Hell hound on my trail

If there is a single narrative that captures the modern understanding of transformative crossroads magic it is the spurious fable of the selling of Robert Johnson's soul. When, in the palaeoanthropology of 20^th century rock and roll music, the biographers of the short-lived blues legend claimed that he had been down to the Dockery Plantation crossroads at midnight to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for guitar skills, they were perhaps unwitting witnesses to the deep history of myth and ritual that has long been associated with the transformative space of the crossroads.Footnote ² They were not lacking in foresight, however, about the way in which such a claim would enhance their subject's credibility. The value of such a sulphurous reputation for a musician is not merely a recent phenomenon but also has historical precedents. A hundred years before Johnson (who lived 1911–1938), the guitarist and violinist Niccolo Paganini (1782–1840) was considered such a suspiciously devilish virtuoso that his audiences were reputed to cross themselves before his concerts in hope of protection from subtle demonic influence. One audience member even fled a concert after reporting seeing the Devil himself aiding Paganini's performance.Footnote ³ Going a little further back, Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) explained of his best-known sonata, The Devil's Trill (1713), that he had ‘written down the piece after waking from a particularly vivid dream of the Devil playing a violin with ferocious virtuosity’, and claimed that it was ‘but a shadow of what he had witnessed in the dream, for he was unable to capture on the page the Devil's full intensity’.Footnote ⁴ His long career was certainly not harmed by this youthful excursion into Hell.

These devilish associations may in fact have added to a perception of the capacity that music has always had of conveying a kind of mystery, one hard won perhaps through ‘occulted’ practice techniques, so lending the musician a certain aura of mystique or magic, and music itself a spiritual dimension. Darci Sprengel describes the role of music in Egypt in the 2011 Arab Spring in combating a deep feeling of powerlessness, coming from a tradition where music is ‘attributed with having its own agency’ and is thought to be subject to ‘forces … outside the artist's control’, including the influence of jinn.Footnote ⁵ The attribution of extraordinary skills of any kind to a demonic or satanic source is found in many cultures and across time. Keith Thomas reports the 11^th century writer William of Malmesbury's complaint that ‘the common people disparaged excellence in any sphere by attributing it to demonic aid’.Footnote ⁶ The Faustian nature of these reputed dealings with power has echoed through some of the foundational narratives of Western culture in ways that this article will explore. Following on from the recent special issue on the relationship been music and magic (Popular Music, 38/1), this article expresses one key element of the historical process by which they are still intimately associated: the ritual at the crossroads.

Although Johnson is reputed never to have specifically claimed the venal crossroads exchange for himself, the lyrical content of his songs and his early and suspicious death at 27 did nothing to exorcise the compelling myth of soul-selling from his brief but increasingly closely scrutinised biography.Footnote ⁷ However, by invoking such a metamorphic transaction with a crossroads god for the sake of Johnson's artistic mythology, his biographers inadvertently perhaps also helped to perpetuate a mythology that still lingers inside some of the cultural forms of the 21^st century. The 1986 film Crossroads brought his myth to the attention of the wider rock music world with its inclusion of Steve Vai as the Devil's ringer guitarist. In the ensuing guitar battle the hero Willie Brown wins by outplaying him with a Paganini piece. Perhaps a still more evocative filmic rehearsal is found in the ‘Tommy Johnson’ character in the Coen Brothers’ turn of the millennium film O Brother Where Art Thou (2000). One reviewer of the mercurial London soul singer Amy Winehouse, also 27 when she died, wonders what happened before the album Back to Black (2006), asking ‘It's almost too good … did she sell her soul to the devil at the Golders Green and Finchley Road crossroads?’Footnote ⁸

Despite Johnson's denial of the devilish business at hand, its repute still colours his musical legacy. His role in blues and rock mythology has been seminal and to some extent his influence is still felt, his life regarded as what Marybeth Hamilton calls ‘the embodiment of the blues romance’.Footnote ⁹ To the blues revivalists of the mid-20^th century and afterwards, the ‘authentic’ bluesman was supposed to be, as Hamilton describes, ‘a tormented soul who found in his suffering a kind of transcendence: driven by demons, as legend held Johnson had been, but generating through his torment the blues’ highest art’.Footnote ¹⁰ The ontological function of the artist's suffering itself, including the desperation implied by the crossroads transaction with the forces of evil, was thought to impart an essentially authentic quality to the music. In this vein, Eric Clapton referred to Johnson simply as ‘the most important blues singer that ever lived’.Footnote ¹¹

