Robert Johnson's Mississippi Blues Crossroads

In the juke joints around Clarksdale, Mississippi, Robert Johnson was known as the kid who could barely play the guitar he often carried. Stories are told of musicians inviting Johnson to join them on stage, knowing that, before he got very far, the audience would be laughing.

He disappeared for a while. When he returned, no one who heard him could believe he was the same man. He blew everyone away, playing the songs that would make him famous, among them "Cross Road Blues" and "Me And The Devil Blues."

Maybe the light bulb went on; the same one writers see when they find their voices, when everything falls into place. Maybe Robert Johnson really did cut a deal with the Devil at a crossroads near Clarksdale, or the Mississippi river town of Rosedale. He never denied it, and the rumor followed him for the remaining six years of his life. Maybe it was another guitar player, Tommy Johnson, no relation, who met Satan. Maybe it never happened. Such a rendezvous would run contrary to what we know about the rational world. But what if it did?

Blues songs, be they Delta or urban, tell stories whose characters are larger than life, whose settings bend reality. Anything becomes possible. Exchanging guitars with the Devil - yours for his on which you can play anything flawlessly - at exactly midnight, is imagery that brings a song lyric, novel, or screenplay to life.

The 1986 film "Crossroads" touches on the legend, featuring a fictional Delta bluesman who knew Robert Johnson, and who has some unfinished business of his own with the Devil back in Mississippi.

If the meeting did occur, three possible locations have been identified.

One is the intersection of Mississippi state routes 1 and 8 in Rosedale, a town mentioned in the lyrics of his "Traveling Riverside Blues:" "Lord, I'm goin' down to Rosedale, gon' take my rider by my side . . . "

Others are the two junctions of US routes 49 and 61, roads found in countless blues and rock songs, still the main highways linking Clarksdale, Helena, and Memphis.

Route 49 starts in Gulfport and works its way north through the Mississippi cotton fields and pine forests towards Arkansas. US 61 begins at Tulane and Broad streets in New Orleans and ends at the Minnesota-Ontario border. On the road atlas, from Natchez to Memphis, as it parallels the river, it's labeled a scenic highway. The Delta is flat, in early June already hot, and life off the main roads seems to have the same leisurely pace it had when Robert Johnson lived there.

There's fast food at one meeting place of the blues mother roads, in Clarksdale. It was no doubt less urban in Johnson's day, but there's no room for quarter pounders in blues stories.

The highway north from Clarksdale is both US 49 and 61 for sixteen miles, until the 49 turnoff to Helena. This is the spot photographed for album covers and magazine articles. Purists could argue that, since the roads don't cross, it's not really a crossroads. They were, though, the two most traveled roads in that part of the Delta. A landmark intersection in the middle of nowhere. A perfect place to talk business with the Devil.

After I took the pictures, I grabbed a handful of crushed rock from the highway shoulder. With those rocks in my travel bag, the absence of car trouble on the rest of that road trip told me the crossroads curse that dogged Robert Johnson isn't real after all.