Radiolab - Crossroads

Episode Date: April 16, 2012

In this short, we go looking for the devil, and find ourselves tangled in a web of details surrounding one of the most haunting figures in music--a legendary guitarist whose shadowy life spawned a legend so powerful, it's still being repeated...even by fans who don't believe a word of it.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts!

From... W-N-Y-C. See? Yes. And N-P-R. I gotta say I'm suddenly regretting this. I was looking forward to this all day, but now it's... I didn't expect it to be so profoundly dark.

You're scared? A little tiny bit, yeah. Oh, dude, you don't need to be doing that. Pat, like a moron, just turned his lights off just to freak me out. Did you ever do that when you're driving out in the woods? So that's producer Pat Walters and I. This is the one. Is this one right here?

This is the railroad crossroads. All right, so. Where are you? So Pat and I... I know it's Pat. I know it's you. And you're driving in the dark? Yes.

This is going to take some set up. So a little while back, Pat and I went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi, which is a little tiny town out in the sticks, Mississippi Delta, drove down this dirt road, and this was dark. I mean, curtain of black, dark. Until we got to this place where our little road crossed another little road made kind of an X. Should we get out of the car?

Yeah. All right. And we got out of the car, and we stood there. Okay, we have to be completely silent, though. And waited. Five minutes to midnight. Because we were told if we stood in that very spot till midnight, the devil would come and, uh,

Talk to us. What? What's that over there? I'm going to beat you with this microphone if you do that one more time. Why? I should wait and find out, I guess. No, you should ask. Would you like to know why we were waiting for the devil?

Yes. What a bunch of tool bags we are. Okay, so I've been interested for years in this story of Robert Johnson and the Crossroads. I mean, do you know Robert Johnson? Yeah. One of the great blues musicians of all times influenced a ton of people, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin. He's also the center of this myth. Situate me in time.

When did Robert Johnson live? So here's the story. 1920s, Robert Johnson is a kid in Mississippi. He wants to play the blues, hanging around blues guys, but he sucks. Other blues guys would laugh at him. So he goes away. Disappears one day. Shortly after comes back, and he's not just good now.

He's incredible. I mean, he's making this music that's, not just technically good, but it's just got a feeling to it that's so different. And are the other musicians like amazed? They were like, what happened? And supposedly what he says to them is, well, one night I walked out into the darkness, found a place where two roads cross, and I waited there till midnight.

What do you mean a place in the night where two roads? There's lots of places. This is apparently what you do when you want to meet the devil. You walk out of town, find the crossroads. At precisely midnight, the devil will come up. He'll take your guitar. He'll tune it, hand it. it back to you and in that moment you've given the devil your soul and he has given you

the ability to play anything. Is that story still told? Oh my God, this is like one of the most famous like myths and rock and roll. This is a story that's repeated constantly. I mean, it's like one of the most enduring stories in music. I was just testing you. And for some reason for the last 12 years or so, I keep thinking about it. And I was always like one day, one day radio lab is going to go down to the crossroads.

We're going to figure out where this down. story came from. And this is an honest question, but is there something about the myth that is true? Yeah. Something. Oh my God, I've never seen so many stars. No? No. This is amazing. It's beautiful. All right, so what do you do? Well, uh, we didn't see any devil, first of all. Really? But, oh my God, a shooting star. We did see a shooting star. We saw a shooting star. And so we ended up, We ended up doing a lot of reporting, you know, going around Memphis, visiting Clarks to all these different places. And the funny thing, the very first thing that we sort of learned about this whole story. And we learned about it from this guy in Tom Graves, who lives in Memphis and has studied the history.

Very first thing we learned is that actually the myth, in a way, began here. We didn't even have to go to Memphis. It began right here. Here, what do you mean? In New York City? Yeah. What do you mean it starts in New York? Well, it starts on a very particular day, in a very particular place.

time with a very particular guy. I think we can trace pretty much this whole thing back to John Hammond, you know, at Columbia Records. I mean, he's the one that sort of pushed the whole thing into, to everybody. And John Hammond was an interesting guy. He was one of the heirs to the Vanderbilt fortune, you know, in New York. He was a thorough New Yorker. And at CBS, he was sort of a talent scout.