Yet the story of Johnson going down to the crossroads as somehow embodying the ‘primal voice of African-American suffering’ only works in its most depoliticised form.Footnote ¹² It is problematic that the romanticism that drives this popular musical mythology also serves to obscure what George Lipsitz calls the ‘hard facts of life and labor in the segregated South in Johnson's day’.Footnote ¹³ In this context, there is a danger that this particularly African American experience may be appropriated without sufficiently acknowledging ‘the factors that give African Americans and European Americans widely divergent opportunities and life chances’, as Lipsitz says.Footnote ¹⁴ Luc Sante describes such white appropriation of Johnson's crossroads myth as a manifestation of ‘colonial sentimentalism’, and even worse than this, Hamilton identifies it as the ‘eroticisation of African-American despair’.Footnote ¹⁵ The extent to which this culturally acquisitive aspect of the story is still important may be demonstrated by Eminem's insistence on acknowledging the African-American origins of the musical forms he has exploited.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet however this recognition of roots functions, it may not deliver authenticity in terms of either provenance or life experience.Footnote ¹⁷ Eminem has some claim to prior authentic distress, but this has not always been the case. And after all, as Theodore Gracyk asks bluntly, ‘how can a pampered, milkfaced, middle-class kid who has never had a hole in his shoe sing the blues that belong to some beat-up old black who lived his life in poverty and misery?’Footnote ¹⁸

Transformative origins

However, even in these circumstances, the very action of reaching after elements of the extremity that the crossroads transformation story implies may still evidence a desire amongst artists for a personal authenticity of their own – an aspirational, if masochistic, longing for a certain kind of formative experience: one that might validate their artistic claim to have plumbed the human depths and accessed the ‘soul’, or the ‘heart’, or even the insistent note of loss that is often detected in Johnson's recordings. In this model, the persistence of the transformative myth suggests a continuing yearning for a transcendent musical origin – even one which may perhaps still be accessed by an intense experience at a crossroads of some kind.

In Johnson's story, the Christian Devil is merely the current and most convenient placeholder for a multiplicity of possible gods who have been imagined to commune with applicants and supplicants coming down to the crossroads throughout the centuries. The derivation of Johnson's particular legendary transformational exchange is most likely to be found in the rituals of the Yoruba religion which originates in Nigeria and Benin – the geographical origins of much of his local Mississippi plantation's original slave community. The original deity involved in any such local tradition would most probably have been Eshu Elegba, the Yoruba god of the crossroads, of generative metamorphoses, of luck and misfortune, and ominously of death itself. Considering this hypothetical crossroads ritual's supposed specificity to the traditions of the southern USA, it is surprising how entirely in accord it is with crossroads rites of magic and transformation that obtain throughout European and other global cultural traditions. These extremely widespread practices date back much further than the early modern period into at least the early classical era, and have been more or less continuous in many places to the present day.

Yoruba and other West African cosmologies regard crossroads as ‘sites of both danger and opportunity’, Lipsitz explains.Footnote ¹⁹ In this, as in many cultures, crossroads are regarded as places giving access to transformative powers beyond the realm of the merely physical. Especially in Yoruba culture, a crossroads ritual mediates a dangerous metamorphic power.Footnote ²⁰ Margaret Thompson Drewal describes the centrality of the crossroads to these rituals, saying ‘the juncture of three and sometimes four roads, is a physical representation of the intersection of the phenomenal world and the otherworld’ and because of this the crossroads is ‘a prime spot to place sacrifices so that they will be taken to the otherworld’.Footnote ²¹ Since their status as in-between places makes crossroads ideal for this sort of transaction between worlds, it may not be surprising that a common belief throughout the early modern period was of people ‘mortgaging their souls’ at the parting of the ways, in return for ‘a temporary access of supernatural knowledge or power’, as Thomas shows.Footnote ²² Yet this narrative of demonic soul-selling goes back much further into the human narrative experience than one might imagine, and is in fact a story whose extreme antiquity has not been appreciated until very recently. Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid J. Tehrani's recent phylogenetic analyses have revealed that the common folktale ‘The Smith and the Devil’, telling of a blacksmith who sells his soul to a demonic spirit in exchange for supernatural powers, is probably at least 6,000 years old, making it older by far than any scripture of today's world religions.Footnote ²³ Since the folktale has been much adapted, there is no way of knowing whether the crossroads figures in its original narrative, but it is certain that the transformational exchange it describes has typically gravitated there throughout narrative history. In possibly what has become the most influential version of this basic story in the West, the 16^th century Faustus myth of demonic transformation, it was ‘toward evening, at a crossroads’ in a forest called the Spesser Wald, near Wittemberg, that Faustus ‘described certain circles with his staff … [and] thus in the night between nine and ten o'clock he did conjure the Devil’.Footnote ²⁴

