weigh implications. The blues say you do what you have to do, your act’s what you are. It’s why Bob Dylan titled his greatest album Highway 61 Revisited after the road that carved crossroads through the heart of the Delta. “Like a Rolling Stone” wasn’t named for Mick and Keith. Dylan’s at least got a sense of what Johnson and Ma Rainey and Muddy Waters were talking about, of what it means to walk down the road that bends back to where black and white came to pretty much the same thing. If only on Beale Street. And only between three a.m. and dawn.
But there’s another dimension of “Crossroads” that remains obscure even to the Dylan of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” stranded in a place where “gravity fails and negativity don’t see you through.” If Dylan maps the existential wasteland, Johnson’s “Crossroads” remembers the routes connecting West Africa with the Delta. For many West African tribes, the crossroads were the place where the spirit world and the material world converged, where you went when you needed spiritual energy. For the Yoruba, the crossroads were a place of power and danger. They were dedicated to and ruled by the spirit, or orisha, Esu-Elegba, who walks with a limp, revels in chaos, and carries messages between the material and spiritual worlds.
Like all orisha, Esu-Elegba combines strengths and weaknesses. When the Yoruba tell stories about the orisha, they’re initiating discussion, not presenting role models. Unlike the stereotypical Sunday sermon that reveals the meaning of a biblical passage, the Yoruba process requires call and response. Esu’s strength lies in his mastery of language and codes, his verbal facility, his literary intelligence. His weakness lies in his amorality. He loves confusion just because he feels at home with it. He’s perfectly capable of tearing a community apart because it’s interesting, to see what happens. This brother has clearly got to be watched.
But if you need to get closer to the divine presence, to learn the inner meaning of the incomprehensible messages that come in dreams or moments of awe-ful awareness of the spirit, you’ve got no choice but to deal with Esu. One way or another, Esu—a.k.a. Legba, Papa LaBas, the Signifying Monkey, Brer Rabbit, the Nigga You Love to Hate, Richard Pryor, and Flava Flav—is gonna deal with you.
So you go down to the crossroads. And maybe you meet a man with a limp. Which, legend has it, is how Robert Johnson learned to play the blues. Laughed off the stage at a Delta juke joint, he vanished for a year, some say three. When he returned, he spoke the blues in tongues his elders had never even imagined. Some say he traveled from New Orleans to Chicago, mastering his craft; others say he sold his soul to Beelzebub.
Black Christians had strong reasons for renaming Esu the “devil.” They’d seen what happened to folks who chose the wrong road. If Esu bestows creative brilliance, he exacts a price. He brings chaos to a community in desperate need of stability. Esu embodies the spirit of Beale Street: drugs, sex, violent death. All in the name of a good time, good music. Pure deviltry.
Maybe the most basic crossroads for a black Southerner led one way to Beale Street, the other way to church. Robert Johnson made his choice, but his music never lets you forget it was a choice. That somewhere a Sunday-morning sister was singing him back home. Or that she was more than half likely to follow him into the woods when she heard that dark blue moan some lonely Saturday night.
The Blues Impulse
A Blues Impulse Top 40
| 1. | Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “The Message,” 1982 |
| 2. | Robert Johnson, “Hellhound on My Trail,” 1937 |
| 3. | Ike and Tina Turner, “A Fool in Love,” 1960 |
| 4. | Bessie Smith, “Downhearted Blues,” 1923 |
| 5. | Muddy Waters, “The Same Thing,” 1964 |
| 6. | The Four Tops, “Bernadette,” 1967 |
| 7. | Aretha Franklin, “Chain of Fools,” 1967 |
| 8. | Stevie Wonder, “Living for the City,” 1973 |