Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722)

by Peter Bebergal

  CHAPTER 1

  (YOU MAKE ME WANNA) SHOUT

  I

  If you want to learn to play guitar, find a crossroads and wait there at midnight. If you are patient, “a large black man” will emerge from the gloom. It could be Papa Legba, a Haitian deity whose strange origins lie in the religion known as vodou. Legba is the guardian of the spirit world, and you must first treat him with respect if you expect to gain any favor from the orisha, the spirits who are expressions of the creator god. It could also be Eshu, a West African Yoruba god who is a messenger, trickster, and the guardian of pathways. He will take your guitar and tune it in such a way so when you play it, you will be gifted with a preternatural power to play the blues. If you tell someone about it, they will surely think you unwittingly sold your soul to the devil, for who else would seemingly bestow you with such a momentous gift without actually asking for anything in return? When your time comes, they will tell you, you must answer to Old Scratch himself. But they would be wrong. It’s not the devil who waits at the crossroads. In their long journey from Africa to the southern United States, Legba and Eshu slowly transformed into something sinister, warping the dark trickster gods at the spiritual source of the blues and later fighting for their rightful place as rock and roll looked to them for its own wild designs.

  The legend of musicians selling their souls at the crossroads has become the creation myth for the popular association of rock with the occult. It is typically attributed to the life and legend of one young man; the poor, black Robert Johnson, whose influence on rock and roll is unsurpassed, was said to have made the deal that would give him uncanny proficiency on the guitar but would also doom him to a death at the age of twenty-seven. The story of Johnson meeting the devil has become popular music’s stock parable for a Faustian bargain that ultimately ends in disaster. Curiously, the original story was likely not about Robert Johnson at all, but about the Mississippi blues singer Tommy Johnson. He sang in a ghostly falsetto that suggested otherworldliness, and he fostered this by putting out the rumor that he’d received his vocal gift from the devil at a crossroads, a story perpetuated by his brother LeDell and pulled deep into the history and mythology of the blues.

  The crossroads legend, despite its pervasiveness, is merely symptomatic of a deeper occult strain swimming in the undercurrent of rock and roll. Despite the story not originating with Robert Johnson, the legendary guitarist was still wading in a bayou of voodoo and Christianity. One of Johnson’s most well-known songs, “Cross Road Blues,” makes no mention of the devil, but it was believed to be his confessional that something happened to him at the devil’s favored location. Most scholars and critics now agree that the song is about something just as common as the devil: riding the rail in search of better luck and a less baleful fate. Nevertheless, Johnson was still part of a culture knee-deep in a swamp of superstition.

  The devil is often a stand-in for any non-Christian deity that might pose a threat to the conventional Judeo-Christian narrative, and it was no different in the American South in the hundred years or so leading up to the time of Robert Johnson and the blues. It began in 1820 when a Yoruban by the name of Ajayi was captured by the Fulani people, who had come to dominate much of West Africa in the nineteenth century. It was common practice for Africans to sell other tribal people into slavery, and Ajayi was only thirteen years old when he found himself bound in chains on a ship heading to Portugal. A ship belonging to a British antislave group stopped the Portuguese vessel and was able to secure the rescue of the captured Africans on board, who were then taken to Sierra Leone, where antislavery Christians had begun to gather and settle. There, the young man was exposed to a Christian missionary and soon converted. He was mentored in the church by Samuel Crowther (whose name he adopted as his own), ordained in 1843, and later became a missionary himself. And what better place to begin than in his homeland, where he knew the people, the customs, and the language?

  To make sure his message would be well received, Samuel Ajayi Crowther began work on a translation of the Bible into the Yoruban tongue. But there were challenges. Crowther wanted the new Bible to feel Yoruban. Afraid it might appear as an alien text, he made sure it embraced the authentic culture of the Yoruban people. To this end, Crowther also borrowed from the Yoruban religion and in so doing shaped the culture of American music and preserved something he had hoped to eliminate. For the Yoruban people, there was no word corresponding to the biblical word for Satan or the devil. So Crowther chose the name for the Yoruban deity who had similar characteristics, at least from a nineteenth-century Christian viewpoint: it would be Eshu, the trickster god of the crossroads.

