Robert initially tried to court Eula Mae’s younger sister, Johnnie Pearl, but a musician’s reputation as low class got him run off from the Williams household. “He come up here to court my sister and Granny ran him off. He wudn’t no church person ’cause he played the blues. She knew that so she wouldn’t let him see her. She knew what he wanted.”16 Unsuccessful with Johnnie Pearl, Robert set his sights on Eula Mae’s friend, sixteen-year-old Virgie Jane Smith. “Me and my girlfriend Virgie Smith used to sneak off and hear them all playing together on Saturday nights. We didn’t go in, we were still girls and our parents wouldn’t allow us to go inside. So we’d listen outside to the music.”17 But, just as Eula Mae’s parents had turned him away for playing the devil’s music, he also ran into resistance with Virgie’s parents and grandparents. “We were Christian folks and they didn’t allow us to be where the blues was played.”18
But it wasn’t just the devil’s music that made some people wary of Robert; it was also personality traits that the local people thought were rather odd. Eula Mae always saw him alone and thought of him as being “moody.” “He’d sit a while then just get up and leave. Wouldn’t tell you bye. Just get up and go.”19 That Robert exhibited such traits is not hard to understand. He had been through a series of traumatic life changes, and when he came to Hazlehurst in hopes of finding his father, and at least a clue to who he was, he failed. Even for a young black man in 1930s Mississippi, life had been unkind. In addition to his odd social behavior, Robert didn’t try to change in order to impress the God-fearing families of the young women who interested him. He had no interest in religion or the church. Eula Mae recalled, “I ain’t never heard anyone say R. L. went to church. He never sung no church song at all. I never heard him sing nothing but the blues.”20
In spite of any opposition to him as a person, Robert’s music still served as a siren call for the young women in the area, and both Eula Mae and Virgie would stand outside the parties at the house of Callie Craft, who ran a Martinsville juke. Virgie wanted to meet him and convinced Eula Mae’s uncle Clark to introduce them. Robert, looking for someone to replace his lost Virginia, took advantage of Virgie’s attention, and the two quickly became romantically and ultimately physically involved. They would go walking around the country roads at night as Robert would use all his talents to woo the young schoolgirl.
In late March or early April, Robert and Virgie met Eula Mae and her boyfriend walking down the Martinsville Road. Virgie confessed: “We gone play around tonight.” Eula Mae later testified that the two couples stood in the woods kissing and then watched each other have sex. “R. L. and Virgie were laying on the ground over there. R. L. was on top of her.”21 The couple continued to have sex for several weeks. Sometimes Robert even met Virgie to have sex “on [her] way to school” near her aunt’s house.
In either April or May Virgie confided a secret to Eula Mae: “I done missed a month. It’s R. L.’s and I don’t know what I’m gone do now. Because it’s gone tell on us.” Eula Mae remembered that “she just told us that ‘I’m pregnant.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it’s sure gone tell on us.’ And so Clark [Vergie’s uncle] asked R. L., said, ‘Well, what you gone do?’ He said, ‘Well, whatever she want to do.’ And she said, ‘Well I don’t know, because I’m afraid.’ Clark told her, ‘Well, you have to go on home to Little Sis.’ That’s what we called her mother. And she was afraid, said, ‘But I guess I have to go.’ And it wasn’t long before her mother came and got her. R. L. didn’t say anything, but just said, ‘Well, what you gone do?’ She says, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll do whatever you want to do.’”22
Robert wanted Virgie and her unborn baby to leave with him and go to Memphis. This time he wasn’t going to lose another potential wife and child. But in what must have been heartbreaking news to him, Virgie decided to neither marry nor leave with him. Once again Robert was facing a profound loss because he was playing the devil’s music. Virgie’s decision weighed heavily on him, and perhaps in an attempt to make her jealous, or to try to get over her, Robert turned his attention to the much more available Callie Craft. An older, stocky woman who had three children, Callie ran the house juke that he played at in Martinsville. It was the home of a bootlegger named O’Malley. Flattered by the attention the young guitarist was giving her, Callie tried to please Robert any way she could: dancing with him, sitting on his lap, bringing him breakfast in bed.
