Take a Walk on the Dark Side Page 2

  In some cases you must realize, as I have done during my research, that some of these are simply myths that have made their way up the ladder to accepted legend. For example, I get tired of the Yoko bashings that I have heard from some unknowing fans. Isn’t it ironic that the woman some Beatle fans accuse of breaking up the Beatles in the first place is the same person who made it possible for the three surviving Beatles to reunite and give their fans the three Anthologies? Maybe some individuals seek only the negative.

  I would also especially like to thank all the fans, who always offer me more strange coincidences to consider. If you know of some other strange facts in which I would be interested, please contact me at Fireside Books. As always I appreciate your input!

  For the record, I do not believe that a listener can be possessed by listening to music that is said to contain backward messages. Rather, an individual can become obsessed and spend his life listening to the garbled backward sounds of mixed phonemes. In many ways the backward sounds resemble splatters of paint thrown haphazardly on a wall. Sometimes the actual problem may be in the viewer and not the creator. But if you enjoy discussing these messages, you’ll learn about them here. Just remember that any sound can have more than one interpretation. It may be a good idea to listen to a track first without looking at someone’s comment on its hidden meaning. With this in mind I hope you enjoy your journey into this offering. We’ll begin as together we walk down a deserted rural highway in Mississippi. The full moon is shining palely down upon one solitary figure holding a guitar standing by a crossroads. The time? It is shortly after midnight. Come. Let me introduce you to Robert Johnson …

  1 WAITING AT THE CROSSROADS

  —Robert Johnson, “Crossroads Blues” I went down to the crossroads and fell down on my knees,

  Asked the Lord up above for mercy, save poor Bob if you please.

  —Robert Johnson, “Me and the Devil Blues” You may bury my body down by the highway side

  So my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride.

  WHISPERS FROM THE CROWD followed him throughout every roadhouse in Mississippi. This solitary, gaunt, black bluesman spun pentatonic riffs and moaning slide guitar lines to accompany a hoarse voice filled not only with the well-known pain of the blues, but also a voice that seemed to hint that his worst pain would certainly await him after death. Members of the crowd had heard the legend. This was Robert Johnson. The same man who had waited at the crossroads and made his pact with Satan himself. In exchange for the ability to play the blues, and enjoy the adoring company of women, whiskey, fortune, and fame, Robert Johnson would offer up his tormented soul as his only escape from the cotton fields in which he had made his own hell. This was a bargain that would allow him a reprieve from the poverty into which he had been born.

  As with any legend, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. It appears that Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, on May 8, 1911. His birth was a result of an extramarital affair between his mother, Julie Ann Majors, and a farmworker whose name was Noah Johnson. Robert Johnson’s “legal” father, Charles Dodds Jr., had earlier deserted his young wife to live with his mistress in Memphis, Tennessee. By 1927, Robert Johnson was working in the cotton fields and had utilized several aliases, Robert Sax and Robert Spenser among others. Johnson later stated to other bluesmen that he used the aliases in case a murder happened while he was in town, so that the police would be unable to pin it on him.

  Biographers state that Robert Johnson was married twice. His first wife was Virginia Travis, who in 1930 died tragically in childbirth; death claimed both mother and child. He later married Callie Craft and started to pursue his musical release through the blues. Johnson’s first musical instrument was the harmonica but he later changed to the guitar, an instrument that would allow him to become known as a blues innovator and the father of modern rock and roll. Local blues legends like Willie Brown, Son House, and Charley Patton would politely let the young Johnson sit in with them as they played the roadhouses. At first they were not impressed with Johnson’s playing and avoided any contact with the young want-to-be bluesman. It was at this time that Johnson disappeared for six months. Some say that he went in search of his natural father, while others say that this was the time that Robert Johnson, armed with a black cat’s bone, waited at the crossroads and made his bargain.

  The Robert Johnson myth concerns the reaction of the older blues players to Johnson’s return and his new complete mastery of the guitar. According to legend, it was Son House who stated that “He [ Johnson] sold his soul to play like that.” The actual crossroads encountered by Robert Johnson was that of superstition and religion. Throughout the early Puritan church doctrine Christians believed that God gave man an inner light that would multiply his acts of goodness. This was a sign that the true believer was one of the chosen, the elect, whose crops would always grow taller, and that success would follow him throughout each of life’s challenges. He was marked by the community as a tribute to his Christian ideals and virtues, which represented obedience to God’s commandments and living a life to be emulated that would transcend a life filled with suffering. Just so, the old field spirituals helped the black worker cope with the horrors of the cotton fields and slavery in general. These ballads gave each individual hope, a hope that there was an afterlife where suffering would end and eternal bliss in paradise would await each true believer. It was in this world that a man’s good works and faith would allow him to find eternal Providence. In Robert Johnson’s case, this would prove to be the opposite. The lifestyle of the blues dictated a life filled with whiskey, loose women, and gambling. These were not the golden virtues patterned in the southern churches to lead man to salvation, but instead a pathway to pain and damnation.