And John Hammond had... This is Elijah Wall, a historian. He had the best years in show. business pretty much ever. He discovered so much talent. But God bless the child. From Billy Holliday. Count Basie. Aretha Franklin. Bob Dylan. Stevie Ray Vaughan. He discovered Bruce Springsteen.

I mean the idea that the same guy could discover Bruce Springsteen and Count Basie? It's crazy. Anyhow, the moment that we're interested in happened kind of early in John Hammond's career. Hammond's career. He was very young. He was in his 20s. Doing well, because he'd already brought on. I think it was Benny Goodman. You know, who was a huge success. This would be the late 30s.

Benny Goodman has the first major integrated band. And John Hammond... He thought that racial segregation was an abomination. And right around the time that Benny Goodman broke, he decided it's time to make a statement. So yeah, in 1938, John Hammond decided to put together this one concert that would be like the whole history of black music from the old slave-era spirituals

up to the hottest swing bands. And not only was it going to cram the entire history of black music into one concert, you wanted to put it in Carnegie Hall. As in that Carnegie Hall. Again, it's a very high-toned place as Carnegie Hall, you know. What was it called?

It was called from spirituals to swing. From spirituals to swing. But here's the problem. And this whole chronology he was putting together he needed somebody to represent backwoods blues. He didn't have anybody. So he sends one of his guys down to Mississippi to a particularly famous record shop,

and the guy comes back with a record from this young guy named... Robert Johnson. Was he known at that point? No, he was a nobody. He was a nobody. Well, when he heard this record... John Hammond thought, wow, this is the best of the backwood blues guys I've ever heard.

That sort of haunting voice. He knew right away this was the guy. I'm going to plug him from obscurity and I'm going to put him in Carnegie Hall. And so he sent word down. To Mississippi, to try to get Robert Johnson and bring him up.

Word came back? That Robert Johnson had died just died. Very, very recently. Just a few months before. He was messing around with a woman and the woman's husband gave him a bottle of poisoned whiskey.

And that was it. Wow. Well, there's a blues singer's death. Yeah. So he's out of the program. One would think. Concert rolls around December 13th, 1938. Here we go. This was a concert. If you could have been there, you wanted to be there. And John Hammond is the emcee.

Tonight, we have going to have... And he... walks the crowd through the chronology, starting with the spirituals on the boogie-woogie. Benny Goodman and the Count Basie Orchestra. And he gets up and tells us, well, the big surprise of the evening. This is what he said. Although unfortunately this part was not recorded. Was to bring you this guy that I discovered recently, Robert Johnson.

And we just found out that he died. But I still want you to hear him, and we're going to play a couple of his best songs. How did he play it? He played it on a phonograph record and miced it through the PA system. Right there on stage? Right there on stage. Drops a needle. And he played one of them was preaching blues, which happens to be maybe my favorite.

And you can just imagine these spellbound people in this audience hearing her record being played through the PA. It was very obvious something different was going on. I mean, what a remarkable thing. And that was in a sense Robert Johnson's, I guess not in a sense. It was his introduction. It was his debut. It's so ghostly. Yeah.

What's most obvious is his absence. Now, at this point, there is no myth about a devil in the crossroads. All you got is music sung by a guy who's not in the room. When the record finishes, did they sit quietly, or do they jump up and down and yell? We have no idea. I mean, it wasn't recorded. But temptation would be to say their minds were blown, but probably would have to be. happened and was that they just clapped politely and the concert kept going. But the seed was planted.

And that seed would bloom in the weirdest way. Twenty-two years later. So let me just fast forward a bit. See, from 1938 to about 1960s, because of four, no one really listened to Robert Johnson. Not too many of his records were in circulation. Because, you know, it was the war years and people were really into these like twists and hop kind of happy records. But then as you slide into the 60s, people get kind of tired of that stuff, and they start getting into folk music. Kingston Trio and all that. Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger, all these guys. So John Hammond, again, John Hammond.