Perhaps as a reaction to being rebuffed by Virgie, on Monday, May 4, 1931, Robert and Callie were married in a civil ceremony in the Hazlehurst courthouse. Robert gave his age as twenty-three (although he was barely twenty) and Callie listed hers as twenty-eight (although she was actually older).
Shortly after they married they left for Vicksburg for a brief honeymoon, but Robert could not stop thinking about Virgie and his unborn baby and made every effort to see them.
Caletta “Callie” Craft. © Delta Haze Corporation
May 4, 1931, marriage license for Robert Johnson and Callie Craft. Copiah County Clerk’s Office, Copiah County Courthouse, Hazlehurst, Mississippi
Robert and Callie would eventually head north to the Delta, but before their departure, Robert went behind Callie’s back and made one last attempt to carry Virgie with him to Memphis. The result of his efforts to win her hand were met with a response he’d heard too many times before: he played the blues, “the work of the devil,” and Virgie’s religious parents refused to let her go with him. And besides, Virgie had heard that R. L. was married to Callie, and she wasn’t going to run away with a married man, no matter who he was.23
Robert never appeared to show any true affection for Callie. To him she was primarily a meal ticket and someone to pamper him. When Virgie refused to go with Robert, this time claiming it was because he was married, Robert resented his new wife even more.
Claud, Robert and Virgie’s son, was born on December 12, 1931.
After Virgie turned Robert down he took Callie in tow and, with Ike Zimmerman along for the trip, went back to the Delta. Ike had gone with his student to bolster Robert’s musical confidence. “They stayed [in Vicksburg] awhile. Then they went on up in the Delta,” Eula Mae remembered.24 Robert, Callie, her children, and Ike settled in Clarksdale for a while.
“Daddy always, I think, he wanted to push him,” Loretha claimed. “I don’t think Daddy really wanted, or cared about—I don’t think he really wanted to record. I think he just pushed Robert. I think he did push him. I think that’s the reason he went all up through there [the Delta region]. I guess he just stayed in the background is what I figured. They tell me he went back to play that guitar, he just tore it up, but … but like I said, my daddy taught him well. Because my daddy was a real blues player. He was really, really, a guitar player.”
But Loretha also recalled that Ike soon returned to Hazlehurst rather than staying in the Delta. She thought his return is what ruined any opportunity he might have had to record. “If he stayed out there, like knowing what he did, you know, he’d have been in the right place” to have been discovered and recorded.
Virgie Jane Smith and son, Claud Johnson. Robert Johnson Estate and Robert Johnson Blues Foundation
Back in Copiah County, Eula Mae heard that in December 1931 or early 1932 Callie took desperately ill. Robert, uninterested in anything or anyone other than his music and his Memphis family, abandoned Callie, first for short periods of time, and then forever. Callie’s illness soon caused her death. She died in early 1933 without ever returning to Copiah County. Eula Mae said, “We heard she died up there. They never sent her body back. You know, she was my cousin.”25 She died without her husband by her side.
This was the second time Robert lost a legally married wife while he was off playing the blues. But unlike when Virginia died, Robert seemed not to care about what happened to Callie and neither tended to her illness nor paid attention to her death. He had a more important task at hand: finding Son House and Willie Brown and showing them how his guitar skills had impr
oved.
9
RAMBLIN’ AT THE CROSSROADS
When Robert returned to Robinsonville, he heard that Son House and Willie Brown would be playing at a nearby juke on a Saturday night, so he and Ike made plans to go show them his new skills. When they arrived the two older, more established musicians were playing to a rowdy, drinking, carousing crowd. The shack was lit up like a holiday, with candles in all the windows and a drum full of flaming kerosene-soaked wood providing heat for the men standing outside smoking, drinking, and swearing up a storm. Robert could hear women shrieking and other men laughing. And through all the extra noise he could hear House’s slide guitar and Brown’s second guitar accompaniment working the crowd to a frenzy.
