I had just taken the kids deep in the mountains of Mississippi, to Avalon, to the front porch of the general store where Mississippi John Hurt once played. It was starting to drizzle, so we took a few quick pictures on the porch and jumped back in the car, heading for Greenwood. The Little Zion Church in Greenwood, Miss is one of the places that claims the burial ground of Robert Johnson. The church has erected a huge marker on the supposed spot…so it seemed a good place to take the kids and tell his infamous tale along the way. So, I started telling my 5 and 7 year olds about Robert Johnson. Started.
“Robert Johnson was a blues guitarist…thought of as one of the greatest guitarists ever. The crazy story is that people think got his talent by selling his soul to the devil. He did this at the crossr…”
“There is a devil,” Kaya asked?
“A devil?????” Asher jumped in.
“This is just a story,” I suggested, “like the ones I tell you at bedtime. So, Robert Johnson meets the devil at these highway crossroads…right outside of Clarksdale…”
“That means there must be a devil. Does the devil walk around all the time? Are we going to meet him? He must be totally scary. I didn’t think there was a devil.”
And we got talking about the devil…does he really exist…how would we know? Does the Robert Johnson story prove that he does? And we talked and talked up until the time we got to The Little Zion Church. It was raining as we stood near the gravestone, a very gothic scene near a sparse, ancient country forest. It was an uncommon moment of child reverence…with a tinge of fear: was the devil walking amongst us?
The devil and the blues…the blues as the devil’s music. Throughout the history of the recorded blues, the devil has been a prominent figure. In fact, some say the term “blues” came from an “Early Modern English term ‘the Blue Devils’, a symptom of alcohol withdrawal where one sees intense visual hallucinations”1 There are the direct references to the devil in blues songs, like Skip James’ Devil’s Got My Woman…one of the great blues recordings of all time…with James’ angelic voice so haunting, so outer-worldly, and Bo Carter’s Old Devil, where Carter tells the devil (probable reference to himself, in this case) that it is time to clean up his act. And then there are just those blues songs that are so very eerie…so dark…like Geeshie Wiley’s The Last Kind Words or Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground…where it just feels like the dark forces are present.
And then there is, of course, the Robert Johnson story, where the devil did a deal with the bluesman: ultimate guitar mastery and fame in exchange for his soul. And while Robert Johnson is the most famous example of a person who sold his soul, he is not the only one with a Satanic connection. There was Johnson’s peer, Tommy Johnson (not related), who also supposedly sold his soul. His brother LeDell told musicologist David Evans (thank you Scott Barretta for the clarification [below in comments] from what was originally said):
If you want to learn how to play anything…you take your guitar and you go to where . . . the crossroad is. . . . Be sure to get there, just a little ‘fore twelve o’ clock that night. . . . You have to go by yourself and be sitting there playing a piece. A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned how to play everything I want.2
Today is Peetie Wheatstraw’s birthday, born 121 years ago. Wheatstraw was one of the most prolific blues recording artists of his day, releasing 160+ sides over an 11-year stretch, starting in 1930 til his untimely death in 1941. For a majority of his recordings, he played the piano and sang, displaying his guitar chops more rarely, and early on. The only known photo of him features him holding his Trigone Resonator guitar with one of the friendliest grins going. Hardly looking like someone who was nicknamed The Devil's Son-in-Law.
His nickname actually ran: The Devil's Son-in-Law, the High Sheriff From Hell, as he relates in his song C And A Train Blues. Interestingly, that song, along with his theme song, The Devil’s Son-in-Law, has very little devilish about it. Instead, it is a reference to his penchant for many lovers…such is the type of devil he was. Unlike either of the Johnsons, whose are defined by the dark aspects of their beings, Wheatstraw’s self-proclaimed moniker is something different. Some might say that it is purely a marketing gimmick. Paul Garon, in his book about Peetie Wheatstraw, suggests something else, that his title is a “poetic…force in the direction of freedom,” a “protest against the drab role which the black man was expected to fill…a striking representation of what the future might hold.”
Regardless of how the title fit the man and music of Peetie Wheatstraw, his person and influence has woven itself into popular culture in interesting ways over the years. When he was at his height of popularity in the mid-30s, another bluesman, Floyd “Dipper Boy” Council, “Blind Boy Fuller’s Buddy,” called himself “The Devil’s Daddy-in-Law. Flash forward to 1977, Rudy Ray Moore wrote and stared in the blacksploitation killer Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil’s Son-in-Law with Moore playing Wheatstraw, a comedian who is killed by his fellow comedians and the mob only to be resurrected by the devil (Lou Cipher) with the understanding that Wheatstraw marry his daughter. The film is full-on Rudy Ray Moore gonzo-great, finding Wheatstraw’s character fighting back against the devil….seemingly winning…but really voyaging into insanity, which sounds more like the High Sheriff From Hell than the real Wheatstraw.
