The Crossroads

Midnight, a guitar, and a stranger

Everybody knows the story, even people who have never heard a note of the blues. A young man who cannot play the guitar to save his life walks out to a lonely crossroads in the Mississippi Delta a little before midnight. He sits down and plays whatever he can. A tall dark figure comes up the road, takes the guitar from his hands, tunes it, plays a few notes and gives it back. From that night on the young man can play anything. The price is his soul.

The young man is usually Robert Johnson, who recorded twenty-nine songs in 1936 and 1937, died at twenty-seven in 1938, and became, decades later, the most mythologised musician in America. The story fits him like a tailored suit: the sudden mastery, the songs about hellhounds and the devil, the mysterious death, the unmarked grave.

But the story is far older than Robert Johnson, and the first bluesman it was told about was a different Johnson altogether. Its pieces come from West and Central Africa, from Southern hoodoo, from European tales of fiddlers who traded with Satan, and from the Black church's long quarrel with the blues. It was assembled, piece by piece, by family members, fellow musicians, folklorists, record collectors, journalists and Hollywood. Following those pieces back is one of the best detective stories in American music.

Worth knowing

Ten things about the crossroads

1. "Cross Road Blues" never mentions the devil.

   Johnson's most famous song is about a man stranded at an intersection as night falls, trying to catch a ride and praying for mercy. No deal, no stranger, no soul.

2. The original told the story about himself.

   Tommy Johnson, no relation to Robert, boasted that he had learned at a crossroads. His brother LeDell described the ritual in detail to the folklorist David Evans in 1966.

3. The "devil" was described as a big Black man.

   In LeDell Johnson's account, and in many of the folk versions collected in the 1930s, the figure at the crossroads is not a horned Satan but a large dark man, which is one reason scholars see an African spirit behind him.

4. Fiddlers did it first.

   Long before the guitar, Southern folk belief held that the fiddle and the banjo were the devil's instruments, and that the forks of a road at midnight were where to learn them.

5. Robert Johnson's teacher played in a cemetery.

   Ike Zimmerman, who taught Johnson around Hazlehurst, liked to practise at night among the tombstones, according to his daughter's account in the 2019 biography Up Jumped the Devil.

6. Another bluesman sold himself as the devil's in-law.

   Peetie Wheatstraw, one of the best-selling blues singers of the 1930s, billed himself on record as "The Devil's Son-in-Law" and "The High Sheriff from Hell".

7. An Italian violinist had the same reputation.

   Rumours that Niccolò Paganini owed his genius to Satan followed him across Europe a century before the Delta blues, and helped delay his burial in consecrated ground for years after his death in 1840.

8. Mississippi made it official in 1999.

   A state resolution named the junction of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale "the crossroads", and a sculpture of three guitars by the metalworker Vic Barbieri went up there in May that year.

9. At least eight other places have claimed it.

   Dockery, Cleveland, Leland, Rosedale, Ruleville, the Bonnie Blue plantation near Clayton, Memphis and Beulah have all been put forward.

10. A woman sold her soul on record first.

    The first blues record about selling a soul to the devil was Clara Smith's "Done Sold My Soul to the Devil", written by Porter Grainger and recorded in 1924, a dozen years before Robert Johnson's first session.

How the story grew

From the forks of the road to the big screen

1. 1713Tartini's dream. The Italian violinist Giuseppe Tartini later told the astronomer Jérôme Lalande that the devil had played for him in a dream that year, inspiring his "Devil's Trill" sonata.
2. 1924Clara Smith records "Done Sold My Soul to the Devil", the first blues record built on the idea.
3. 1926Puckett's Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro records instructions for learning the banjo or guitar from the devil at the forks of a road.
4. 1928Tommy Johnson records in Memphis. Around the Delta and the Jackson area he is already telling people where his skill came from.
5. 1931Skip James records "Devil Got My Woman", and Peetie Wheatstraw is already on record as the Devil's Son-in-Law.
6. 1935–39Harry Middleton Hyatt interviews hundreds of hoodoo practitioners across the South, and collects dozens of crossroads rituals.
7. 1936–37Robert Johnson records "Cross Road Blues", "Me and the Devil Blues" and "Hell Hound on My Trail".
8. 1966Two key interviews. Pete Welding's piece in Down Beat's yearbook reports Son House linking Johnson's sudden skill to the devil; David Evans records LeDell Johnson's account of Tommy's ritual, published in 1971.
9. 1986Crossroads, the film, sends Ralph Macchio to Mississippi in search of a lost thirtieth Johnson song, ending in a guitar duel with the devil's guitarist, played by Steve Vai.
10. 1999Clarksdale's crossroads monument goes up at Highways 61 and 49.
11. 2000O Brother, Where Art Thou? puts Tommy Johnson on screen, claiming the deal himself.
12. 2019Up Jumped the Devil, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, tells the graveyard story of Ike Zimmerman in full.