  Johnson’s guitar instructor was said to be Ike Zinnerman. This was a peculiar name for a bluesman, since the great performers all had legendary nicknames such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, Son House, and Howlin’ Wolf. Even stranger than his name was the method of his instruction. It seemed that he claimed to have learned to play the guitar at night, sitting in old country churchyards, with his only companions being the tombstones of the dead and an eager pupil, Robert Johnson. Some claimed Zinnerman to be the devil, and most of the area bluesmen had no problem in accepting this explanation. With this as his origin, Johnson inspired whispers of his legendary pact throughout the cheap blues joints where his music became popular.

  The use of the crossroads as a symbol of Satan’s presence comes from the concept of being the final resting place for suicides and those unworthy of being buried in hallowed ground. As the bodies were buried, stones and other objects were tossed upon the corpses to show Christian contempt for their selfish deaths. After the burial, the only memorial those poor souls’ graves would contain would be the well-beaten footpaths of unsuspecting travelers who unknowingly, with each heavy footfall, would help obliterate the memory of the unfortunate remains sequestered within their narrow cells underneath the crossroads. Crossroads were also supposed to be the site where witches held their gatherings. Many readers familiar with the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne will remember that Young Goodman Brown keeps his appointment with the devil at a crossroads. Perhaps this scene drawn from Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” may well parallel that of another meeting at a crossroads, a meeting involving a young Robert Johnson:

  He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveler knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude; … and he glanced fearfully behind him as he added, “What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!” His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking forward again, beh
eld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose at Goodman Brown’s approach and walked onward side by side with him. “You’re late, Goodman Brown,” said he.

  Hawthorne well knew the superstitions associated with witchcraft and the devil’s black arts. It was his ancestor, John Hathorne, who had never repented of the execution of witches at Salem village. Young Goodman Brown and his wife can be considered allegorical characters associated with the struggle between good and evil. Hawthorne allows his protagonist to securely reestablish his faith in God through the devotion and love of his wife. Of course it is fitting that in this allegory Young Goodman Brown wife’s name is Faith. Though Young Goodman Brown disavows his fellowship with the devil and wakes to find himself all alone in the deserted forest, the story’s ending hints of newfound tragedy, in some ways very much like the legend of Robert Johnson. Goodman Brown’s life changes completely. He is haunted constantly by his visions of the witches’ ceremony, turns from his wife, and now looks at each pious figure in his village with complete misgiving. This is how Hawthorne describes Goodman Brown’s burial: “And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.”

  An illustrative discussion of Christian burial occurs in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. After Ophelia’s questionable death, which many readers believe to have been a suicide, Laertes asks the priest, “What ceremony else?” The priest replies, “Her obsequies have been as far enlarg’d/As we have warranties; her death was doubtful;/And, but that great command o’ersways the order,/She should in ground unsanctified have lodg’d/Till the last trumpet; for charitable prayers,/Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her.” The doctor answers the grieving Laertes, asserting, “We should profane the service of the dead/To sing a requiem and such rest to her/As to peace-parted souls” (5.1.200-212). Of course in Hamlet, the king forces a Christian burial for Ophelia against the precepts of Church doctrine.

  Most of the old bluesmen were well aware of mojo hands, and charms made with graveyard dust. The term “mojo” comes from African language and refers to magical powers that could be summoned to help the initiate achieve his will. Remember, blues great Muddy Waters sang of having his “mojo workin’,” and in “Hootchie-Cootchie Man” he lists a number of talismans to aid him in his love life, one of these charms being none other than a “black cat’s bone.” The black cat’s bone relates as one of many superstitions dealing with the use of supernatural power to aid the bearer in his quest for fame, love, and fortune. One legend states that a black cat should be boiled until only the bones remain. The bones should then be placed in a running stream of water. The superstition also states that one bone will float upstream and away from the others. With this bone the bearer will be given the power to cast spells, and perhaps, as in the case of Robert Johnson, the ability to summon the devil.

  The legendary concept of selling one’s soul to the devil at a lonely country crossroads actually precedes that of Robert Johnson. It had been hinted that another early bluesman, Tommy Johnson (no relation to Robert), had earlier waited at a deserted crossroads and made a pact with Satan. LeDell Johnson, Tommy Johnson’s brother, related this description of the supposed event in Francis Davis’s The History of the Blues: “If you want to learn to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where a crossroads is. A big black man will walk up there [at the stroke of midnight] and take your guitar, and he’ll tune it.”1 Tommy Johnson and the crossroads are mentioned in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? In one scene Everett, Delmar, and Pete pick up a young black man at a deserted crossroads. After introducing himself as Tommy Johnson he informs his fellow passengers that he had just sold his soul to the devil. A few minutes later the group records “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.” After the paid session Everett turns to Tommy and says, “Damn, Tommy, I do believe you did sell your soul to the devil.”

