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art tipaldi's avatar

great informative read ted. in 1998, I was interviewing Eddie Kirkland. he was best known as John Lee Hooker's guitarist from 1949-1962. out nowhere, he started talking about his visit to the crossroads. I sat in silence and awe in that I was hearing a first hand account of this belief, prevalent in the southern African-American culture, that up to this point, I'd only read about.

...here are Eddie's exact words.. "Almost all the people born on those islands, Jamaica and Cuba, held those beliefs passed down from generations. That’s most of their religion. In America, I was taught to worship Jesus. My mother’s people came out of Africa and they brought much of the African religion with them. My dad’s people came from Cuba, and they believed in the same things, root doctors, mojos, and crossroads.

I know what happened. Charley Patton years ago sold his soul to the devil and he lasted 5 years. Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil and lasted 8 years. Stevie Ray Vaughan sold his soul and lasted 6 years. Jimi Hendrix sold his soul to the devil and lasted 6 years. People read up on this stuff and they try it man.

I’m gonna tell you something. I went to the army in 1943. I came out in 1945. I was kicked out and I hurt so bad becauise I wanted to be a service man. I was really angry. I didn’t have nobody, I hadn’t seen my mother since I was 12. I went to Detroit. I went and got me a black cat, got me a big ol’ boiling pot and boiled that cat till the bones just fell offa her. Once you get that bone, you go to the fork in the road for nine mornings. If you can stand what you see for nine mornings, you’re automatically sold to the devil. If I’d a went through with it, I’d a been dead, gone, cause the devil woulda come and got me. What I saw on the first morning at the crossroads, I said, Hell no. I went to a priest who told me to get on my knees for nine mornings and ask God’s forgiveness and you’ll be alright. I did that cause what I saw on the first trip, I knew I wasn’t gonna go through with that.

Stevie was at the top of his life, Jimi was at the top of his life. Robert Johnson was at the top of his life, Charley Patton too. I backed out of that."

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The Minor Wazoo's avatar

Hi ted -great to read your stuff - i have bought your blues book and subversive history and both are informative and insightful. Re the piece on Robert Johnson and in part the imagery derived from landscape that is found in the blues, I once had the inestimable privilege of having a long conversation with Brownie McGee at a post gig party in Dunedin New Zealand. This was way back in the early 1970s. To be honest I didn't know squat about the blues beyond the Peter Green/Clapton/BB King stuff but as I wrote music reviews for the Uni newspaper I got these invitations from to time.

The concert had been promoted locally by a pair of wealthy lawyers and it was in one of their big houses that the party took place. The atmosphere was a trifle odd as the host was keen to both show off his guest - Sonny Terry was tired and stayed in his hotel rather than attend - and equally keen to demonstrate his knowledge of the blues. He got into a conversation with Brownie about the details of his past. It was odd because this guy even had the temerity to correct Brownie's versions of some of these events. It became clear that Mr McGee found this tiresome and he retreated to a piano stool in one corner of the large room. A few of us kids - I was 19 - sort of gathered at this feet and he began to talk to us whilst still holding a sort of more public conversation with his host.

At one point a guy turned up with an ancient Gibson acoustic which he was keen to sort of flaunt to gain Brownie's validation as it were. The old man confided to us that he had several of this model back at his home and that he was "a dollar millionaire". He then offered the man a thousand dollars for the guitar but it became clear that the guy didn't want to sell it. Brownie kind of dismissed him at that point in a kind of "shit or get off the pot" manner - courteous but "don't waste my time or patronise me".

The atmosphere was getting odd as clearly Brownie wasn't interested in pandering to his hosts and again said to us kids that he was touring on behalf of the US State Department and encountered this sort of thing often. He obviously found these rich white folks somewhat patronising and repeated the point that, appearances to the contrary, he was a man of substance and not some kind of old poor black man singing for his supper.

Kiwis were then - before Peter Jackson's Tolkein tourism movies - inclined to manifest a sense of insecurity that whilst they lived in this demi-paradise, the world had largely ignored the place. So foreign visitors were often asked about what they thought of the country. Brownie deflected these questions in a courteous manner, being too diplomatic to offer any view that might court controversy. Apart from which he was on a whistle stop tour and hadn't really "seen" much of the country at all. These queries continued in an ever more fatuous manner - "What do you think of the mountains ?" - sort of thing until one of the hosts asked what Brownie thought of the rivers.

At this point Brownie presented a long disquisition, almost sotto voce, about his relationship to rivers and it became very clear to us kids that he wasn't talking about the Mississippi or the Hudson but dealing more with the imagery of rivers in the blues and in poetry and what those images denoted in a metaphysical sense. Most of the "grown-ups" quickly lost interest - he wasn't speaking in a loud voice - and returned to their conversations with each other. Brownie continued talking to us kids sat on the floor at his feet. He went off almost in a kind of reverie about the poetics of landscape in the blues. He didn't use those terms but that was the center of his meaning. He knew precisely what he was saying and had read the complexities of the room and the different degrees of receptivity in his audience(s) and his tone was definitely "Who feels it knows it".

It was at that point that my eurocentric conception of this music and its denizens took a giant step into the beginnings of the kind of understanding that your piece on Robert Johnson exemplifies. I knew intuitively that what Brownie was saying to us kids was on the same level as the lectures on the Metaphysical poets that I was attending at Uni. The blues never sounded the same since that night.

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