Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition by Adam Gussow (review)

Robert Johnson’s 1937 recording “Hell Hound on My Trail” contains some of the most compelling lyrics in Mississippi Delta blues, such as those in the opening chorus: “I got to keep movin’, I’ve got to keep movin’, blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail (repeat) / And the day keeps on worryin’ me, it’s a hell hound on my trail, hell hound on my trail.” Ever since Rudi Blesh discussed this song in 1946, “Hell Hound on My Trail” has been described in haunted terms.¹ “This song creates a mood of sheer terror,” as folklorist David Evans once introduced it.² But to my knowledge, no previous commentator has reconciled that striking opening to its following chorus: “If today was Christmas Eve, if today was Christmas Eve, and tomorrow was Christmas Day, / If today was Christmas Eve, and tomorrow was Christmas Day (spoken: Aow, would we have a time, baby?), / All I would need my little sweet rider just to pass the time away, huh huh, pass the time away.”

How should a listener regard these first two choruses? As disconnected verses from Johnson’s mental storehouse of lyrics? Or are they connected in accordance with Johnson’s overall intent for the song? In his new book, Beyond the Crossroads, Adam Gussow affirms Johnson’s recorded blues as love songs, even those considered by other writers as devil songs. Are love and the devil compatible?

To embark on his study, Gussow asks, in effect, of all the many kinds of African American popular music, why is/was it that blues alone has been singled out as the devil’s music (20)? Drawing on primary sources, he points out that fiddle music first earned that designation. As the guitar, the instrument used to play the blues on farms and plantations, succeeded the fiddle, the blues took on the association with the devil. Gussow explains:

It is worth remembering that at the dawn of the twentieth century, as African American adults in the South suddenly found themselves victimized by the combined onslaught of lynching, segregation statutes, disenfranchisement, and slander in the press and popular culture, their churches and their households were two of the only areas over which they retained more or less complete control. The blues, competing with and mocking their ministers and seducing their children, threatened to undermine both domains. This fact alone helps account for much of the drama that accompanies the phrase “the devil’s music.”

(45)

But what sort of devil should we be dealing with, especially with regard to the frustrations of love? He is certainly not a Western devil, such as Milton’s Lucifer, Goethe’s Mephistopheles, or Samiel from Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, whose acolyte, Kaspar, suggests a trip to a crossroads (Kreuzweg) on a Friday night. Rather, the preferred devil is a shape-shifting spirit whose nature was explored by Jon Michael Spencer (now Yahya Jongintaba) in Blues and Evil, which Gussow adopts as a foundational text for his study.³ Spencer describes this devil as a nonmagical liberating force who manifests himself in instances of trickiness, capriciousness, lawlessness, and sexuality. “The devil wears many hats,” says Gussow (179). “Sometimes he wears more than one hat within a given song.” Such hats may include a metaphysical ideal, or the romantic rivals described by a blues singer, or the singer himself or herself. The devil means one thing for blues as love song: “The right to choose freely in love always entails the possibility of hooking up with a lover who . . . takes away your freedom even as he lives out his own. Love hurts, or can. The blues knows all about this paradox. The devil helps blues people articulate it” (192).

It is a new interpretation, then, that Gussow offers (68–70) of Johnson’s 1937 recording of “Me and...