The stories the blues tells about itself

The crossroads

The story. A young guitarist who cannot play well enough takes his instrument to a crossroads at midnight. A man is waiting there. The guitar changes hands, and it comes back with something in it that was not in it before. In the version everyone knows, the guitarist is Robert Johnson, the year is about 1930, and the price is his soul.

What the record says. Johnson never told that story, in any interview or on any record. The earliest telling we have attaches it to Tommy Johnson, who told his brother that he had met a man at a crossroads and traded something for the ability to play, and who said it out loud for years while Robert Johnson was still a teenager learning harmonica. It migrated after Robert Johnson's death, because his songs invited it: “Cross Road Blues” and “Hellhound on My Trail” sound like testimony if you have already decided what they testify to. Read plainly, the first of those is a song about standing at a highway junction at night with no ride and no money. The pact is something we added, and it says more about the people who needed an explanation for that guitar playing than about the man who did it.

The death of Bessie Smith

The story. Her car hit a truck on Route 61 in the dark. She was badly hurt and bleeding. The ambulance took her to a whites-only hospital, where she was refused admission — in some versions one hospital, in others three — and she died in the road or in a corridor, for the colour of her skin. It became a play by Edward Albee in 1959. It has been printed as fact for eighty years.

What the record says. Two ambulances came out from Clarksdale: one from the white hospital, sent for the white couple in the other car, and one from the G. T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital. Smith was taken to G. T. Thomas, where her right arm was amputated. She never regained consciousness, and was declared dead at about half past eleven that morning. The refusal story came from John Hammond, writing in Down Beat within weeks of her death, and it went unchallenged in print for decades. When Chris Albertson researched his 1972 biography, he found the attending physician, Hugh Smith, who pointed out the obvious thing: in Clarksdale in 1937, no ambulance driver would have tried to put a Black patient into a white hospital, and the two hospitals stood less than half a mile apart. The death certificate and the doctor's 1941 letter to John Lomax both support the same account. Hammond never recanted. Lomax repeated the myth in print in 1993.

What actually cost her the time is duller and still damning: a doctor who chose to transport her in his own car rather than wait for the ambulance already coming, and a system in which the distance between two buildings was measured in what a town would permit. The myth is not a lie about racism in Mississippi. It is a simplification of it — and simplifications are how the real mechanisms stay unexamined.

Lead Belly, twice

The story. He sang his way out of prison — twice. Once for a Texas governor, once for a Louisiana one — writing a song on the spot, aiming it at the man with the pardon in his pocket, and walking out with a twelve-string guitar and a legend attached.

What the record says. The first one is close to true. In January 1924, Huddie Ledbetter played for Governor Pat Neff during a visit to the Sugar Land prison farm and wrote a song asking to be let go. Neff told him he wanted to hear him again and left him there. A year later, days before leaving office, Neff signed a full pardon — 16 January 1925 — cutting twenty-three years from a thirty-year sentence. That is one of the very few pardons Neff granted in four years.

The second is where the story starts lying by omission. By 1930 he was back inside, this time at Angola in Louisiana, on an assault conviction. John and Alan Lomax recorded him there in July 1933 and returned in 1934; he did rework his pardon song for Governor O. K. Allen, but what released him on 1 August 1934 was commutation for good behaviour — with a folklorist's recordings and correspondence sitting in the file. He walked out of Angola into a career that belonged, in part, to the man who had helped open the door, and the publicity that followed sold him as a convict first and a musician second. The neat version — the singer who charmed his way free — is also the version that makes prison sound like an anecdote.

Skip James, found in a hospital

The story. A genius makes one impossible record, vanishes, and is presumed dead — murdered somewhere in Mississippi. Thirty years later, three young collectors follow a 78 rpm disc back to a hospital bed and bring him out to play again.

What the record says. Most of it holds. James cut eighteen songs in two days in Grafton, Wisconsin in February 1931 and took a flat fee — forty dollars — instead of royalties, which in the worst year of the Depression was not as foolish as it sounds. Paramount pressed the records into a collapsing market and they sold almost nothing. He was ordained, led a gospel group, farmed, mined, and for three decades played almost no blues. Big Joe Williams, who had known him, believed he had been murdered in Mississippi.

In June 1964, John Fahey, Bill Barth and Henry Vestine found him — after a tip that led them to his wife Mabel at a barber shop in Dundee — in a hospital in Tunica, being treated for cancer. He was playing again within weeks: a nine-minute set at the Newport Folk Festival in July, then Vanguard albums, tours, and a strange second fame in which Cream's cover of “I'm So Glad” earned him more than his own recordings ever had. He died in 1969, five years after being found. The romantic version ends at the hospital door. The real one includes a man performing in pain because the money had finally arrived and there was not much time left to collect it.

Robert Johnson's last three days

The story. He was playing a house party at Three Forks and paid too much attention to another man's woman. The man put poison in his whiskey. He was carried to a room, suffered for three days, and died at twenty-seven — the first member of a club that would not be invented for another fifty years.

What the record says. The date is not in doubt: 16 August 1938, at a plantation house north of Greenwood where two women had taken him in. Almost everything else is. The death certificate gives syphilis as the cause and names no attending physician; there was no autopsy. The poisoned-whiskey account comes from other musicians, David “Honeyboy” Edwards chief among them, recalling it decades later — and the most commonly named poison, strychnine, has been questioned on the grounds that it kills in hours rather than days. A 2019 biography proposes dissolved mothballs instead. Nobody was charged. Nobody was ever going to be.

The grave is its own argument. Three markers stand in Leflore County: one at Payne Chapel near Quito, paid for in 1990 by an Atlanta band; a one-ton obelisk at Mount Zion near Morgan City, put up by Columbia Records in 1991; and a stone at Little Zion on Money Road in 2002, which the Mississippi Blues Trail treats as the official site on the testimony of a woman whose husband dug the grave. The certificate says only “Zion Church,” and there is more than one. He was twenty-seven, he had recorded twenty-nine songs in two sessions, and he died before a concert at Carnegie Hall that John Hammond had booked him for. The arithmetic of that — three years of recording, a decade of neglect, then permanent sainthood — is the most reliable part of the legend.

The devil's music

The story. The blues was the devil's music. Playing it cost you your soul, or at least your seat in church. The musicians knew exactly what they were trading and did it anyway, for the money and the nightlife.

What the record says. The phrase came from the pulpit long before it came from the press, and the objection was practical rather than theological. The blues lived in the same buildings as gambling, bootlegging and prostitution; a musician who played there could be put out of the congregation, and the congregation was often the only institution a Black neighbourhood controlled outright. So the warning was about consequences you could name, not a bargain at a crossroads.

The satanic branding was mostly showbusiness. Exactly one significant pre-war bluesman built a whole identity on it — Peetie Wheatstraw, who billed himself as “The Devil's Son-in-Law” and “The High Sheriff from Hell,” and who died in 1941 — and he was doing what later generations would call marketing. What he was selling was the same thing the revival would later sell: a frisson for people whose souls were never actually at risk. The part that was not a costume is economic. The church offered standing. The record business offered a flat fee, and took the publishing.