blog post The Devil and Robert Johnson

It’s the best-known story from the blues’ murky past, and it has found its way into popular culture time and again. Robert Johnson was a young man living on a plantation out in the Mississippi countryside. Tormented by a burning desire to become a great blues musician, and failing in his efforts, Johnson was instructed to bring his guitar to a crossroad near the Dockery Plantation at midnight. As Johnson waited alone in the dark, the devil approached out of the night in the form of a powerfully built black man. Satan took Johnson’s guitar, and carefully tuned it. Once finished, he settled the guitar against his large chest, and played song after song. He handed back the guitar, and vanished into the inky night. Johnson found he could play every song he had just heard, and had mastered the instrument. In exchange, he had forfeited his soul.

The sinister aspect of his songs “Hell Hound on my Trail,” “Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil),” and “Me and the Devil Blues” and his untimely death at the age of 27 gave the tale a veneer of credibility.

It’s a story good enough to appear time and again in popular culture. Cream’s 1968 version of Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” (which they called “Crossroads”) drew attention to the story. Their version is much more ambiguous about just what is going on at the intersection in question. In Johnson’s version it’s pretty clear his only misdemeanor is hitchhiking.

Johnson’s story also traveled to Hollywood. In the 1986 film Crossroads, a music student tracks down a close friend of Robert Johnson, and examines the musician’s legacy over the course of a jailbreak, hoboing from New York to Mississippi, and a meet up with the devil. It all culminates in a guitar duel with Steve Vai for the soul of Ralph Macchio (I believe Ralph wins with a crane kick).

But if you want to see a great movie play with the legend, watch the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? The film is about a trio of convicts who have broken out of jail (this is required in every movie referencing Johnson) and trying to get to some hidden treasure before it is trapped underwater by a new dam. While on the run, they pick up a hitchhiker at a crossroad. The hitchhiker, Tommy Johnson, explains he was out in the middle of nowhere to sell a soul he wasn’t using for some lucrative guitar skills.

Believe it or not, the reference here isn’t to Robert Johnson. There was a real blues player named Tommy Johnson who cultivated a diabolical persona as a kind of marketing ploy. Tommy would play the guitar between his legs, behind his head and throw it in the air, claiming he sold his soul to the devil to master his guitar skills. In fact, all written evidence seems to prove Tommy is the originator of the soul-for-guitar-mastery swap. There’s no evidence Robert Johnson ever claimed he’d struck a deal with the devil.

Here's Robert Johnson's grandson, Steven Johnson, giving his take on how grandpa mastered the guitar.

But when it comes between the truth and the legend, the legend wins every time. “The thing about Robert Johnson was that he only existed on his records,” filmmaker Martin Scorsese said in Alan Greenberg’s book, Love in Vain: The Life and Legend of Robert Johnson. “He was pure legend." And so all that remains of the mysterious man are 29 recorded songs and a story lifted from another man with the same last name.

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