June 19

Me and the Devil Blues: Robert Johnson at the Crossroads

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On today’s date in 1937, a twenty-six-year-old musician from Mississippi arrived at a makeshift studio on the third floor of the Vitagraph Building at 508 Park Avenue in downtown Dallas, Texas. The room had been improvised from a storage area, its acoustics shaped by beaver board panels: only a single microphone, some portable Presto disc-cutting equipment, and aluminum recording discs spinning at thirty-three and a third. Outside in the Texas summer, it was hotter than hell; some of the engineers recorded in their shirtsleeves (and, by some accounts, in their underwear.)

Over the next forty-eight hours, Robert Johnson recorded thirteen songs—and changed music history. He was paid approximately ten to fifteen dollars per side, and never recieveda single royalty for the classics he was about to lay down. In fact, he would be dead in fourteen months—poisoned at a juke joint near Greenwood, Mississippi … making him the first true member of the infamous “27 Club.”

But the total twenty-nine songs Johnson left behind (split between this Dallas session and an earlier one in San Antonio the previous year 1936) constitute one of the most significant bodies of work in the history of American music. Keith Richards would later say that Johnson “seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor,” while Bob Dylan called him “the most powerful cry that I ever heard.”

But before Keith, before Dylan, before Clapton, and before the 1961 Columbia LP that introduced Johnson to a world that had no idea he existed—there was a legend. It began at a crossroads…at midnight…with the Devil waiting in the dark.

Before the Legend

Robert Leroy Johnson was born on May 8, 1911, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, the eleventh child of Julia Major Dodds and Noah Johnson. His early life was difficult, his family moving between households and using multiple surnames (giving future historians and biographers years of guess-work to untangle), and spent years on the road. By his late teens, and already out on his own, Johnson was playing harmonica and attempting the guitar, but with mediocre results. His first wife, Virginia Travis, died during childbirth in 1930 and, shortly afterward, a grieving Johnson disappeared for an extended period—making for the perfect first chapter of his coming legend.

When Johnson returned, something had changed. Son House—one of the great Delta blues masters, who had known Johnson before the “disappearance”—was astonished; the uncertain, unskilled guitarist he remembered had become something else entirely: a musician of seemingly paranormal skill, his slide technique precise and devastating, his fingerpicking complex enough to blow other, more experienced musicians, away. House would go on to tell the story for decades, perhaps being the true source of the legend; in Son House’s words, Johnson had come back to world a “transformed” man—and there was only one explanation for such a meteoric mastery of his instrument: Johnson had gone to the crossroads and made a deal with the Devil himself.

As Modern Occultist News has covered in the past, the “Faustian Pact” dates back centuries earlier, and with overtly European roots. But Robert Johnson’s own deal at the crossroads marks a true historical divergence; aside from being the key moment pinpointed to the Blues coming into mainstream prominence, it also marks the seeds of later Rock and Roll. In essence, Johnson’s story is a uniquely American take on Faust himself. But the concept of “the crossroads” goes back much further than that, being an existing legend within Yoruba tradition with influence of the Middle Passage. Within the Yoruba spiritual system, the “crossroads” is seen as the domain of Eshu-Elegba—the trickster deity who stands at the intersection of all paths, and thus controls communication between the human and spirit worlds, who must be invoked at the beginning of every ritual. In the Haitian Vodou tradition, Eshu-Elegba became Papa Legba: an old man with a crutch and a straw hat, smoking a pipe, and guarding the gateway between the worlds; In Louisiana Voodoo, he morphed into Papa La Bas, and, in Brazil, Exu. The name changed with each diaspora, yet the spirit’s function always remained constant: the crossroads was the place where the veil between worlds was thinnest, and where communication with the ancestors and the spirits was possible and where wisdom could be sought.