Older than the blues

The keeper of the crossroads

In Yoruba religion, in what is now Nigeria and Benin, the crossroads belongs to Eshu, also called Elegba: a trickster and messenger who stands at the threshold between the human world and the world of the spirits. Nothing passes between the two without him, and offerings are left for him where roads meet. Among the Fon of Dahomey he is Legba, and in Haitian Vodou he became Papa Legba, the old man at the gate who must be greeted before any other spirit can come through.

In the Kongo tradition of Central Africa, the crossroads is a map of existence. The Kongo cosmogram, a cross inside a circle, marks the meeting of the living world and the world of the dead, and the four moments of the sun's journey through both. The art historian Robert Farris Thompson traced these ideas across the Atlantic in Flash of the Spirit (1983), and writers on the blues such as Julio Finn, in The Bluesman (1986), have argued that the Delta's man at the crossroads is Legba wearing new clothes.

In that reading, the "devil" was not originally evil at all. He was the gatekeeper of skill, luck and power, and a musician who went to him was seeking a teacher, not a damnation. It took Christian preaching, which tended to file every trickster spirit under Satan, to turn the meeting into a sale.

What the folklorists heard

Hoodoo, the fiddle and the devil's music

The ritual itself was documented long before anyone wrote about Robert Johnson. In 1926 the sociologist Newbell Niles Puckett published Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, which recorded that the fiddle and banjo were thought to be the devil's special accomplishments, forbidden to good church people, and that a player could learn by taking his instrument to the forks of the road at midnight. One New Orleans conjurer described a version involving a black cat bone.

Between 1935 and 1939 Harry Middleton Hyatt, an Anglican minister from Illinois, travelled the South recording interviews with root doctors and hoodoo practitioners. His five volumes of Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork (1970–78), more than 4,700 pages, include dozens of crossroads rituals that follow the same pattern: go to a crossroads before midnight, play, and wait for a man to come and take your instrument. The skill gained might be music, dancing, gambling or card tricks.

The other half of the story was supplied by the church. To many devout Black Southerners, the blues was the devil's music, played in jukes full of whiskey, dice and dancing, and a bluesman was living on the wrong side of the line. The line was real enough that many musicians crossed it: Son House, LeDell Johnson and Ike Zimmerman all became preachers, and Skip James spent years away from the blues in the church. Seen from the pews, any bluesman who suddenly got good had obviously been dealing with somebody.

Europe had its own version. The legend of Faust, the scholar who trades his soul for knowledge, ran from sixteenth-century chapbooks to Marlowe and Goethe. Tartini claimed the devil had played his violin in a dream. Paganini's thin frame and impossible technique made audiences whisper that he had made a pact, and when he died in Nice in 1840 without taking the last rites, the church refused him consecrated burial; his remains were not finally laid to rest until decades later. The virtuoso in league with Satan was a stock figure on both sides of the Atlantic.

Tommy and Robert

The wrong Johnson

In 1966 David Evans, then a graduate student at UCLA, found LeDell Johnson living in Jackson, Mississippi. LeDell was a preacher by then, and the older brother of Tommy Johnson, one of the most popular Mississippi bluesmen of the 1920s. LeDell told Evans that Tommy had explained exactly how he learned. You take your guitar to a crossroads, a little before midnight, and you play. A big Black man walks up, takes the guitar, tunes it, plays a piece and hands it back, and after that you can play anything you want. Evans published the account in 1971.

Tommy Johnson made sure people knew the story. He played the guitar behind his head and between his legs, and was happy to be thought dangerous. It was publicity as much as confession.

The same year, Pete Welding published "Hellhound on His Trail" in Down Beat's 1966 yearbook, built partly on conversations with Son House. House described the teenage Robert Johnson as a pest who could barely play, who disappeared and came back startlingly good. Welding reported that House put the change down to a deal with the devil. Later researchers have not found anyone else who heard House say so, and the quote has been questioned. But the outline was enough: a boy who could not play, a few months away, and a master returning.

Somewhere in the 1960s and 70s, through liner notes, magazine features and retellings, the details of Tommy Johnson's crossroads were laid over Son House's memory of Robert Johnson's transformation. Robert Johnson himself never claimed any such thing in any surviving source.

• The legend

  Robert Johnson, a hopeless guitarist, vanished from the Delta, sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, came back a genius, sang openly about the deal in "Cross Road Blues" and "Me and the Devil Blues", and was collected by the hellhound at twenty-seven.

• The record

  The crossroads story was told by Tommy Johnson about himself, and passed to David Evans by his brother. Robert Johnson spent perhaps two years, not a few months, near Hazlehurst learning from Ike Zimmerman. His songs mention the devil, but never a deal. The legend attached to him decades after his death.