Robert had been to many such jukes before, but he never had so much to prove. This was to be his time, not House’s or Brown’s. With his guitar strapped to his back he made his way through the outside crowd and stood for a second in the doorway, wanting to get a good view of his competition. Both musicians were every bit as good as he remembered, and when House sang, his head rocked back, his eyes rolled, and he became totally possessed by the song he was singing. They were still, at least for the next few minutes, the best any of the crowd had seen or heard, and Robert knew he had his work cut out for him. He had returned to display the superior skills he learned since he left the Delta almost a year earlier, and he paused for a moment wondering if he was really that good. But Ike Zimmerman, still with him, pushed him through the door and spoke only three words: “I taught you.”1
Robert walked through the room and stood before the two musicians. It was the first time he ever thought he could “cut somebody’s head”—he was there to outperform the competition. Son House recalled the night well when asked about it in 1964.
He remembered Robert had been away for some time. Then, “Willie and I were playing again out at a little place east of Robinsonville called Banks, Mississippi. We were playing there one Saturday night and, all of a sudden, somebody came in through the door. Who but him! He had a guitar swinging on his back.
“I said, ‘Bill!’
“He said, ‘Huh?’
“I said, ‘Look who’s coming in the door.’
“He looked and said, ‘Yeah. Little Robert.’
“I said, ‘And he’s got a guitar.’ And Willie and I laughed about it. Robert finally wiggled through the crowd and got to where we were.”
House asked him, “‘Well, boy, you still got a guitar, huh? What do you do with that thing? You can’t do nothing with it.’
“He said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what.’
“I said, ‘What?’
“He said, ‘Let me have your seat a minute.’
“So I said, ‘All right, and you better do something with it, too.’ And I winked my eye at Willie.
“So he sat down there and finally got started. And man! He was so good! When he finished, all our mouths were standing open. I said, ‘Well, ain’t that fast! He’s gone now!’”2
After impressing House, Brown, and everyone else in the juke, Robert sat and smiled in satisfaction. He had cut their heads and had literally taken the seat of the master. Robert played a few more songs before letting House take his place alongside Brown and finish the evening, but the attention was still on Robert.
House, the more experienced bluesman, took Robert aside over the next few days and tried to give him some advice. He tried to warn Robert of the dangers he faced. “He hung around about a week or more, and I gave him a little instruction. ‘Now, Robert,’” House told him, “‘you going around playing for these Saturday night balls. You have to be careful ’cause you mighty crazy about the girls. When you playing for these balls and these girls get full of that corn whiskey and snuff mixed together, and you be playing a good piece and they like it and come up and call you “Daddy, play it again, Daddy”—well, don’t let it run you crazy. You liable to get killed.’” But Robert, still reeling from successfully cutting heads, seemed to disregard these warnings.“He laughed it off, you know. I said, ‘You gotta be careful about that ’cause a lot of times, they do that; and they got a husband or a boyfriend standing right over in the corner. You getting all excited over ’em and you don’t know what you doing. You get hurt.’ I gave him the best instruction. So he said, ‘Okay.’ Finally he left and went somewhere else again with his guitar.”3
Although House’s often-quoted story would later attain mythical proportions, resulting in many untruths about Robert, his basic facts remain accurate. Unfortunately, some blues writers, inserting their own personal beliefs, implied that House’s alleged comments indicated that he believed Robert had used supernatural forces to gain his remarkable guitar skills. Their conclusions, not House’s comments (for he never actually made such an assertion), were the first steps in building the long-enduring crossroads legend: the most famous story in all of blues history. What makes this mythical reliance on what House supposedly said about Robert even more absurd is the usually unnoted fact that House had also undergone a similar transition: he was playing professionally within a year of acquiring his first guitar. His biographer, Daniel Beaumont, described his rapid development: “Once House took up the guitar what happened next is … surprising—the rapidity with which his new career progressed. Within a matter of weeks he was performing at house parties on his own.”4 Such rapid musical development was certainly no less remarkable in House’s case, yet no one has ever associated his accomplishment with a deal at the crossroads as they have with Robert. To the community who knew him, Robert was a musician who went from being a “good player of old time songs” to “an excellent player with his own songs.” Somehow, his progress allowed southern superstition to be intertwined with reality. How this happened is a case study in folkloric creation.