In the testimonies of those describing magical transactions at crossroads, especially in matters of love, revenge, or the arts, a form of musical metamorphosis is often part of the deal. To the German occult writer Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), music was itself materially transformational since it operated as an amplifier for the influence of the stars and planets. For Agrippa, music ‘follows opportunely the Celestial bodies’ and ‘doth wonderfully allure the Celestial influence’.Footnote ²⁵ Nanette de Jong and Barbara Lebrun refer to both the supposed divine origin of the natural sympathies and harmonies of this music of the spheres and its association with magic from the earliest times, noting that Plotinus (203–70 CE) described music as ‘a form of sorcery that raises no question’.Footnote ²⁶ In Agrippa's world, music is therefore in itself able to ‘change the affections, intentions, gestures, motions, actions and dispositions of all the hearers’.Footnote ²⁷ Agrippa also believed that it ‘appeaseth the mind’ or alternatively makes men mad, and possibly even cures many ills, allowing music many different transformative properties.Footnote ²⁸ Zachary Loeffler and Owen Coggins have studied those who claim similar effects for music to the present day.Footnote ²⁹

Musical transactions

Music could be an integral part of other magical rituals, including those of Sicilian witches’ imagined fairy gatherings, and was sometimes used to bless houses in that vicinity.Footnote ³⁰ It is also a significant element of the transaction in Lawrence Southerne's Reference Southerne1642 pamphlet Fearefvll Newes from Coventry that describes how one Thomas Holt, a ‘Musitian in Coventry’, having been made penurious by his 19 children, had sold his soul to the Devil.Footnote ³¹ The pamphlet describes Holt as a phenomenal musician, one ‘whom for his skill in his Art and profession few or none could compare … by which he gained not onely the love of many Gentlemen thereabouts; but also a competent estate to himselfe’.Footnote ³² Rather than allow this as evidence of the benefit of the musician's demonic transaction, the moralistic pamphleteer attributes the musician's sudden facility with his instrument to the blessing of God. Although this increased skill was the apparent cause of the prosperity that supposedly followed his soul-trading, it was Holt's ‘infidelitie and miserable belief’, Southerne says, that were ‘the grand and sole ringleaders’ to his damnation and so reinscribes the nature of the exchange within a specifically Christian moral hamartiology, the language of the ‘fatal flaw’.Footnote ³³ In this case, the musician, having been warned of the Devil's approach to claim his soul by a ‘mightie and tempestuous wind … by reason whereof some had their houses blowne down’, attempts in some desperation to write a will, but is cut short by a handsome visitor who, after some ‘private conference’, breaks Holt's neck, changes ‘his assumed shape’, and makes off into the night.Footnote ³⁴ Whatever the actual circumstances of Holt's murder, or the moralistic and hortatory nature of the pamphlet's storyline, the essential elements of the myth are there: musicianship or other artistic wizardry expressed with a high degree of skill and subsequent prosperity associated with the fear or suspicion of some otherworldly exchange, here expressed in the devilish terms of popular contemporary theology.

Such imparting of musical skills by supernatural means has been a significant element of the mythology of crossroads across cultures. There is an old Norwegian tradition that skill can be gained in music by ‘sitting on Christmas Eve on a crossroads with a stick in each hand; these one would move like a fiddle and fiddle bow’ in order to effect the charm.Footnote ³⁵ This specificity of time and place accords with a crossroads tradition recorded in 1925, in Maryland, USA, that stipulates ‘before sunrise for five mornings you take a fiddle and go into the country till you come to the end of one of the main roads or to a crossroads, on the fifth morning you will meet a man carrying a fiddle. He will teach you to play. He is the devil’.Footnote ³⁶ The St Louis bluesman Peetie Wheatstraw, who was happy to call himself the Devil's Son-in-Law, is reported as claiming this for himself:

This tradition, however, certainly pre-dates the blues, and C. Lee recorded the custom among communities in the southern USA in the late 19^th century, quoting one informant as claiming ‘if you take your banjo or violin to the forks of the road at midnight, Satan will teach you how to play it’.Footnote ³⁸ The summoning elements these ritual spells have in common are the crossroads, the late night or early morning and playing the instrument as a musical offering. One, from an informant in Ocean City, Maryland, ‘starts in a cemetery and concludes at a crossroads’ and insists that ‘to play a banjo or a guitar … you have to sell yourself to the devil’.Footnote ³⁹ This requires that you ‘go to the cemetery nine mornings and get some of the dirt and bring it back with you and put it in a little bottle, then go to some fork of the road … and on the ninth morning there will come some rider riding at lightning speed in the form of the devil … and when he has passed you can play any tune’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Another specifies time: ‘You go out there [to the forks of a road] about four o'clock, just commence dawning day, just about crack of day’.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet another informant specifies the required aid of a sacrificial rooster, adding:

The rooster's eye may presumably work as a prophylactic against evil. French versions of the same sort of sacrifice of roosters are recorded in Puisayne, Auverne, Béarn and Gers, with variations on the ritual also found in Poland and Bavaria.Footnote ⁴³

In 1926, Newbell Puckett reported the particulars of a crossroads ritual for music in some detail when ‘a New Orleans conjurer’ described the procedure involved with making a contract with the Devil to him as follows, with an accomplished storyteller's eye for narrative specificity. Firstly you need to cut your finger nails as short as possible. Then take a bone of a black cat and go with your guitar to ‘a lonely fork in the roads at midnight’. There you must ‘play your best piece, thinking of and wishing for the devil all the while’ and soon you will hear music, ‘dim at first but growing louder and louder’; then after a while you will feel ‘something tugging at your instrument’ and at this point you must allow the Devil to take it but ‘keep thumping along with your fingers as if you still had a guitar in your hands’. At this point, the Devil will swap instruments with you and accompany you on your guitar. Then, the conjuror concludes,

To be clear, the promise and the metamorphic fantasy here, as in the Faustus myth, is that after this painful ritual ‘you can do anything you want to in this world’ and this huge claim perhaps is at the root of the continued fascination with this transaction, suggesting an almost divine power. In modern Brazilian candomblé ceremonies, ritual music is seen as the embodiment of the magic life force and is not only a crucial element in appeasing the god-like orixás, but is also thought to manifest their very voices. As Brian Brazeal notes, in candomblé ceremonies, ‘music is not just an accompaniment; it is the means by which ritual work is done’ via the means of its significant ‘transformative power’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This is clearly also the case in many of the other crossroads transactions described above, with their common elements of performed or exchanged music, material sacrifice, and geographical and temporal specificities. It is arguable that the projection of desire onto magical intersections of time and space such as these is natural to a modern culture obsessed with instant transformations and the Faustian price of fame. This seems especially to be the case, however, where it is concerned with music, which, despite the depredations of the internet age, retains a sense of its own subversive transcendent power.

The roots of ill repute

That these rituals might be perceived to involve the aid of a devil figure could result from the unsurprising fact that the Christian church has always been at best ambivalent about the power of music, and at worst has considered it literally demonic, being especially suspicious of its effects on the emotions. In the teachings of the so-called church ‘fathers’, Justin Martyr (c.150 C.E.) condemned what he called ‘subtle flutes that provoke people to lustful movements’; Clement of Alexandria (c.190 C.E.) meanwhile declared that ‘if people occupy their time with pipes, psalteries, choirs … and such disorderly frivolities, they become quite immodest’, concluding that ‘we must reject frivolous music, which weakens men's souls’; Novatian (c.235 C.E.) was more specifically opposed to stringed instruments, asking disparagingly, ‘why should I speak of strings set vibrating with noise?’ and declaring that ‘even if these things were not dedicated to idols, they should not be approached and gazed upon by faithful Christians’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In terms of the influential churchmen of the early modern period, although Martin Luther was broadly in favour of music, John Calvin was of the opinion that secular music could make (presumably) men ‘effeminate in disordered delights’.Footnote ⁴⁷ With this background of fear over the material power of music, it is not surprising that by Robert Johnson's time it was widely believed in many white conservative Christian circles that non-church music and, adding the obvious racist element, especially that made by black people, was the Devil's music. In Europe and elsewhere this discourse found fertile ground in what was a long tradition of mistrust for musicians and travellers generally.Footnote ⁴⁸