Beauregard, Mississippi

Lessons among the tombstones

The most likely explanation for Robert Johnson's sudden skill turned out to be stranger than the myth. Around 1930, after his young wife Virginia died in childbirth, Johnson left the Delta and went south toward Hazlehurst, where he was born. There he found Isaiah "Ike" Zimmerman, a guitarist from Grady, Alabama, who lived near Beauregard. His name is often spelled Zinnerman.

According to Zimmerman's family, and to Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow's biography Up Jumped the Devil (2019), Johnson lived with the Zimmermans and studied with Ike for about a year or more. Zimmerman liked to practise at night in the Beauregard cemetery, sitting on the tombstones, because nobody would disturb him there. Johnson went with him.

A young man who left the Delta unable to play, spent his nights in a graveyard with a guitar teacher, and returned a virtuoso: it is easy to see how the story grew. Son House remembered the absence as about six months. The Mississippi Encyclopedia, among others, suggests it was closer to two years, which is plenty of time for a talented, obsessive student to become very good indeed.

The evidence on record

What Johnson sang, and what he did not

Johnson's songs are the main exhibit for the prosecution, and they are thinner than they look. "Cross Road Blues" is about a man alone at a junction as the sun goes down, unable to get a ride, kneeling to ask for mercy and calling on his friend Willie Brown. For a young Black man in 1930s Mississippi, being stranded on a country road after dark was frightening enough without any supernatural help.

"Me and the Devil Blues" does bring the devil to his door, and the two walk side by side, but it plays the encounter with a gallows grin, and contains no bargain. "Hell Hound on My Trail" is about pursuit, restlessness and the hoodoo charms a jealous lover might use; its title image is terrifying, but its subject is a man who cannot stop moving. "Preachin' Blues" was issued with the subtitle "Up Jumped the Devil".

Devil songs were common currency in 1930s blues, from Skip James to Peetie Wheatstraw to Clara Smith. Johnson used the imagery brilliantly, and perhaps knowingly, as Tommy Johnson had. What none of his records contain is the deal.

Find it on a map

Where is the crossroads?

Every year visitors drive to the junction of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale to photograph the three blue guitars on a pole. Clarksdale earned the claim by being a real blues capital, a place Johnson and Son House knew, and an intersection already called "the crossroads". Mississippi made it official by resolution in 1999. The Mississippi Blues Trail's marker there is careful to say the legend has been placed in many other spots.

Rosedale, the river town Johnson mentions in "Traveling Riverside Blues", has its own claim, and Cream's 1968 "Crossroads" includes a Rosedale verse. Others point to Charley Patton's home at Dockery Farms, or to Cleveland, Leland or Ruleville. The 1986 film placed its scene at Beulah.

There is no single place, because the story never named one. In the folk tradition the crossroads is any lonely meeting of two roads at midnight. It is a threshold, not an address, which is exactly what Eshu and Legba would have expected.

Start here

Songs to hear, and where they went

• 1928 Big Road Blues Tommy Johnson's most influential song, recorded in Memphis by the man who first told the crossroads story. It runs through Floyd Jones to Canned Heat. Floyd Jones 1951Canned Heat 1967
• 1931 Devil Got My Woman Skip James's eerie lament, sung in a high, haunted voice over a minor-sounding open tuning. Robert Johnson knew it well.
• 1936 Cross Road Blues The song that named the legend, without ever telling it. Cream recorded it live in 1968. Cream 1968
• 1937 Me and the Devil Blues The devil at the door, met with a shrug and a dark joke. Later recorded by the Cowboy Junkies, Eric Clapton and Gil Scott-Heron. Cowboy Junkies 1988Eric Clapton 2004Gil Scott-Heron 2010
• 1937 Hell Hound on My Trail Pursuit, hoodoo and nowhere to rest, from Johnson's last session in Dallas. Eric Clapton 2004

Pop culture

The legend that will not die

Once the story fused with Robert Johnson, it took on a life far beyond the blues. Walter Hill's film Crossroads (1986), written by John Fusco with music by Ry Cooder, imagined a Juilliard guitar student and an elderly Willie Brown heading south to buy back Brown's soul, and ended with a cutting contest against Steve Vai. Joel and Ethan Coen's O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) restored the story to its first owner, with the bluesman Chris Thomas King as Tommy Johnson, picked up at a crossroads after making his deal.

Cream's 1968 recording of "Crossroads" carried the song to rock audiences, and since 1999 Eric Clapton has staged Crossroads Guitar Festivals at venues from Madison Square Garden to the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. The idea of the musician who sells his soul has passed into heavy metal, television and novels, and into the folklore of the "27 Club", which counts Johnson as its first member.

Scholars have spent decades taking the legend apart. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch's Robert Johnson: Lost and Found (2003) argued it was largely built by white writers and fans in the 1960s; Adam Gussow's Beyond the Crossroads (2017) traced how blues singers themselves used the devil, as a joke, a threat, a rival to the preacher and a figure for power. The legend survives because it is a good story, and because the music on those twenty-nine sides still sounds like it came from somewhere nobody else could go.