Both African and European folklore include stories of pacts being made at a crossroad. In both traditions the crossroad is a supernatural place with unique powers. Similarly, the Faustian bargain was a very familiar theme in the African American tradition, predating the development of popular blues. Blues scholar Julio Finn contends that “the tradition of making a pact at the crossroads in order to attain supernatural prowess is neither a creation of the Afro-American nor an invention of blues lore, but originated in Africa and is a ritual of Voodoo worship,” and indeed, the African roots of the African American version of this belief seem beyond dispute.5 As it was adopted by many members of the American black community and syncretized with Western religious beliefs in a devil, the idea of selling one’s soul or making a deal with a “Big Black Man” or the devil became a common theme in folk narratives and music. The key to understanding the prevalence of such a belief is to understand the time and place in which this narrative existed and the mainly rural, African American people for whom it held meaning. The culture was full of such folklore.6
As early as 1926 Niles Newbell Puckett collected beliefs about making a deal at the crossroads in Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro.7 The Federal Writer’s Project (1935–1939) actively collected tales of conjure in the black community. In 1931 Zora Neale Hurston published “Hoodoo in America” in the Journal of American Folklore.8 And in 1935 she published Mules and Men, describing her personal initiation into voodoo/hoodoo.9 Between 1935 and 1939 folklorist Harry Middleton Hyatt collected several dozen folk versions of that belief, all similar in content: a person may go to a crossroads at midnight and make a deal with either the devil or a “big black man.”10 In her 1939 book, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South, Hortense Powdermaker asserted that a connection between Christianity and voodoo/hoodoo wasn’t contradictory: “Often, however, those who are devoutly religious are also devout believers in current folk superstitions and do not look upon Christianity and voodoo as conflicting in any way…. For a large number in the middle and lower classes they [the superstitions] still have significance. The older generation is the one that adheres most strongly to superstitions, but there are also younger believers.”11
When q
uestioned about the legend decades after Robert’s death, Willie Mae Powell, one of his girlfriends and cousin of Honeyboy Edwards, believed what Edwards allegedly told her about Robert: “He [Robert Johnson] told Honeybear [Honeyboy Edwards] that he sold hisself, at the fork in the road, twelve o’clock one night. Honeybear says it’s the truth! He told me so. He did! He wanted to be a sworn musician, and that’s the kind that can play anything.”12 Another of Robert’s girlfriends, “Queen” Elizabeth, also from Quito, Mississippi, was even more adamant that Robert made a crossroads deal. “He done went to the crossroads and learnt, went to the cross, and he started playing. I done heard. I asked him. If I want to know anything, I ask ’em. Well that’s where you have to play! You sold your soul to the devil.”13
It’s important to remember that these declarations were made in the 1980s, almost fifty years after Robert’s death and twenty years after the rerelease of his music made him a cultural icon. It is uncertain, therefore, whether these “recollections” can really be attributed to Robert making the claim himself or whether they are the result of folk-iconic creation: people saying what they believe others want to hear. One thing is certain: hoodoo belief survived in the black community at the time Robert was performing and recording. But as Queen Elizabeth indicated, however, it wasn’t just the crossroads myth that was culturally important, it was also the belief in a personalized devil.
Up Jumped the Devil Page 9