This spiritual framework crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Africans and survived in the Hoodoo and conjure traditions of the American South—the same traditions that saturated the Mississippi Delta in which Robert Johnson lived and traveled. Folklorist Harry M. Hyatt spent years in the 1930s conducting fieldwork across the South, recording thousands of interviews with practitioners of Hoodoo and conjure—published eventually in five dense volumes as Hoodoo Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Rootwork. Within those pages, Hyatt found the crossroads ritual in its living, breathing form: people going to the crossroads at midnight not to sell their souls to the Christian Devil but to petition the spirit of the crossroads—Legba, by whatever name—for gifts of music, for healing, protection, and power. The Kongo cosmogram (the Yowa cross, brought to America by Central African enslaved peoples) represented the intersection of the living and the dead, the rising and setting of the sun, the cycle of death and rebirth. Archaeologists have found representations of it scratched into clay pots on plantations in South Carolina, recognizing that it wasn’t really a symbol of Satanic compact but, rather, a symbol of the boundary between worlds and of the methods of crossing it.

The Wrong Devil

The story that attached itself to Robert Johnson is almost instinctively linked to the Christian “Faustian” of and Marlowe and Goethe. But oddly, Robert Johnson wasn’t the first “Johnson” to him it was originally associated: Tommy Johnson (no relation), was the first hisotrical source of the crossroads pact story wthin Delta tradition. By the time the myth migrated to Robert Johnson in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it had been filtered through the Abrahamic framework that the white record industry and its cultural intermediaries most commonly recognized. But now, the being at the crossroads was recast from Legba (the gatekeeper, the transformer, the ancient spirit of passages and possibilities) into Satan, as the adversary and bargainer of souls.

Johnny Shines, who traveled extensively with Robert Johnson and knew him for years, found the entire devil-pact story preposterous, later claiming, “Robert never claimed any such thing.” In the years following his murder, Johnson’s family members, consistently disputed the myth and attributed his skills to plain old hard work and natural talent—as well as and mentorship of another guitarist named Ike Zimmerman, who was himself a skilled player from Beauregard, Mississippi. In all likelihood, it was Zimmerman who took Johnson in and taught him following the young man’s loss of his wife and child. According to family accounts, Zimmerman had his own habit of practicing guitar in cemeteries at night, as, in the African-American diasporic tradition, the sacred ground may be viewed as another liminal space that acts as a threshold between the worlds inhabited by the living and the dead.

That June in Dallas

The songs Robert Johnson recorded at 508 Park Avenue on June 19 and 20, 1937 would go on to become some of the most enduring and important recordings in American musical history. “Hellhound on My Trail” is a portrait of haunted consciousness so vivid even today that it defies easy analysis: the hellhound as a figure simultaneously of guilt, fate, and of genuine supernatural origins, and of the psychological weight of living on the margins of a society that still regarded Black men as property; “Me and the Devil Blues” (the single most important track in solidifying Johnson’s “pact legend”) opens with the Devil knocking at Johnson’s front door at early morning, and tells of an intimacy suggesting not fear of the Devil, but a relationship with him—comfortable, knowing, perhaps even contractual in some sense that has nothing to do with souls.

What distinguishes the Dallas recordings from the earlier San Antonio session is a quality that music historians have noted but struggled to characterize: a deepening interiority, a quality of inwardness. These are not performances directed outward at an audience, but sound more like what they truly were: an intimate setting of Johnson singing to himself. Reports that he’d played facing the wall so as to guard his technique from other musicians, play into the myth that he was a tortured soul who was protecting the “gift” he’d bargained away so much to attain.

On August 13, 1938, Johnson performed at the Three Forks juke joint near Greenwood, Mississippi. The owner, a jealous husband, gave him a glass of whiskey laden with poison; Johnson was sick by nightfall and was dead within three days. Only adding to the legend, his burial site remains accurately known. Rumors immediately circulated that the Devil had come to collect, yet the facts are grimmer and more human: a man murdered by a jealous husband in the Jim Crow South, with no medical attention and no justice. Johnson’s death certificate (only discovered in 1968) lists the cause simply as “No Doctor.”

His twenty-nine completed songs, however, became immortal. At first out-of-print, they were rediscovered and pressed to vinyl in 1961, reaching the ears of Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bob Dylan, who carried the current forward into music that reached audiences Johnson could never have imagined.

Every power chord in rock and roll still carries some trace of what Johnson recorded at 508 Park Avenue during that Dallas heatwave.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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