  The consequences of Crowther’s shell game were immense. Given that the beliefs of African religion were transmitted orally, it would be impossible to trace exactly what route this new Eshu-in-devil’s-clothing would take in the journey across the Atlantic, but if we follow the religion’s beliefs overall, eventually we are sure to find him waiting at the crossroads somewhere in the American South. By the time we get there, though, Satan has taken his place.

  Eshu first appears outside of Africa as the orisha known as Legba in Haiti. Here, the African slaves practiced vodou, a tradition blending the religion of the Fon people of West Africa known as vodun with the French Catholicism of their masters. Vodun and the Yoruba religion share some essential features, not the least of which is the figure of this trickster deity that acts as an intermediary between this world and the spirits. As for Catholicism, this brand of Christianity made perfect sense to a people who saw their own spirits performing the same function as saints; intercessors who could be prayed to for various human needs, such as curing illness, changing the course of luck gone bad, or even exorcising other ill-tempered entities. And like the orisha, Catholic saints each have their own symbol, often a plant, animal, or something akin to a charm or amulet. In fact, saints were combined with various African spirits based on the similarities of their symbolic objects.

  During the thirteen-year-long Haitian revolution of French slaves from 1791 to 1804, vodou was the spiritual heart of the revolt, and many believed the magic of their homeland would empower them. Numerous freed blacks, slaves, and slave owners fled to Louisiana and helped to increase the already swelling black population. The complex aspects of vodou intermingled with the stew of other beliefs and practices, including Evangelical Christianity, occult practices molded out of the Yoruba religion, and European superstitions. Together these elements would come to be popularly known as voodoo.

  Even before the slaves brought vodun to Louisiana, the African deities had already begun their decline as important intermediaries with the transcendent creator god in Yoruba (known as Olorun) to devils and even Satan himself. The Western view of African religion was filtered through fear and racism. Even those who considered themselves scientists viewed their subjects as though studying a strange nonhuman creature. In 1849, David Christy, a member of the American Colonization Society, gave a lecture to the Ohio House of Representatives titled “A Lecture on African Colonization,” in which he argues against the slave trade and proposes instead to “civilize and Christianize Africa.” Whenever the chance arises, Christy refers to their beliefs as superstitious and barbaric, in need of Christian cleansing. Between the subtle psychological conflation of the African trickster god with the Christian devil, as well as the deliberate attempt to paint African religion as backward, it is no surprise that for African Americans there was a troubled negotiation between their newly adopted Christianity and stories and folktales that survived from Africa. Music became the location where the lines were clearly drawn. Inside the church is the music of a promised salvation; outside the church the devil lurks. In the American South, it was difficult to separate the devil from those traditions that had been passed along, so while certain occult practices continued, the real magic was spread through whispers and gossip. Like all occu
lt phenomena, tracing what was actually practiced as opposed to what was rumored can be difficult.

  In the American South, people spoke in hushed tones about conjurers, spells, and gris-gris—small bags containing objects such as pubic hair or bone that served as talismans—and they may even have paid someone to cast a luck charm or to help ward off evil. Their Christianity did not preclude people from accepting there was power in another kind of belief, even though such practices would be intolerable within the actual church community. Voodoo also offered a direct and unmediated way to try and change one’s conditions. In his masterful book Slave Religion, Albert J. Raboteau explains why conjure (magic) was so attractive to the slave despite, for example, the Christian prohibition against it: “Not only was conjure a theory for explaining the mystery of evil, but it was also a practice for doing something about it.” The post–Civil War South continued to see voodoo practices, but it is likely many African Americans didn’t call it by name. Folk beliefs become so familiar, and so habitual, they can seem mundane, just parts of living requiring attending to.

