Selling It at the Crossroads

This chapter explores the mythology of "selling your soul at the crossroads" that has surrounded guitarist Robert Johnson and dominated contemporary conversations about the devil and the blues. Offering a new theory about Johnson's attitudinal debt to his mentor, Ike Zimmerman, it argues that Johnson, far from being haunted by evil, was a master ironist who viewed crossroads mythology skeptically and instrumentally: a way of attracting lovers and increasing his prestige. The film Crossroads (1986), an interracial buddy flick focused on the adventures of Johnson's peer Willie Brown and a young white blues student, Eugene Martone, reinvigorated the Johnson legend and stimulated Mississippi's nascent blues tourism business. The 1999 installation of a guitar-topped monument at "the crossroads" in Clarksdale, Mississippi certified the Johnson legend; this chapter investigates the deep history of that intersection and explores the meanings that tourists and guides have projected onto multiple crossroads locations in the Mississippi Delta.