Editing Robert Johnson (section)

==Devil legend==
According to legend, as a young man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi, Johnson had a tremendous desire to become a great blues musician. One of the legends often told says that Johnson was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near [[Dockery Plantation]] at midnight. (There are claims for other sites as the location of the crossroads.) There he was met by a large being (the Devil) who took the guitar and tuned it. The Devil played a few songs and then returned the guitar to Johnson, giving him mastery of the instrument. This story of a deal with the Devil at the crossroads mirrors the legend of [[Faust]]. In exchange for his soul, Johnson was able to create the blues for which he became famous.

This story was originally associated with Delta blues musician [[Tommy Johnson (guitarist)|Tommy Johnson]], to whom Robert Johnson was unrelated.{{sfn|Wald|2004|pp=265–276}} Tommy Johnson, who grew up near the Dockery Plantation and learned the blues from [[Charlie Patton]] and [[Willie Brown (musician)|Willie Brown]], first claimed to have [[Deal with the Devil|sold his soul]] to [[the devil]] at a crossroads in exchange for his mastery of the guitar.<ref name=trail>{{cite web |title=Lower Mississippi Delta Region: Tommy Johnson |date=October 25, 2017 |url= https://www.nps.gov/locations/lowermsdeltaregion/tommy-johnson.htm |publisher=US National Park Service |access-date=February 21, 2024}}</ref><ref name = "Evans22">Evans, David (1971). ''Tommy Johnson''. Studio Vista, p. 22. {{ISBN|978-0289701515}}.</ref>

===Various accounts===
This legend was developed over time and has been chronicled by [[Gayle Dean Wardlow]],{{sfn|Wardlow|Komara|1998|pp=196–201}} Edward Komara{{sfn|Wardlow|Komara|1998|pp=203–204}} and Elijah Wald, who sees the legend as largely dating from Johnson's rediscovery by white fans more than two decades after his death.{{sfn|Wald|2004|pp=265–276}} [[Son House]] once told the story to [[Pete Welding]] as an explanation of Johnson's astonishingly rapid mastery of the guitar. Other interviewers failed to elicit any confirmation from House and there were two full years between House's observation of Johnson as first a novice and then a master.

Further details were absorbed from the imaginative retellings by [[Greil Marcus]]{{sfn|Marcus|2015|p=}} and [[Robert Palmer (American writer)|Robert Palmer]].{{sfn|Palmer|1981|p=}} Most significantly, the detail was added that Johnson received his gift from a large black man at a crossroads. There is dispute as to how and when the crossroads detail was attached to the Robert Johnson story. All the published evidence, including a full chapter on the subject in the biography ''Crossroads'', by Tom Graves, suggests an origin in the story of the blues musician [[Tommy Johnson (guitarist)|Tommy Johnson]].{{sfn|Graves|2008|p=}} This story was collected from his musical associate [[Ishman Bracey]] and his elder brother Ledell in the 1960s.{{sfn|Wardlow|Komara|1998|p=}} One version of Ledell Johnson's account was published in [[David Evans (musicologist)|David Evans]]'s 1971 biography of Tommy Johnson,<ref>{{cite book |last=Evans |first=David |title=Tommy Johnson |location=London |publisher=Studio Vista |date=1971 |page= }}</ref> and was repeated in print in 1982 alongside House's story in the widely read ''Searching for Robert Johnson'', by Peter Guralnick.{{sfn|Guralnick|1998|p=}}

In another version, Ledell placed the meeting not at a crossroads but in a graveyard. This resembles the story told to Steve LaVere that Ike Zimmerman of [[Hazlehurst, Mississippi]], learned to play the guitar at midnight while sitting on tombstones. Zimmerman is believed to have influenced the playing of the young Johnson.{{sfn|Wardlow|Komara|1998|p=197}} [[File:ClarksdaleMS Crossroads.jpg|right|thumb|The crossroads at Clarksdale, Mississippi]] Recent research by the blues scholar [[Bruce Conforth]], in ''[[Living Blues]]'' magazine, makes the story clearer. Johnson and Ike Zimmerman did practice in a graveyard at night, because it was quiet and no one would disturb them, but it was not the Hazlehurst cemetery as had been believed: Zimmerman was not from Hazlehurst but nearby [[Beauregard, Mississippi|Beauregard]], and he did not practice in one graveyard, but in several in the area.<ref>{{Cite magazine|last=|first=|date=January–February 2008|title=Discovering Robert Johnson's Guitar Teacher, Ike Zimmerman|magazine=[[Living Blues]]|volume=|issue=194|issn=0024-5232|pages=68–73}}</ref> Johnson spent about a year living with and learning from Zimmerman, who ultimately accompanied Johnson back to the Delta to look after him.