He had his finger on the pulse of what was going on. He had just signed Bob Dylan. And Dylan's first record, as you can hear, was kind of bluesy in places. So Hammond thought, hmm, maybe now is the time to revisit the whole Robert Johnson thing. Maybe put out a Robert Johnson record. So he did. And then people took those records overseas. And then guys like Eric Clapton heard it, flipped out, started recording covers.

I mean, it just sort of like I went into warp drive then. This is really the song that catapulted Robert Johnson into the world conscious. But still, despite the name of the song, there was no sailing of any souls. Crossroads is a metaphor. and countless blues songs come to the crossroads, which way are you going to go? It just refers to a decision point.

That shouldn't surprise anybody. So if you bought the final album and you looked at the album cover, there's no mythology on the back cover. No, no devil myth yet. But now all the conditions are sort of in place because you've got this whole folk roots movement and people who want to know more about the music.

And you've got a guy in Robert Johnson who's being covered by huge rock bands but who nobody knows the first thing about. So you have this void that needed to be filled and into that space walks a guy named. Pat, no, his name's not Pat, but Pat, you take this part. All right, so, when Chad and I were in Memphis, we went to see this guy who was one of the first people to find out anything about Robert Johnson. In a way, he's actually at the root of the myth about Robert Johnson's own and the soul of the devil. That he didn't mean to be.

Right. His name's Dave. David Evans. a professor of music at the University of Memphis. He works in a music building, so as you walk in, you hear like 60 different instruments playing, and you kind of feel like you're losing your mind. But when you step into his office,

thanks for having us. It's kind of quiet. Which felt weirdly appropriate, because we're surrounded by all these old books and stacks of real-to-reel tapes of people that he's interviewed over the last five decades. And while we were there, he told us about one of those taped interviews.

That changed everything. I was a student at UCLA. This is 1966. Just getting interested in folk music and blues. Got a guitar, you know. Even started ginging around a little bit. I was interested in Tommy Johnson. Now, Tommy Johnson is a pretty famous blues guy.

But there's no relation between Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson. None whatsoever. And musically, they're way different. Tommy Johnson yodels. Robert Johnson doesn't do that. No. So David Evans was into Tommy Johnson. I had met, I had heard a number of his recordings and had met Babe Stovall.

A blues singer who was on the circuit in 1964 and Babe had known Tommy. And he told Dave, well, you know, if you want to find Tomp. Tommy, Tommy's dead, but I can point you to his brother, Liddell Johnson. Well, he's living in a little house in Jackson, Mississippi. Dave decides to go see him. No, Tommy. Record an interview. See if you could learn a few things about Tommy.

In 1914, that's where he came back. Liddle was a bluesman-turned-preciar. He was very spry. Didn't play the blues anymore, but he sang for David a little bit. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Don't you yell my lonesome cry. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Baby, don't you hear my lonesome cry.

What a way you treat me, mama? Well, well, well, that's the way you do. When did he first start singing that? It's an amazing interview to listen to. In any case, after he sang a little bit, David handed him a guitar, and he played a bit. And after that, Liddell tells David's story about his brother. brother Tommy. And again, this is Tommy Johnson, not Robert Johnson. But Liddell tells David's story that tries to explain how his brother Tommy got so good. And to our knowledge,

this tape has never been broadcast before. You could sing any kind of tangle-up song you want to, and I bet you he would play. Me and him would play for some white folks here, and he just set up and just sat there and fumble with his box. And he'd, and he'd just sit there and fumble with his box. and he could make a song, he could make a song in ten minutes. And I'd ask him, now if the arm was living, he'd tell, now, he's untold my wife, tell you, he said the reason he'd know so much, said he sold himself to the devil. I asked him how.

He said, if you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and not learn how to make song yourself, said you take your guitar and you go where road crosses, is that a way? Crossroads. Where a cross road is. And say, get there. Be sure to get there just a little for 12 o'clock that night so you will know you'll be there. And say, you have your guitar and be playing a piece sitting there by yourself.

