The Devil’s Gonna Get You

This chapter explores a major theme within the blues lyric tradition: the devil as a figure who haunts intimate relationships between African American men and women. In some cases, men imagine themselves as footloose, mistreating devils; in other cases, they complain about romantic rivals who act in that way; in still other cases, they rage as their women, in thrall to the devil, grow cold to the touch or transfer their feelings to some other man. Artists covered include Lonnie Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins, Skip James, and Sonny Boy Williamson, along with Bessie Smith, Koko Taylor, and other black women who call on the devil to punish their no-good man—or, alternately, reject him as a mistreating devil rather than the angel he appeared at first to be.

I’m Going to Marry the Devil’s Daughter

This chapter explores the way in which the blues lyric tradition uses the devil as a figure for the southern white man and hell as a figure for the miseries of the Jim Crow South. The white slave master and slave patroller show up, in coded form, in the antebellum spirituals; this tradition was reconfigured after Emancipation to reflect the new realities of the sharecropper's and bluesman's world, one presided over by the white bossman, sheriff, and prison farm warden. Bluesmen acted the devil, one might say, in order to evade and supplant the (white) devil and live more freely in the Jim Crow South over which he presided. Big Bill Broonzy, Peetie Wheatstraw, Lightnin' Hopkins, Champion Jack Dupree, and others recorded songs in which they signified on this mean white devil; Wheatstraw and Broonzy imaged themselves as his son-in-law: the black man making love to the white devil's daughter.

Heaven & Hell Parties

This chapter explores the origins and meaning of the phrase "the devil's music," paying particular attention to the way in which black southern blues performers, male and female, contest the term. Africa, through the mechanism of the slave trade and the condemnation of instrumental music by Islamic clerics, offers one possible origin for devil's music concept. The prelude to the demonization of the blues and its representative instrument, the steel-stringed guitar, is the evangelization of the slaves and the demonization of the fiddle during the second Great Revival. As blues emerged in the Mississippi Delta early in the Twentieth Century, blues musicians like John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, and the Mississippi Sheiks, along with an irreverent "young modern" generation of black youth, mocked the hypocrisy of black ministers and spurned the religious certainties of their parents and the church.

Introduction

This chapter argues that the connection between the devil and the blues is much more extensive than prevailing popular mythologies, which tend to focus narrowly on the phrase "the devil's music" and Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads. The whitening of the blues audience is partly responsible for this development; so, too, are Afrocentric understandings of Johnson that substitute Legba for the European devil and reinforce the popular overvaluation of the crossroads location, drawing attention away from black social worlds where so many devil blues recordings are set. The devil imagined by African American blues people served a range of functions; he was "just" the devil—the opponent warned about in the Bible—but he was also a figure of useable power for some bluesmen, an agent of vengeance who could "get" a wayward lover, and a symbol of the white man.

Conclusion

This chapter argues that the meaning of the blues-devil has shifted over time, with white understandings that highlight Robert Johnson's soul-sale at the crossroads coming to dominate the contemporary conversation. Clarksdale, Mississippi has become a center of touristic interest in Johnson and a place where artists and investors seek to profit from a stereotyped, gothic-laden idea of the crossroads; this development bothers some black residents of the city, who feel as though their neighborhood, one historically connected with the blues, has been bypassed. The devil-blues lyric tradition, meanwhile, has flourished in the first fifteen years of the new millennium, a development driven both by Johnson's popularity and by a post-9/11 anxiety about "evil" at large in the world. The longstanding struggle between black southern ministers and purveyors of "the devil's music" continues into the present, at least in Mississippi, but with noticeably less intensity than in days gone by.

Sold It to the Devil

This chapter focuses on the first recorded devil blues song, Clara Smith's "Done Sold My Soul to the Devil" (1924). Public anxiety about the moral hazards experienced by black female migrants to the urban North offers one context for the song, but so does the rejection of Victorian morality by a transracial cohort of Lost Generation youth for whom the devil was an admirable figure rather than fear-inducing phantom: a master of the revels and instigator of "bad behavior" of the sort playfully chastised by Fats Waller in "There's Gonna Be the Devil to Pay." Couples dancing was a key issue: both black and white ministers condemned it, along with the "devil dance dens" in which it supposedly thrived, but blues singers like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Sippie Wallace sang songs in which they partied with the devil—joyously in Rainey's case, uneasily in Wallace's.

Selling It at the Crossroads

This chapter explores the mythology of "selling your soul at the crossroads" that has surrounded guitarist Robert Johnson and dominated contemporary conversations about the devil and the blues. Offering a new theory about Johnson's attitudinal debt to his mentor, Ike Zimmerman, it argues that Johnson, far from being haunted by evil, was a master ironist who viewed crossroads mythology skeptically and instrumentally: a way of attracting lovers and increasing his prestige. The film Crossroads (1986), an interracial buddy flick focused on the adventures of Johnson's peer Willie Brown and a young white blues student, Eugene Martone, reinvigorated the Johnson legend and stimulated Mississippi's nascent blues tourism business. The 1999 installation of a guitar-topped monument at "the crossroads" in Clarksdale, Mississippi certified the Johnson legend; this chapter investigates the deep history of that intersection and explores the meanings that tourists and guides have projected onto multiple crossroads locations in the Mississippi Delta.