Some of this negative construction may also draw upon the classical roots of the supposedly disreputable nature of music, some of which describe music employed for the benefit of gods of the crossroads. The first thing the trickster and crossroads god Hermes did when born, illegitimately (of Zeus and the nymph Maia), was to crawl from his mother's cave, make the first lyre from a turtle's shell and sing a song about himself.Footnote ⁴⁹ Shortly after, Hermes stole the god of music Apollo's cattle but won his forgiveness by playing the lyre he had made and then gifting it to Apollo, in exchange for the title Keeper of the Herds, whilst reserving for himself the shepherds’ pipes that he had also invented.Footnote ⁵⁰ It was after these musical transactions that he was appointed ‘messenger of the gods and guide to Hades’ with his shrines sited at the between-place of the crossroads.Footnote ⁵¹ Horace tells that the Roman version of Hermes, Mercury, to whom ‘Statues four-square [were] set up … in the Cross-Roads’, was the god of ‘all gainful Arts’ and ‘the Inventor of the Harp’.Footnote ⁵² Mercury plays the lute in Sambucus’ emblem book of 1564 where he also performs a transformative musical function.Footnote ⁵³

This suspicion that musicians like Johnson were in general up to no good, and might very likely be tempted towards the radical transformativity of the crossroads, has a long history then. One part of the background to this may be found in the nature of musicians’ touring, which partook of the general wariness of settled societies towards wanderers. Misgivings on this score included the idea that such travellers might use their transitory status to spread heresy, or even, by their very peripatetic nature, the plague. Such things had also been suspected of earlier medieval travelling musicians in Europe, the Manichaean Cathar troubadours.Footnote ⁵⁴ As A.L. Beier explains, minstrels could be politically subversive, attacking unpopular people or policies, occasionally even to the point of provoking violent riots, as in 1584 when crowds numbering up to a thousand ‘battled near London theatres’, or in Walsall in 1610 when ‘revellers led by a pipe and tabor fought all night’.Footnote ⁵⁵ With this background of music as a catalyst for subversion, it may not be surprising that anti-musician legislation might not be far behind. Under Henry VIII's sovereignty, minstrelling in general, besides its potential for drawing people to hell, was considered to be a cover for the religious dissent of ‘sectaries and recusants’ and one statute of his expressed the fear that ‘songs and ballads were used by schismatics’, as Beier noted.Footnote ⁵⁶ Beier also cites examples of musicians being prosecuted as religious deviants in Yorkshire in 1608 and Nottinghamshire in 1616.Footnote ⁵⁷ Legislation for the prosecution of vagrancy at the time included provision for ‘many entertainers … wizards and unlicensed healers’, an inclusion which indicates the kind of company travelling musicians were thought to keep.Footnote ⁵⁸ Minstrels were also suspected to be thieves, with Robert Greene in 1592 alleging that ‘music was helpful to pickpockets’, and at least in one case, that of Richard Cokley in 1616, who went to a Chester fair ‘to do singing, dancing and tricks’, and was accused there of ‘taking a purse containing £5’, this was apparently true.Footnote ⁵⁹ Elizabeth I's vagrancy statutes of 1572 and 1597 included minstrels among their threatening ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’, while during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate a law was enacted ordering wandering ‘fiddlers and minstrels summarily to be branded’.Footnote ⁶⁰

The need for musicians to travel of course often historically had an economic imperative. Although the touring musicians known as town waits appear to have been relatively well paid, as they ‘travelled around on foot during the weeks of summer and performed their music to paying audiences in other places’, as Mark Brayshay says, the majority of those arrested as unlicensed vagrant minstrels were to some degree poor.Footnote ⁶¹ A musician called Robert Dorey ‘played one day until midnight for some milkmaids near Reading in 1623, and travelled the next day before sun-up to perform for 1d at a gentleman's house’.Footnote ⁶² For some travellers it is poverty that forces them to musicianship in the first place, as Robert Burton complained in 1621: ‘Homer himself must beg if he want means, and … sometimes he did “go from door to door, and sing ballads, with a company of boys about him”’.Footnote ⁶³ As the chief popular musicians of their day, ballad-singers above all were thought to be ‘dishonest, immoral and seditious’ and from around 1570 the word ‘ballad’ itself is a pejorative term; one Methuselah Flower of Tewkesbury, was arrested in 1654 in Bristol for ‘singing of ballads, thereby contracting people together in a tumultuous manner’.Footnote ⁶⁴ I predict a riot. Ballads were in fact banned in England from 1647 to 1656, and in 1648 ‘the Provost-Marshal was ordered to seize singers and hawkers’, while in 1655 a Devizes man was despatched to a house of correction ‘for singing of ballads contrary to the statute’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Whether wealthy or poor, musicians had a reputation for living dangerously and defying the authorities. The musician Nicholas Bennet was arrested in Wiltshire in 1614 simply for playing on Sundays, no doubt one of many.Footnote ⁶⁶ Meanwhile, one Bodleian Library manuscript describes a musician called Michael Wise who was ‘knocked on the head & kil'd downright by the Night-Watch at Salisbury for giving stubborn and refractory language to them, on S Bartholmews day at night’, in 1687.Footnote ⁶⁷ Although ‘police’ brutality was much more common then, ‘stubborn and refractory’ language would probably not have resulted in his death if the swearer had been a respected member of the community.

