Happy 100th, Robert Johnson, From Your Own Crossroads: An Essay
Yesterday would have been Robert Johnson’s 100th birthday, a landmark which has not gone unnoticed — even my mom called me over the weekend to tell me about this “great NPR story” she heard on the legend of ol’ RJ. And it’s only right that we commemorate him here as well. Robert Johnson’s fame would be enough to celebrate as an arbiter of musical change, the roots of blues and rock music, America’s only indigenous sound. But what truly makes him special is the least true part about him: the myth. We’ve all heard the story: a young Robert Johnson approached the crossroads in the Mississippi Delta at midnight, met up with the Devil himself, and sold his soul for the ability to play sizzling blues guitar. He later became member of the even more mysterious 27 club. And this legend launched a century of rock ‘n’ roll lore.
I got a chance this semester to visit Johnson’s crossroads myself, and to meet with some folks that knew him. Yes, literally knew him. It seems like forever ago to us, for whom rock music has been as naturalized as The Simpsons and public libraries, that he could have been walking around, strumming those blues — but that’s part of the legend.
We hadn’t decided the next stop on our road trip when Ben, GT and I sat down with David Simmons in a crowded Starbucks in downtown Memphis. Simmons is currently curating a museum of famous blues and civil rights photographs, but his past is as varied and exciting as the history of blues itself; he seems to have had a hand in everything music-related to come through Memphis and the South in the past thirty years at least. Plus, he knows his stuff, he’s a laid-back, really nice guy, and our meeting with him couldn’t have been more serendipitous. We knew we wanted to swing through Clarksdale, Mississippi (the alleged “home of the blues,” where the crossroads are) but at this news David rolled his eyes. “If you really want to see the crossroads,” he said conspiratorially, “I’ll tell you where they are.”
As if we weren’t already hanging on his every word.
We leaned in close as David, a grown businessman, pulled out his decorated artist’s notepad and proceeded to draw an elaborate map of the road from Memphis to Helena, Arkansas, to Clarksdale, sketching in the details from memory. He insisted we go to Helena first, a straight shot from Memphis, where (if we dropped his name) we could sit in on the nation’s longest-running daily blues radio show, King Biscuit Time Radio Hour. He told us what to look for when we crossed the Mississippi river from Helena to Arkansas, and where to stay in Clarksdale — in a hostel on a former plantation, in a barely-updated one-bedroom sharecropper’s shack named for Pinetop Perkins, a musician and friend of Robert Johnson’s who died only a week after our trip at 97 years old. And most importantly, he told us where to find the real crossroads: at the old intersection of Highways 61 and 49, before they re-routed Highway 61 through the center of Clarksdale. I don’t want to give away any more details at the expense of keeping a myth a myth, but without David’s guidance, we would have been oohing and ahhing at the neon-lit sign screaming “Home Of The Crossroads!” along with the rest of the tourists.
Still, David didn’t hold too much respect for the legend. “You know that’s not really anything that happened,” he cautioned us. Better, he said, to just drive through the crossroads and spend most of our time catching the live music at Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero nightclub. Sonny “Sunshine” Payne, the 85-year-old host of King Biscuit Time Radio Hour in Helena, felt similarly about the hype, and he knew Johnson, and Perkins, and Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Walter, and Robert Lockwood, Jr., and all of the seminal blues musicians to come out of the Delta because they all appeared on his show all the time, and furthermore he grew up with them. Sonny (see the bottom of this post for his personalized message) told us how Johnson’s mother had been religious and protective and always urged her son to stay away from any temptation that might hurt him — alcohol, drugs, or violence, all of which could be found in Clarksdale’s juke joints late at night (and by the way, they still can.) But Johnson wanted to learn the guitar, and the only way was to haunt these venues and learn from the older folks, and Johnson probably picked up more than guitar lessons there. “So it was all a kind of metaphor,” Sonny said. “They say he sold his soul to the Devil, but it’s really that he was messing around with alcohol and these juke joints. There wasn’t really a crossroads. There was just that part of town that his mama didn’t want him going.”
Sonny told us lots of stories that day, all of which brought the Delta blues culture vividly to life in the present-day, as we sat in what appeared to be the only non-abandoned building in Helena (outside of the yearly Blues & Heritage festival, which draws huge numbers and big-name acts) where many of the world’s most famous blues musicians had sat before us, telling stories and jokes with Sonny, playing their music, changing the world. But neither David’s nor Sonny’s disinterest in the myth of the crossroads could dissuade us, and so we trekked out to the old highway intersection with the rail lines cutting through, the spikes rusty and glinting in the early March sunshine.
Many, many musicians make this voyage, a sort of pilgrimage, and take pictures and walk on the rails and try to feel the power of the history — like we did. It’s definitely worth it. Robert Johnson’s crossroads story is like the Old Testament: it doesn’t matter whether it happened, or it a little bit happened, or it happened only figuratively, or it never happened at all. The legacy of such a story has become manifest in literature, music, criticism, and every form of art to the extent that we can never, collectively as a culture, renege on the power of the myth. It’s why Don McLean sees Satan in Mick Jagger, why rock ‘n’ roll is swathed in dangerous allure and mystic appeal and downright sexiness, why we have “Highway 61 Revisited,” and Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival, and possibly even that heinous Britney Spears movie from 2002. So on this, the centennial of Robert Johnson’s supposed birth (hey, Methuseleh lived 969 years according to the O.T.) get yourself to a crossroads – any crossroads, whether it’s physical or merely a metaphor. “It’s an anywhere road for anybody, anyhow.”
– Caroline Klibanoff
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