You have to go by yourself. And be sitting there playing a piece and say 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. Said that's the way I learned how to play anything I want. And he could. Now he told that then. Play anything.

Don't care what it was, church song. I mean, I was collecting stuff on Tommy Johnson and here was this legend. Dave says he wasn't quite sure what to make of this. I mean, he knew that the idea that a person could sell their soul to the devil in exchange for limitless talent, that is a very old myth. But that was about it. So he goes back to UCLA, and one night he's chatting with some friends.

You know, grad students have their bull sessions. You know, we all talked about these things. And he tells his friends about this thing that Liddell had said about Tommy, and in the room that day was a fellow grad student named Pete Welding. Pete was as much of a blues. a freak as I was. And according to David, as Pete's listening to this story, he makes a little mental switcheroo.

He thinks to himself, you know, this whole soldier's soul of the devil thing would make a hell of a lot more sense if it's about Robert Johnson. Not Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson. I mean, the fact is, Robert Johnson sang a song about going to a crossroads. Now, in the song, he doesn't say

that he went there to meet the devil. But he also sang another song on the same album about Me and the Devil. Walking Side by Side. You know, which does suggest, at least in the song, he's in some kind of partnership with the devil. So Pete has this thought that this story sounds a lot more Robert Johnsony than Tommy Johnsony. And a few months later, he travels to Mississippi, and he ends up interviewing this really famous bluesman named Sun House.

Pete asks Son about Robert Johnson. Son tells Pete the usual story about how Robert Johnson was just so bad, get up on stage. It would be just noise in the people, you know. And the folks have come out and say, why don't just some of you all go in and meet that boy, put that thing down, he's running us crazy. That's a little bit of Sun House that we found on YouTube.

So Son tells Pete that story, ends it in usual way, says Robert Johnson disappeared, he came back, he was better than all of us, nobody knew how I did it. And then, probably what happened, says David, is in that moment. I think Pete asked a leading question. I wasn't there. Dave suspects maybe Pete said something like, is it possible that Robert Johnson got so good because he sold his soul to the devil?

And son... Son, I think, gave a kind of hesitant answer that seemed like it... left open that possibility. Price said something like, yeah, sure, it's possible. David says Pete takes that non-answer and runs with it. Publishes an article where he says, you wouldn't believe this, but Sunhouse told me that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil.

Pete, he was a writer, a stylist, in quotes. A little bit of a liar is what you're saying. He himself even admitted that that, that article was a bit over the top. Over the top or not, the story exploded. Got printed over and over in books and magazines, Clapton and others, talked about it at concerts.

And over time, it just became part of the canon. The story that we like to tell about a guy that we really know nothing about. But okay, I mean, this was not why we decided to do this story. I mean, the whole thought was that there's got to be something more going on here than just a bad game of telephone. because the music does seem to suggest that there is more going on. I mean, it does feel haunted. And midway through our reporting, we did learn one thing

that suddenly made the myth make a kind of sense. And like real sense, not just story sense. Really? Yeah. Tell me that story. Well, we heard it from a guy named Mack McCormick. I'm actually going to play you, him talking about it in an old documentary that we found.

Okay. Now, Mac is probably the expert on Robert John. And in the 80s, he tracked down some of Robert Johnson's family that no one had been able to locate. And he came back with a really different story about the guy than at least I would have ever expected. Robert Johnson was married in 1929, but he was quite young. He was about 18, says Mac, and he met a girl named Virginia, and he fell in love. When he married, he made one of the important decisions in his life, which was to live a conventional life. They were going to live on a farm, raise a family.

Up until then, he'd been a kind of a casual party musician, and his wife, Virginia, became pregnant. She decided to go back to her family to have the child. He was going to join her, but right before she was due... Robert went off playing. Kind of snuck off to play a few gigs before the baby was born. And when he went to visit her, he found that she died in childbirth. And he was destroyed. And he was faced with this incredible community condemnation.

of what you've done to Virginia because he was in Virginia's childhood community at the time. And they looked upon him as an itinerant evil musician who was singing the devil's songs, who killed Virginia. And he gradually became that person that the community saw him as. So if Robert Johnson was haunted by anything, maybe it was grief. So if you had to tell it, you'd say, so no, he didn't go out and work. to double, he had this tragedy, and the tragedy changed him, and it changed him into a great musician.