An earlier deviant

These early modern roots connect this narrative, somewhat coincidentally, to another Robert Johnson who was also a songwriter and skilful player of frets and strings, and a close professional associate of William Shakespeare.Footnote ⁶⁸ This earlier Johnson (1582–1633) was a virtuoso lutenist and composer of music for masques and entertainments who was attached to James I's court from 1604, and served the royal courts until his death in 1633.Footnote ⁶⁹ He wrote music for the theatre, collaborating, among others, with Ben Jonson on the Oberon, the Faery Prince (1611) and The Devil is an Ass (1616). Despite these public collaborations, like the later Robert Johnson, he remains somewhat elusive, lacking any extant autograph collections of his own.Footnote ⁷⁰ Also in keeping with his later namesake, he was a similarly seminal figure, a musical innovator who took a radical approach to matching ‘disrupted textures [and] disorder to stage movements’, as Daniel Albright describes it, with Johnson also ‘especially attracted to the fantastic, the macabre, the grotesque’.Footnote ⁷¹ Albright suggests that the very semantic codes involved in music themselves ‘arise through deviant behaviour, for only deviance is salient enough for the ear to register as significant’, and so, like the later musician, this earlier Robert Johnson may also have had something of the allure of the deviant about him.Footnote ⁷²

Johnson's main career claim to fame is his composition of the original settings for some of Shakespeare's lyrics, writing at least two of the extant songs of The Tempest. This is of course an overtly transformative play in which Ariel is the wandering spirit who sings of death and metamorphosis.Footnote ⁷³ The best-known of these are probably ‘Where the Bee Sucks’ and ‘Full Fathom Five’:

These narrative tendencies feed the transformative alchemical myths of the age, and The Tempest is a play in which nearly everyone undergoes some form of ‘sea-change’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Johnson was also the composer of the music for the song ‘Come Away Hecate’ in Thomas Middleton's The Witch (c.1613–1616), that sings of the common fantasy attached to the free wandering nature and high aspirations of witchcraft. According to Albright, this tune to the crossroads goddess Hecate, still extant, is ‘lilting’ and ‘jingly’: ‘a clear crowd-pleaser’.Footnote ⁷⁶ There was clearly no blue note here, and the lyrics tell us that after communing with the spirit metamorphosed into the likeness of a cat, these witches could ‘fly by night’, higher than cannon shot and the ‘yelps of hounds’, well out of reach of any hell hound that might be on their trail. It is perhaps interesting to consider how the accident of two musical Robert Johnsons in this history of crossroads ritual and musical transformation suggests a coincidence that superstitious minds might find suspicious.

Beyond the crossroads

Perhaps the one thing we do know from these transactions at the crossroads is that they will fail to deliver. Like the Faustian bargain, one famous report of a witch confession from 1681 describes an agreement with the Devil that was signally unsuccessful: ‘He promised her when she made her contract with him, that she should want nothing, but ever since she hath wanted all things’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This perhaps is the trick of the god at the crossroads, as Dr Faustus and others have found out: that the appetite that gives birth to transformation is in fact unlimited.Footnote ⁷⁸ The history of rock and roll in particular is littered with the youthful corpses of those that believed in and tried to follow Johnson's supposed path to the crossroads and beyond. In this way, the cultural in-between place of the crossroads works as one of the vacuums that nature abhors: a place perpetually hungry, for emotional content, for working performance of rituals of meaning, and for the bodies that carry those. Only the most socially or materially disempowered, or perhaps the hungriest of wanderers, is driven to the extreme measure of loitering there for long. For many musicians, their art, like the rituals of the crossroads, is born of both hopeful resistance to, and necessary acquiescence to, dominant powers of different kinds (at the intersections of commerce, censorship, fandom, or credibility, for instance). Unless one is content with powerlessness, the choice of which powers to submit to may still be the most meaningful one available. Yet in this universal yearning for a meaningful transformation, or a transcendent origin, it is the music itself which remains the most potent of catalysts.