While Dockery, Hazlehurst and Beauregard have each been claimed as the locations of the mythical crossroads, there are also tourist attractions claiming to be "The Crossroads" in both Clarksdale and Memphis.{{sfn|Wardlow |Komara|1998|p=200}} Residents of [[Rosedale, Mississippi]], claim Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the intersection of Highways 1 and 8 in their town, while the 1986 movie ''[[Crossroads (1986 film)|Crossroads]]'' was filmed in [[Beulah, Mississippi]]. The blues historian Steve Cheseborough wrote that it may be impossible to discover the exact location of the mythical crossroads, because "Robert Johnson was a rambling guy".{{sfn|Cheseborough|2009|p=83}}

===Interpretations===
Some scholars have argued that the devil in these songs may refer not only to the Christian figure of Satan but also to the trickster god of African origin, [[Papa Legba|Legba]], himself associated with crossroads. Folklorist Harry M. Hyatt wrote that, during his research in the South from 1935 to 1939, when African-Americans born in the 19th or early 20th century said they or anyone else had "sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads", they had a different meaning in mind. Hyatt claimed there was evidence indicating African religious retentions surrounding Legba and the making of a "deal" (not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by Graves) with the so-called devil at the crossroads.{{sfn|Hyatt|1973|p=}}

{{blockquote|The Blues and the Blues singer has really special powers over women, especially. It is said that the Blues singer could possess women and have any woman they wanted. And so when Robert Johnson came back, having left his community as an apparently mediocre musician, with a clear genius in his guitar style and lyrics, people said he must have sold his soul to the devil. And that fits in with this old African association with the crossroads where you find wisdom: you go down to the crossroads to learn, and in his case to learn in a Faustian pact, with the devil. You sell your soul to become the greatest musician in history.<ref name="Ferris">{{cite AV media|people=Ferris, Bill|date=|title=[[The Story with Dick Gordon]]|medium=television program|time=|publisher=[[American Public Media]]}}</ref>}}

This view that the devil in Johnson's songs is derived from an African deity was disputed by the blues scholar [[David Evans (musicologist)|David Evans]] in an essay published in 1999, "Demythologizing the Blues":

{{blockquote|There are{{nbsp}}... several serious problems with this crossroads myth. The devil imagery found in the blues is thoroughly familiar from western folklore, and nowhere do blues singers ever mention Legba or any other African deity in their songs or other lore. The actual African music connected with cults of Legba and similar trickster deities sounds nothing like the blues, but rather features polyrhythmic percussion and choral call-and-response singing.<ref>{{harvnb|Evans|1999|page=}}</ref>}}

The musicologist [[Alan Lomax]] dismissed the myth, stating, "In fact, every blues fiddler, banjo picker, harp blower, piano strummer and guitar framer was, in the opinion of both himself and his peers, a child of the Devil, a consequence of the black view of the European dance embrace as sinful in the extreme".{{sfn|Lomax|1993|p=365}}

Both Lomax's and Evans's accounts themselves have been disputed and dismissed by Black scholars and authors including Amiri Baraka and Cornel West.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17595.Blues_People | title=Blues People }}</ref><ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.themonarchreview.org/cornel-west-strength-in-the-blues | title=Strength in the Blues – an Interview with Cornel West | date=September 9, 2012 }}</ref> West defines Blues as a creation of a people "who are willing to look unflinchingly at catastrophic conditions", as children of God responding to those conditions. Baraka's words are more directly critical of white writers who study African-American Blues artform and culture from a Western viewpoint, stating that "They have to do that to make themselves superior in some kind of way: that everything has come from Europe, which is not true".<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2013/07/26/205541225/black-history-meets-black-music-blues-people-at-50 | title=Black History Meets Black Music: 'Blues People' at 50 | website=NPR | date=July 26, 2013 | last1=Holley | first1=Eugene Jr.}}</ref> Baraka cites that rather than being formed out of any Western context, Blues derives from an African context of its own. The call-and-response singing Lomax argues is different from Blues has been widely cited as being a central aspect of Blues music.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-call-and-response-in-music |title=What Is Call and Response in Music? |website=MasterClass |date=August 26, 2021 |access-date=November 4, 2022}}</ref>