Mm-hmm. That's what I would say. And that's where our story might have ended. Hello? Hello, Mac. Yes. But that story about Robert Johnson's young wife dying in childbirth was so sad and fascinating that we really wanted to talk to the guy who found it.

My name is Mac McCormick. He's the guy we just heard in the documentary. But when we mentioned that story that he told about Robert Johnson's wife dying in childbirth, He kind of cut us off. Let's not get into that. Why not? That's not something I've confirmed satisfactorily. What does that mean?

I have doubts about the things I said years ago. Specifically, like what? Well, okay. This is one. Mack told us about a weird encounter he'd had. in New Orleans. In New Orleans, I was told about a man named Robert Johnson, who was a blues musician. And this was years after the Robert Johnson had died.

And I went racing down the street to this address. Well, when I got there, this man said his name was Robert Johnson. He was a blues singer, had been. But he was not the man who made the records. But he was somebody who at the time had gone around imitating the records. And Max says at that moment he started to wonder, Like, is it possible that the stories I've been connecting about Robert Johnson, one particular Robert Johnson, the Robert Johnson,

are actually about a collection of different Robert Johnsons. This is what you have to apply, as statistics here. Robert's a pretty common first name, and Johnson's a pretty common last name. So if you have a state with whatever population, you've got to say there's this many Robert Johnson's. We don't know how many, but Mac figures there's certainly more than one. And as Max doubt mounted, he started to run into other problems. Have you seen the death certificate? I've seen reprints of it in books.

Have you seen a reprint of the backside of it? No. Okay, the backside says... That he had come from Tunica County to play banjo at a country dance. Play banjo. But Johnson played the guitar. And to make matters more confusing, the death certificate said that this Robert Johnson died of syphilis, not whiskey poisoning.

This has got to be a different guy. Mack wasn't entirely convinced until he met this guy who had played with Robert Johnson back in the day. He and Robert Johnson jammed together a little bit. When Mac brought up Johnson and the fact that he died in 1938, this guy gave him a funny look and said,

no, I saw him in a rodeo. In 39, I believe it was April or so in 39. A few years later, the same thing happened with another guy Mac was talking to. He said that he'd seen Johnson in Memphis. In April 1941. And not too long after that, it happened again. So it's things like that that give you hints.

That you might be wrong. And if you're wrong about whether he died or not. How do you know any of these other things that I believed? Obviously, when Mack told us this, we were really disappointed. Kind of kills the story. Although we do still have this song, which is incredible, the 28 others. Maybe that's enough. And if you think back to that moment in Carnegie Hall where

music was drifting out of that audience for the first time, we talked about that earlier as an absence. But clearly it's not if that's all we got. Actually, it's everything. It's everything. Come on in my kitten, there's going to be right of a door. On the subject of Robert Johnson, there's the book by writer Tom Graves. It's called Crossroads, The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend, Robert Johnson.

And thanks to Elijah Wald, who were escaping the Delta. I don't know the subtitle. Robert Johnson, The Invention of the Blues. And to Peter Goralnik, whose book on Robert Johnson is called, searching for Robert Johnson. There's a lot of people looking for that guy. Yeah. And the truth is, I should also just say to close this out,

Thurice is the person who put Robert Johnson in my head and his music in my head. Is a guy named Dean Ulster, sort of my first mentor in radio, who used to run a great program called The Next Big Thing. So a big heartfelt, bluesy thanks to Dean Ulster. I'm Chad Abumrah. I'm Robert Krillich. Thanks for listening. Hey, this is Iiana.

I'm calling from Oakland, and I'm a radio lab listener. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. For more information about Sloan, visit www.flone.org. Thanks.