Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

134 Johnson, Robert
vernacular music, sought to introduce a larger
audience to the music of black America. He
arranged for a Carnegie Hall concert he called
Spirituals to Swing, recruiting a wide range of
gospel, jazz, folk, and blues artists. One he hoped
to feature was a man he knew only from recordings,
Robert Johnson. He called Law, who got in
touch with Oertle. Neither man had seen Johnson
in a while, and it was only after making inquiries
that Oertle learned of the bluesman’s death. Over
the next two decades Johnson would be largely
forgotten. Hard-core collectors of 78 rpm records
documenting America’s roots music remembered
him, and some of the blues musicians who had
known or heard of him—notably Lockwood,
Shines, Elmore James, and Muddy Waters—
included reworked versions of Johnson songs in
their repertoires. Then in the early 1960s
Columbia Records issued two LPs of Johnson’s
music. A new generation of young, mostly white
blues, folk, and rock musicians, among them Bob
Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton, heard
Johnson for the first time, and his reputation as
one of the greatest performers and innovators
took hold. In 1990, amid much attention, acclaim,
and surprising commercial success, Columbia
issued the two-CD Robert Johnson: The Complete
Recordings.
By this time the legend of Johnson’s deal with
the Devil was nearly as well known as his music. It
figured in a poorly reviewed, ill-conceived 1988
Hollywood movie, Crossroads, directed by Walter
Hill. It was also the subject of Alan Greenberg’s
lyrical novel-as-screenplay Love in Vain: The Life
and Legend of Robert Johnson (1983). In 1999 no
less than Muddy Waters’s son Big Bill Morganfield
wrote and recorded “Left Hand Blues,” which does
not mention Johnson by name but is manifestly
about his Faustian bargain.
Besides the testimony of Johnson’s relatives,
those who believe that the legend was contemporary
with Johnson point to the texts of three of his
own songs to argue that Johnson consciously
encouraged the belief, as had other blues performers,
for reasons of self-aggrandizement. In the first
half of “Me and the Devil Blues,” the Devil knocks
on the singer’s door: “And I said, “Hello, Satan, I
believe it’s time to go.”
In the next verse the two are “walkin’ side by
side.” The narrative, a loose one in the fashion of
the country blues of the period, turns to
complaints about a woman who “ain’t doin’ me
right,” then refers cryptically to “that old evil spirit
so deep down in the ground.” It ends with a vision
of the singer’s death, his body buried by the roadside,
his “evil spirit” riding on a Greyhound bus.
“Hell Hound on My Trail,” more a series of
images of romantic conflict and rambling than a
coherent tale, opens with a singer in desperate
flight, lost in fear and anxiety (“blues fallin’ down
like hail”), with “a hellhound on my trail.” The
hellhound then vanishes from the song, which
turns to less apocalyptic, more prosaic matters.
“Cross Road Blues” has a clearer story line, with
the singer again in desperate flight, caught at a
crossroads, praying anxiously and trying without
success to “flag a ride.” Night falls, and the song
ends with the singer’s frightened cry, “I believe I’m
sinkin’ down.” The only supernatural reference is
to the Lord, whom the singer implores for mercy.
The Devil appears nowhere in the lyrics. Students
of Johnson’s music, however, argue that the crossroads
image is a coded allusion to the place where
the fabled encounter with Satan took place.
As evidence that Johnson himself promoted
the myth, this does not amount to much. Skeptical
blues writer Gayle Dean Wardlow points out that
“Hell Hound on My Trail” was almost certainly a
song Johnson made up in the studio in order to
make a few extra dollars, and had no larger
meaning. There is little evidence that it was part of
his live repertoire. He also suggests that Johnson
borrowed the hellhound image from J. T. Smith’s
1931 recording “Howling Wolf Blues No. 3.” Less
plausibly, Wardlow—who seems unaware of the
black-dog tradition—argues that to Johnson, the
hellhound represented law-enforcement authorities
on his trail. On the other hand, another blues
scholar, Jon Michael Spencer, thinks that the devil
references amount to no more than a “genuine
consciousness of sin” (Spencer 1993).
The Devil was a frequent image in blues
recordings of the period. “Hell Hound” has
musical as well as (at least obliquely) lyrical ties to
Skip James’s “Devil Got My Woman” (1931),
Kansas Joe McCoy’s “Evil Devil Woman Blues”