- Actually, the real crossroads , where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, is not where the symbol of the guitars is.
- Oh no? Where exactly?
- The bypass around the city wasn't built until the last year of Johnson's life and by then he had made his big recording. Investigating maps of the past we saw that the real crossroads is in the center, near the blues club, but as a symbolic place it was a better location where the signal is now. We try not to tell too many people, don't tell it.
- Man, I can't not tell ...
- Okay ...- he laughs.
You don't see the day coming in your life as a journalist where you seriously talk to a source about the off the record around the place where the devil himself bought the soul of a musician in the 1930s. However, such a conversation begins to sound reasonable after a few hours in Clarksdale, the city in the Mississippi delta where the city council itself approved a resolution that gave a letter of nature to the evil one and the transaction.
Last year, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Delta Blues Museum, the State House passed a resolution declaring that “the intersection of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale, [was] the place where the legend of the blues Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the ability to play an infamous guitar. "
Previous deliveries
- At the wheel of black America | 1. New Orleans
- At the wheel of black America | 2. Birmingham (Alabama)
- At the wheel of black America | 3. From Alabama to Mississippi
Bill Luckett, who made the disclosure on the exact location of the Johnson case, is something very much like the "man who does it all" from Clarksdale. Former mayor, lawyer, businessman and co-owner with Morgan Freeman of the Ground Zero club, as well as an actor, he is one of the people most involved in the tourist pull of the city as the cradle of blues, for making it the holy place where every year, at less until the pandemic, fans from all over the world made pilgrimages.
Sam Cooke, Muddy Waters, Elmore Jones, Jimmy Reed, WC Handy. All of them created their first bars in the Delta —the poorest area of the poorest state in the entire country— to end up emigrating north. It was the route taken by many African Americans, musicians or not, who left a South marked by poverty and racial violence attracted by the manufacturing boom of Michigan or Illinois in the first half of the 20th century. Cooke, born in Clarksdale, moved to Chicago taking the music with him, as did James and many others.
Sam Cooke or Muddy Waters created their first bars here
Johnson didn't have time to leave. He died in 1938, aged only 27, in unclear circumstances. This you see the most widespread version: after playing a party in Greenwood, another nearby town, he started flirting with the wrong wife and someone put poison in his whiskey. A few years earlier, after disappearing for a few months, he had gone from mediocre musician to virtuous because, apparently, he had reached the familiar Faustian pact with the devil.
A ghostly air runs through Clarksdale, with its murals of faded musicians, vintage cars parked in the middle of downtown, the old Roxy cinema with rusted letters. After shutting down and languishing for 30 years, it resurfaced as a venue for theatrical and musical performances, but retains all of the faded image. The town as a whole, of some 15,000 inhabitants, seems to deliberately give off that decadent air, as if this impoverished territory had learned to make a virtue out of necessity.
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
Ground Zero, the club of Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett, is a very spacious venue, all daubed on the walls and with dozens of flags from around the world hanging from the ceiling. The Spanish woman is recent, in black marker, it is written: “December 27, 2019. Papparelli Alonso family. Olé ”. They must have gone on a Christmas trip to the Deep South, life before the coronavirus. The business is now closed, without a clear reopening date due to the risk of contagion, but Luckett opens it to show it and be able to take some pictures.
“Morgan and I had become friends in the mid-nineties. He saw all these people passing through Clarksdale and he said, "But what are all these people doing around here?" I told him that they were tourists, that they came here for the blues, but they had no where to listen to it because then there was no permanent place, so we opened it, and from there others did too, ”he explains.
Freeman was born in 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee, but moved to Mississippi as a young boy and has always remained linked to the Delta. Until eight years ago, he also owned a restaurant with Luckett, Madidi, which had to close because, unlike the club, it never built enough clientele to remain profitable. "Tourism has grown over the years, but it will never overtake agriculture as the main economic engine, not in my generation at least," he says.
The abandonment of the old Riverside hotel also recalls that flight that the town did not quite lift, but like everything else in the Delta, it is an abandonment of bohemian air, also seasoned with a good history. Before becoming a small motel in the 1940s, it had been a hospital for African Americans, the GT Thomas, in compliance with the segregation laws of the time. Bessie Smith died in it in 1937. The empress of the blues, suffered a car accident on Highway 61, which connects Clarksdale and Memphis, and there was no pact with the devil for her. For years the story circulated that she was taken to a white medical center, where she was rejected, and bled to death on the way, but a few blues historians have seen this implausible to begin with, because it would not have occurred to them to take the artist to a white center.
The atmosphere and landscape have an air of bohemian abandon
Now, a picture with Bessie Smith's name stands in front of the closed hotel. The woman's face collides with that of the thicker photographs that can be found of Smith in cyberspace. An article by journalist Alison Fensterstock on NPR pointed out a year ago that the portrait actually corresponds to the more stylized rhythm & blues singer LaVern Baker, and there are several copies of that image mistakenly attributed to Smith on the internet, but no one has changed the sign.
There is no exact date that determines its birth, but it does begin to be heard in the cotton plantations, that it is born from the songs of the blacks who picked it up. 80% of Clarksdale's population is African American. Cotton, soy and other crops still dominate the landscape seen from the road to Greenwood today. This is where you have to drive - just an hour - to find the grave of Robert Johnson, at least one of them, because several locations have been identified. The one at Little Zion Church has some flowers and a couple of empty bottles. Not a single car passes. Johnson sold the soul because there probably wasn't much else to sell then.