Probably the most well-known Wheatstraw reference is in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the groundbreaking, National Book Award winning masterpiece from 1952. The book is still required reading in many school curriculums, ensuring that the character of “Peter” Wheatstraw, a self-described “piano player and a rounder, a whisky drinker and a pavement pounder,” is introduced to generations of readers. Wheatstraw’s character encounters Ellison’s narrator on the streets of Harlem, where the narrator is looking for work after leaving the south due to getting expelled from college. Wheatstraw is shuffling down the street, pushing a cart full of thrown away architectural blue prints, singing the blues, speaking in a puzzled southern poetic vernacular that both repulses and intrigues the narrator, often interrogating the narrator about a mysterious dog, finally announcing “I’m the Devil’s only son-in-law, so roll ‘em…My name’s Blue and I’m coming at you with a pitchfork. Fe Fi Fo Fum.” Ellison knew Wheatstraw…saw him play…and admitted that unlike most characters in the book who were not based on any real person, Wheatstraw’s character was taken from the blues legend who, at the time of the books release, had been dead and gone for over a decade. Dead but still shouting in the streets.
Two years after bringing my children to Robert Johnson’s supposed grave, one of them came into my bedroom right before bedtime and said, “I know there must be a devil, because if there wasn’t, that blues guy would never have been able to do a deal with him.” The character of the devil…of the deepest darkest evil…is one that stays with us…horrifies us…helps frame the bad against the good. No matter the motivation behind Peetie Wheatstraw’s self-proclaimed title, it has helped preserve his legacy…causes pause and wonderment: who was that guy? It has helped keep his music alive.
Happy Birthday to the Peetie Wheatstraw. Fe Fi Fo Fum.
COLOGNE SAVES HISTORIC STOCKHAUSEN STUDIO
If the WDR Electronic Studio had only been the place where Stockhausen had recorded, that would have been enough. But it was also the studio used by Xenakis, Herbert Eimert, and other incredible 20th century audio explorers and helped prophesise Can and Pink Floyd. Pretty incredible that it was saved….
Read an extract from Eric Dolphy: Biographical Sketches by Guillaume Belhomme
A sweet piece from the English translation of Belhomme’s book of sketches came out earlier this year. This excerpt covers part of the period of when Dolphy was playing with Coltrane, a collaboration celebrated also this year with the excellent release of never-before-heard recordings at the Village Gate.
Norma Barzman, One of the Last Surviving Members of the Hollywood Blacklist, Dies at 103
“Barzman…recalled how one of the people who warned Barzman that she was being watched by the FBI and local law enforcement was a young blonde lady who only introduced herself as Norma. A few years later, after Barzman and her family fled the United States, she reunited with Norma in Paris and learned her full name: Norma Jeane Mortenson, a.k.a. Marilyn Monroe.”
Santa Rosa teams with nonprofit arts group to bring more murals to city walls
Santa Rosa is not only commissioning murals, they are working with some of the great lowbrow artists and other muralists of the day, including Amy Sol who recently also unveiled another mural in Las Vegas and Allison Bamcat.
Until now, I have been unfamiliar with the work of J.K. Bruce-Vanderpuije. As discussed in this article, his work is so important to the capturing of Ghanas history and culture…and his eye is stunning.
A pretty horrifying modern story of threats to our most important accessable world knowledge, engagingly told by Carolyn Dever: “That’s the bitter irony at the core of this cybercrime: what was stolen was access to knowledge….No, the library is not closed. Yes, the books are still there. But library users have little to no access to the books….We’re past the days of card catalogs, alas: the modern library has long since converted to digital recordkeeping…If librarians wanted to see who’d laid hands on a certain volume of Michael Field’s diary, or on the manuscripts or earliest published work of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, the Brontës, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and so many more writers familiar today and others languishing, awaiting rediscovery, presumably they could, with a simple request within a digital file. Most importantly, if I wanted to request to see a specific book, I could look it up electronically, and then ask the librarians to find the physical copy. Until Halloween, 2023…”
Degrees Of Gray In Philipsburg
By: Richard Hugo
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done.
The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can't wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs--
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won't fall finally down.
Isn't this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn't this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don't empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?
Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I'll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You're talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it's mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.
https://beniciapaw.com/2019/10/11/how-the-blues-genre-became-synonymous-with-the-devil/#:~:text=Johnson%20was%20famous%20for%20songs,the%20so%20called%20%E2%80%9CDevil%E2%80%9D.
Cobb, James C. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
of course you have taken your kids to Clarksdale! Great post. Thank you.
Yes - it's what LeDell told David Evans. I'll go see if he was conveying what TJ said or if it was a general statement. LeDell had earlier been a blues artist.