The Black Man of the Crossroads

In 1966, in a small house in Jackson, Mississippi, LeDell Johnson told the musicologist David Evans and Marina Bokelman how his brother Tommy, dead ten years by then, had learned to play. Tommy had left home and come back able to play whatever he pleased. The recipe LeDell repeated is spare: take your guitar to a place where one road crosses another, sit down there and play a little before twelve; then a big black man comes up, takes the guitar, tunes it, plays a piece on it and hands it back. From that moment you can play anything. Nobody bargains out loud and nobody signs anything: the deal is in having handed over the instrument. Evans published the account in his 1971 study of Tommy Johnson.

Forty years before that interview the rite was already in print. Newbell Niles Puckett travelled the Black Belt of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia and published in 1926 a collection of folk beliefs in which the fiddle and the banjo appear as the devil's instruments, forbidden to church folk to the point that playing the violin is described as brazen communication with Satan himself. Among the formulas he recorded is the barest of them all: take your banjo to the forks of the road at midnight and Satan will teach you how to play it. The figure in those formulas has no proper name and no biography; he is simply called the black man, which in the English of the witch trials had long been one of the ordinary ways of naming the devil.

In Southern hoodoo the crossroads was not scenery but a place of work. You went there to get rid of something: whatever had been used in a rite was thrown down at the crossing and you walked home without looking back, so that it would not find its way after you. And you went there to learn. The formula Puckett recorded, and which the collectors of the nineteen thirties heard again and again, is to return to the same crossing several nights running, or several mornings before dawn, until the figure appears; what is asked for is not always music, since there are versions for cards, for dice and for marksmanship. That this use of the crossing descends from the road guardians of West Africa is a hypothesis debated among scholars, not a demonstrated line of descent: what is documented is that the practice was carried on in Christian vocabulary, with Satan as the party addressed.

The story is almost always pinned on Robert Johnson, who was no relation of Tommy's and about whom no account equivalent to LeDell's exists. His "Cross Road Blues", recorded in San Antonio in November 1936, mentions no pact at all: it describes a man kneeling at a crossing who cannot get a ride and on whom night is closing in, a very concrete danger for a black man in the segregated South. The attribution hardened later, with the reissues of the nineteen sixties and the writing that followed, until it became the default story and displaced the man who had actually told it. The so-called 27 Club, assembled by the press in the nineteen nineties out of coincidences in the ages of real musicians, is a separate matter and belongs neither to this figure nor to its explanation.