  For the Christian South, distrustful of anything that did not conform to the church and suspicious of secular music in general, the blues was a perfect storm, a tempest challenging the idea that an American black identity had to be bound up in the church. From its earliest days, the blues were seen as the devil’s music, a secular pastime bumping up directly against the sacred music of the church, which by this time was mostly gospel. The blues were not about salvation, faith, or redemption but about worldly things. While borrowing much of its musical rudiments from slave spirituals, the blues were psychologically in tune to the songs sung in the fields and on the rail. Work was not the stuff of church and, particularly post–Civil War, did not have theological implications as it had when blacks were slaves and their labor would be rewarded with heavenly salvation. Work songs for the freed blacks were honest in the way the work was honest, pure labor under the hot sun: “Oh, I b’lieve I git religion an’ jine de church / I’ll be a black-jack preacher, an’ not have to work.”

  As the blues developed, ever more liberated from the church, sex and relationships became the preferred topic. Some of the more explicit songs were performed by women artists, which only highlighted how much the blues were also about personal agency and didn’t need to conform to Christian ideals about the place of the sexes. The Delta blues singer Lucille Bogan’s 1935 song “Shave ’em Dry,” for example, not only placed the power of sex with the woman, but drew a clear line in the sand: the blues might be the music of black folk, but it is not black church music: “I got nipples on my titties, big as the end of my thumb, / I got somethin’ between my legs’ll make a dead man come.” Most blues songs are not this sexually explicit, but they are emotionally explicit, dealing plainly with love’s gains and loss. As the late writer and poet LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) explains, the blues humanized the slave songs by making the hopes and suffering more earthbound and not simply a part of a great cosmic drama. And while the blues often suggest that the trouble is merely bad luck that befalls you, there was something you could do about it, if only to locate the source of misfortune: hoodoo inserted agency and will into the black spiritual identity. Personal agency, however, was often in opposition to the will of God. For example, if you didn’t have much talent for playing the guitar, well, this was just the hand God dealt you. It wasn’t for you to make any kind of deal behind his back.

  If you are heartsick over a lover who has run away, Jesus can’t help, but a “gipsy woman” might, as in a song by Joshua Johnson: “Well I went to the gipsy an’ I laid my money on the line, / I said, ‘Bring back my baby, or please taker her off my mind.’” If your mate is cheating, don’t ask God to change your lover’s ways. The root of a certain orchid resembling a withered hand—known as a mojo hand—will help you in a way frowned upon by your Christian fellows: “I’m going to Louisiana, to get myself a mojo hand / ’Cause these backbiting women are trying to take my man.” Freedom, even if it was by the hand of God, didn’t necessarily mean life would be easy. Work was still hard to find. Manual labor for little money meant that gambling became more than a pastime. It was a hope that things could get better. And hoodoo could shake up the odds in your favor: “He give me some good luck tea and said, ‘Drink it before it gets cold’ / He give me some good luck tea and said, ‘Drink it before it gets cold’ / He said, ‘Drink it all day, doggone your bad luck soul.’”

  Sometimes, however, hoodoo was the reason for luck gone bad: “I believe, somebody’s / done hoodoo’d poor me / I believe, somebody’s done hoodoo’d poor me / Every card I pick’s the first one that falls, / Dice won’t do nothing but two, twelves, and three.” And hoodoo won’t help you with a cheating lover if it’s hoodoo luring her away: “Now, when your woman start actin’ funny, and begin to run aroun’, / You better get you somebody, ’cause she’s fittin’ to put you down, / Better let her go, man, just as quick as you can, / Because that hoodoo girl is going to hoodoo the hoodoo man.” As the blues made its way out of the South and into the northern cities, the superstitions and occult beliefs were cast off like old clothes in the hope for better things to come. Where there was industry there was likely more work. And this meant less time to be concerned with the curses spat out by an old conjurer.

