Beyond the Crossroads

Abstract

This book explores the role played by the devil figure within an evolving blues tradition. It pays particular attention to the lyrics of recorded blues songs, but it also seeks to tell a story about blues-invested southern lives. The first four chapters investigate, in sequence, the origins and meaning of the phrase "the devil's music" within black southern communities; the devil as a figure who empowers and haunts migrant black blueswomen in the urban North of the Jazz Age; the devil as a symbol of white maleficence and an icon for black southern bluesmen entrapped in the "hell" of the Jim Crow system; and the devil as shape-shifting troublemaker within blues songs lamenting failed romantic relationships. The fifth chapter is an extended meditation on the figure of Robert Johnson. It offers, in sequence, a new interpretation of Johnson's life and music under the sign of his mentor, Ike Zimmerman; a reading of Walter Hill's Crossroads (1986) that aligns the film with the racial anxieties of modern blues culture; and a narrative history detailing the way in which the townspeople of Clarksdale, Mississippi transformed a pair of unimportant side streets into "the crossroads" over a sixty-year period, rebranding their town as the devil's territory and Johnson's chosen haunt, a mecca for blues tourism in the contemporary Delta.

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