Crossroads: What the Devil Really Taught Robert Johnson

 

Robert Johnson– Bluesman

Crossroads: What the Devil Really Taught Robert Johnson

By Darkside Johnny

Some say Robert Johnson went to the Crossroads and made a deal.
I believe he did.
He wanted it bad — the sound, the swagger, the way to make a guitar cry like a man in church.
And the Devil delivered.
The catch was simple: he’d get his wish, but only for a heartbeat of a life.
Death at the height of fame, young enough to still taste it.
That’s the Blues, right there — a song that ends too soon.

I’ve been to that Crossroads — Highway 49 & 61, Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Birthplace of the Blues.
If you’ve never seen it, let me tell you: it ain’t holy ground.
It’s cracked asphalt and broken promise.
I once filmed kids there chanting,

“Brickyard bound in this bitch!”

They already knew their odds:
die before graduation,
do time if you live long enough,
or spend years trying to guitar your way out.

There’s a Blues museum that teaches kids music for free,
but after the lesson, they still gotta walk home through that gravity —
the Crab-in-the-Basket pull of poverty and pain.
Clarksdale births the Blues because suffering has to start somewhere.
Memphis? Memphis is where that pain learns to dance.
Birthplace versus Home —
the Devil doesn’t live at the Crossroads, brother;
he keeps an apartment on Beale Street.

I met him there once — not horns and smoke,
just a man with money that smelled like ether and sin.
I was busted up from a job injury,
divorce papers half-signed, broke, angry, drunk on the river overlook.
He offered me a seat in the underworld — logistics, protection, good money.
I took a breath and said,

“Your money stinks.”

And it did.
That was my Crossroads moment.
The Devil walked away, and I kept my soul —
and my hunger.

Years before that, I’d already asked God for a deal of my own.
Not riches — just the gift to play.
To make sense of the noise inside me.
And God, being clever, sent me a teacher instead of a miracle:
Glenn Campbell’s old guitar tech —
the man who showed me the Nashville Number System and the way the notes really breathe.
Simple. Honest. Divine.

So when I think about Robert Johnson disappearing for a few weeks,
then coming back with that bottle-neck slide and that swagger —
I don’t think the Devil taught him scales or chords.
I think he removed his fear.
That’s the real sorcery.
Miles Davis said it:

“Talent is twenty percent — the rest is the attitude of the [explicative] playing it.”

Maybe that’s what Robert learned in the dark —
not how to play, but how to stop asking permission.

When he walked onto that porch,
shoes shined, eyes burning,
and dragged that glass over the strings,
the porch boards squeaked and the world changed.
He wasn’t just playing a song.
He was announcing that he’d crossed the line and come back alive.

And me?
I stood at my own Crossroads, told the Devil his money stank,
and kept walking with my guitar and my scars.
Because, if you want some insight — the Blues has nothing to do with music. Music is something you do when you have the Blues.

— From the Rock & Hallow Sessions