  It’s the legend of Robert Johnson that remains, however, even though the consensus among music critics and historians is that for Johnson himself, the devil was not part of his self-identity. As the blues historian Elijah Wald explains, “There is no suggestions from any of his friends or acquaintances that the hellish or demon-harried aspects of his work were of particular importance to him, or that they were even noticed by the people that crowded around on the streets of Friar’s Point.” The fact the legend persists is valuable in and of itself: Robert Johnson meeting the devil is a cultural crossroad: the place where all the avenues of occult meet and a point where the occult will continue to reveal itself in the music and culture of rock. The music itself is a product of a synthesis consisting mainly of those rhythms and vocal expressions coming directly out of the religious practices of Africa, practices that involve precisely what we now term the occult. These include spirit possession, divination, and sympathetic magic, all of which are in opposition to Christian norms.

  Most important is the belief that the occult’s power lies in what is imposed on those who are on the margins or who defy convention held fast. By virtue of not being the music of the church, the blues were believed to raise the devil in their midst. But Johnson’s popularity gave a face and a name to the complex relationship between African American music, outsider musicianship, and actual occult beliefs in the form of voodoo.

  The legend of Robert Johnson still has the power to ring spiritually true; when you are playing with unseen forces, no matter your intentions, the devil is always close by, maybe even more present than Christ Himself. The devil is so at hand that one could chance to meet him at a highway crossroads on a moonless night and darkly trade one’s soul for a gift. It was as if the spirit of Papa Legba knew it was about to be lost forever, and so embraced its new identity as Satan, if only to ensure it would continue to find expression in rock and roll. Better to be accused of being the devil than to be forgotten completely.

  II

  When Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, the cameramen worked overtime to position the angles of the shots so as to not emphasize his crotch and gyrating hips. But it wasn’t merely Presley’s display of lustiness that was a concern. American Pentecostalism, the source for much of the early polemic against rock and roll, sees any hint of aberrant sexua
lity as an invitation to demonic influence. Ironically, it was the Assemblies of God Church, an offshoot of Pentecostalism, where Elvis was raised. The Pentecostal Church insisted on its congregants striving for a direct connection to God through music, dance, and speaking in tongues. The example was taken directly from the African American churches. While viewed with a deep skepticism by white Christians, the black congregations had a method of worship, which, while infernal in its origins, could be used to holy purpose. One leader of the early Pentecostal Church was heard to have pronounced: “The devil should not be allowed to keep all this good rhythm.” White churches saw the remnants of pagan Africa in the black churches, black churches saw the devil in the blues, and everyone saw the Pentecostals as possessed by the devil. Rock and roll would become the one thing they could all agree was evil by design. From the very beginning, rock would be associated with devilish intent. Throughout its history it would both embrace and challenge this suggestion. Even the churchgoing Elvis would push back.

  Elvis was not shy in pointing out these contradictions. In interviews with his longtime friend Larry Geller, Elvis fondly remembered the energy and ecstasy of the hellfire preaching and the congregation that would “jump up and down, stomp their feet, and get themselves worked up to a frenzy.” The very same church would call out Elvis for sidling up to Satan and corrupting the youth of America: “They said I was ‘controversial.’ And there were some preachers who actually said that my music was dirty, and I was leading the kids to hell. They even had a bonfire and burned my records and albums. Can you imagine that? Hell, all I did was what came naturally—what I learned when I was a little kid in church, movin’ my body to the music.” What Christians were able to perceive—unconsciously to be sure—were the deep non-Christian influences of Elvis’s music. On the one hand was the carnal music of the blues and roots music, via voodoo-charmed swamps of the bayous. On the other was an influence even more deeply non-Christian, and it could be heard and felt in the music and worship of their own church. It was the sound of the shout, born in the spirit-conjuring circle chants of Africa, and an early link in the chain of rock and roll’s occult origins.