  In African folklore, “the guardian of the crossroads” was a god called Èsù by the Yoruba and Légba by the Dahomey. This deity “interpreted the will of the gods to man and carries the desires of man to the gods.”2 As Christian missionaries brought the new faith to the African tribes, it would only be appropriate to associate any ancient pagan god with the devil. In this case the crossroads became a spiritual symbol of tribal traditions counter-balanced by the acceptance of a new faith in a new God. In 1986, producer-director Walter Hill attempted to bring the Robert Johnson story to film. In his Crossroads, the film begins with one of Robert Johnson’s recording sessions. The film then shifts into the story of Eugene, a young classical guitarist who finds the legendary Willie Brown in an old folks’ home in New York and helps Brown escape back to the Delta to break his pact with Old Scratch. What is interesting is that the mysterious black man at the crossroads is called Légba (obviously Hill had done his homework). The role of Eugene was played by Ralph Macchio (The Karate Kid), who obviously is better at “wax on, wax off” than spinning blues riffs from his beat-up Fender Telecaster guitar, but there is one memorable moment when Willie Brown and Eugene fight for their souls in a “head cutting” contest in a juke joint from hell. “Head cutting” was a term used for blues men to prove their worth in a musical duel. It determined who had the best licks. The devil’s champion was Jake Butler, played by guitar virtuoso Steve Vai (obviously the devil still doesn’t play fairly). In a smoldering jam Eugene (his bag of guitar tricks provided by legendary guitarist Ry Cooder) and Willie Brown defeat the forces of darkness and win back their immortal souls. Crossroads was one of the first films to introduce the Robert Johnson legend.

  After Robert Johnson began to achieve his exemplary fame as a firstrate guitarist, he would travel throughout the South rambling from town to town, jumping freight trains with just a moment’s notice. In 1936, at the insistence of a Jackson, Mississippi, music store owner, Robert Johnson began his short recording career with Ernie Oertle, a Columbia records salesman. Within one year Johnson had recorded each of his legendary songs and may have received as much as $100 for the total effort. Having a bad reputation seemed to help pack the blues joints in which Robert Johnson performed. There was just something about his appearance. He had a cataract in one eye that many superstitious fans claimed to be the “evil eye” that could help send an innocent onlooker into the burning flames of hell. Some of the local musicians noticed that Johnson turned his back to the audience when he performed. This they took as sign that he had something to hide. Actually, he was hiding his guitar licks from the other players. When Eddie Van Halen first emerged in the music world and demonstrated his proficiency on the guitar, he also would often turn his back to the audience during his trademark “Eruption” solo. This was to keep his newfound technique a closely guarded secret. Johnson also experimented with open tunings, which eerily brings back LeDell Johnson’s story of waiting at a crossroads and at the stroke of midnight “a big black man comes and tunes your guitar.”

  As with every legend, the circumstances of Johnson’s death are shrouded in mystery. Though it is evident that he was murdered, there are many variations to his tragic death. Some sources say Robert Johnson was stabbed or shot to death by a jealous girlfriend or by one of his many lovers’ avenging spouses. The legendary account of his death hints of Johnson being poisoned by a jealous husband shortly before the other musicians arrived to begin their performance. It was suggested that wood alcohol or strychnine may have been the method of poisoning. Johnny Shines and other musicians claimed that Robert Johnson died after three days of intense, excruciating pain. On the day he died, August 16, 1938, Johnson was said to have fallen to his knees and barked and howled like a dog shortly before his untimely death at the age of twenty-seven. The legend also states that Johnson’s family may have buried his body in an unmarked grave, and—a
s many followers of the legend believed—in unhallowed ground. In this case Johnson may very well have gotten his wish in “Me and the Devil Blues”: “Early this morning when you knocked upon my door/And I said, ‘Hello, Satan, I believe it’s time to go.’” Johnson’s grave can be visited in the Zion Church graveyard just off Highway 7 in Morgan City, Mississippi. The headstone was provided by Sony Music and contains a listing of Johnson’s twenty-nine songs. Then again in a cemetery near Greenwood, Mississippi, there is another grave said to contain the mortal body of Robert Johnson. The headstone was donated by rock band ZZ Top. Many visitors place guitar picks as a tribute to the blues great when they visit this site. To make this even more confusing, in 2000 another gravesite was found and documentation provided to say that this was the actual resting place of Robert Johnson. This unmarked grave is located at Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Greenwood, Mississippi. According to Mrs. Rosie Eskridge, she saw her husband bury a body said to be that of Robert Johnson at this very site sixty-two years ago. Of course, for the more adventurous, the notorious crossroads where Robert Johnson’s pact was made is said to be found near the center of Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Highway 61 intersects Highway 49.