Music: Going Down to the Crossroads

In many cultures, crossroads are regarded as geographical ‘thin’ places, giving access to divine or demonic transformative powers beyond the physical world. This chapter considers the Faustian transformations, crossroads soul-selling, and metamorphoses that this idea has generated, especially in relation to music. Finding resonance between musicians across time, from the early modern Robert Johnson who composed tunes for the witches of Shakespeare and Middleton to his seminal early 20th namesake, it connects early narratives of crossroads metamorphosis with more recent formative myths, and reads an early modern debate over the possibilities of transformation as a generative mode of social assertion for the powerless.