This book explores the theme of the devil as well as his abode, appearance, and actions in the lyrics of blues songs and in blues culture from the 1920s to the present. It contains an introduction surveying the topic, followed by five chapters. The first of these is a discussion of the concept of blues as “the devil’s music.” Next comes a chapter about female vaudeville blues of the 1920s, in which the devil is interpreted as a symbol of modernity, who leads newly urbanized black women to prostitution and shame. This is followed by a third chapter dealing with male blues songs in which the devil is interpreted as a symbol of the Jim Crow system, the evil white exploiter of black bodies. In the fourth chapter the devil is depicted as a shape-shifting troublemaker in failed relationships between men and women. The final chapter contains three sections. The first deals with bluesman Robert Johnson, his songs with references to the devil, his life and afterlife. The other sections treat devil imagery in two blues revival or popular culture settings, the film Crossroads and a large metal “The Crossroads” sign at the intersection of two highways in Clarksdale, Mississippi, meant to attract tourism to the town and to proclaim it as an important blues center. These last two sections pertain more to the (primarily) white response to blues music, and they are two of the three best parts of the book, although the last one is weakened a bit by a long, unnecessary, and ultimately inconclusive attempt to date precisely when Johnson left Robinsonville for Hazlehurst, Mississippi, and might have passed through Clarksdale on the way to make his alleged pact with the devil.
Adam Gussow interprets the film as an attempt to depict the passing of the blues torch from older black to younger white performers at a particular point in history (1986) when many believed that whites were indeed taking over the genre. He shows how the film’s creators ignored contemporary young black blues artists. The section about the sign in Clarksdale contains useful interview material from the artist who designed and created it, largely out of a sense of civic pride. The other outstanding chapter in the book is the second one, dealing with the female blues of the vaudeville era. The interpretation is straightforward and stems from the frequent overt connection of devil themes with imagery of men as mistreaters in the songs themselves, buttressed with sociological data. The book has a conclusion that is really just an attempt to tie up some loose ends in a sketchy fashion. These include problems inherent in Clarksdale’s adoption of a “crossroads” image, some new devil-blues by young performers, and the lingering of the “devil’s music” appellation in Mississippi. An appendix contains a listing of 177 songs containing devil-related themes. If one eliminates some sermons, jazz, pop, and hillbilly tracks, alternate takes and remakes, the list boils down to about 125 blues songs with these themes over a 90-year period.
There are problems with the remaining sections of the book. These stem chiefly from the author’s relentless pushing of major interpretations on the basis of very little evidence, or from a selection of a few apparently supporting examples out of a vast amount of blues lyric material. He seems not to have heeded the statement made as early as 1930 by the poet Sterling Brown that “there are so many Blues that any preconception might be proved about Negro folk life, as well as its opposite.”
Gussow is aided in his quest for meaning by the recent elevation of the black vernacular expression “signifyin’” to an analytical and interpretive concept useful to scholars. This term, whose semantic range can encompass the concepts of use of multiple, sometimes conflicting, levels of meaning, as well as lying and “bullshitting,” has opened up the floodgates for scholars to find almost any meaning they want in black folk and formal expression, often ignoring or downplaying the significance of the overt surface meaning. Gussow leads off the discussion with the hyperbolic statement (10) that “the devil, shape-shifter extraordinaire, is the blues’ most malleable, dynamic, and important personage . . . the only actor, apart from the blues singer himself, who is also an icon for the music as a whole.” Yet the devil appears in an infinitesimal percentage of blues songs, whereas the singer and a counterpart of the opposite sex (“Baby”) occur in almost all blues, followed by romantic rivals. It would be fair to say that the treatment of the devil theme in blues would be worthy of little more than an article were it not for its prominence in the blues of Robert Johnson and Johnson’s own exalted status in the music’s pantheon of artists. And it should be noted that all types of black, and some white, secular and dance-related music can be and have been associated with the devil, although this association is not universally accepted in those communities.
Gussow sees the blues-devil and artists who identify with him as partaking “of the disruptive, uncontrollable, good-and-evil phallicism of Legba” (10), a phallic/trickster deity found under various names in several West African religious systems, even though on the following page the author admits that no blues artist (nor any other black American writer or speaker for that matter) ever mentioned Legba or any of his African counterparts until forty or so years ago. Without denying that conceptions of Legba and other African tricksters could have influenced African American concepts of the devil, as anthropologist Melville Herskovits pointed out many decades ago, it should also be noted that Euro-American folk concepts of the devil can have a similar non-Christian background. This background doesn’t overrule the fact that for the most part in both communities the devil is simply the enemy of God and the one who causes or tempts mankind to evil. Gussow views Robert Johnson as “a fearless young modernist who deliberately constructed his songs to offend uptight religionists and attract feminine attentions, signifying on crossroads mythology with ironic intent” (14). But what about all the other “fearless young modernist” blues singers of the same era as Johnson (the 1930s) who didn’t use or rarely used devil imagery in their songs? In my own research I determined that Johnson employed themes of the devil and other supernatural beings, magic, and sorcery and victimization in 63% of his recorded songs, and he sings of these topics with a great degree of evident passion and sincerity. This is an extraordinarily high percentage, which to me suggests that these themes were of real concern to Johnson and were not merely used by him with calculated ironic intent.
Limitations of space prevent a more detailed critique. Even if the topic already occupies an outsized space in blues literature, this book, while making a large contribution, is unlikely to be the last word on the devil theme in the blues.
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[Review length: 1156 words • Review posted on February 1, 2018]