Blues & beers at the crossroads

Cemetery at historic Robert Johnson crossroads (or not)

beernews.org reports that Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and Sony Legacy are set to collaborate on another beer/music project, this time turning to the blues.

In mid-January, Sony Music Entertainment filed a trademark application for Robert Johnson’s Hellhound on my Ale. The name is a play on words from one of Johnson’s songs, Hellhound on my Trail. This week, Dogfish got TTB approval for a keg collar. The only description available is that it’s brewed with lemons.

Enough about beer. On to Robert Johnson. Here’s what Sony Legacy wants you to know about him: “May 8, 2011, marks the 100th birthday of Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, who, according to legend, sold his soul down at the crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in a midnight bargain that has haunted the music world for three-quarters of a century. The ‘deal’ brought forth Johnson’s incandescent guitar technique and a run of 10-inch 78 rpm singles for the Vocalion, Oriole, Conqueror and Perfect labels recorded in San Antonio in 1936 and Dallas in 1937.” Sony then gets to the point. It’s selling two special Robert Johnson sets.

One of many possible Robert Johnson crossroadsSince we’re pretty sure that Johnson didn’t actually enter in a transaction with the devil it might seem silly to worry about the location of THE crossroads themselves, but humor me. It wasn’t necessarily, or even probably, where Highway 61 and Highway 49 meet.

More than twenty years ago Living Blues magazine devoted pretty much an entire issue to “The death of Robert Johnson.” Jim O’Neal set the tone with his introduction.

As marvelous and influential as Robert Johnson was, his life, lyrics, and legend have still received an inordinate amount of attention over the past 20 or 30 years. The mythic proportions of the Johnson legend are largely the product of modern-day audiences’ and writers’ enthusiasm (further fueled by this issue of Living Blues, of course). The search for anything of substance pertaining to Johnson has produced a valuable body of research, but it has also created more and more pitfalls where fiction may bury the facts.

Almost every blues artist of Johnson’s generation who has been interviewed has probably been asked about Robert Johnson (sometimes ad nauseam), and who knows how many times one bluesman or another has fabricated a tale merely to prey on a young interviewer’s anthusiams and keep his attention a little longer.

Honeyboy EdwardsHoneyboy Edwards, who’ll be 96 years old in June, tells a convincing story in that 1990 Living Blues about playing with Johnson the night he was poisoned. By a bit of chance we heard him repeat it in 1992 at a Clarksdale, Mississippi, lunch spot called Fair’s. He was in town to enjoy the Sunflower Blues Festival. The week before he performed at the first — there might have one or two more — Robert Johnson Crossroads Festival in nearby Greenwood (the photo on the right). Anyway, if I were in charge of organizing a Robert Johnson commemorative beer I’d invite Honeyboy to toss in a few hops.

To return to beer for a moment, apparently they wouldn’t want to call this new one Crossroads because Anheuser-Busch briefly tested a wheat beer by that name in 1995. Flunked the test; guess there was no deal with the devil.

Back to Robert Johnson. We made two trips into the Mississippi Delta in 1992, because Daria was writing a story for Touring America called “Where the Blues Began.” We used Living Blues to help us find historically important spots. O’Neal wrote an article called “A Traveler’s Guides to the Crossroads” that even had maps, and was still properly skeptical.

I have never heard any musician claim to have made any deal at any crossroads, by the way, although some say they have heard such stories told by old-timers. But Napoloan Strickland of Como, Mississippi, did tell me that, following instructions from his grandfather, he learned to play music by going to a cemetery and ‘straddling a grave” at midnight.

One of the crossroads mentioned was near Bonnie Blue Plantation, where Johnson lived, and White Cemetery. We headed there near dark, per O’Neal’s suggestion. I’m not sure we actually found the right cemetery, but we did spy three crosses, shined the car headlights on them and I took the photo at the top. The experience became the lead to Daria’s story.

“You’re standing in a tiny cemetery that’s surrounded by a cotton field. The few stark white crosses rise from the grass like ghosts. Across the dirt road in one direction is a field of tall corn, in the other, a field of sorghum. It’s growing dark, and you realize that if you screamed your loudest, no one would come.

“This could be the place, you think — the crossroads where blues musician Robert Johnson claimed he met the Devil. Here, the idea doesn’t seem so far fetched. You can easily imagine a thin young man with a guitar slung over his shoulder making his way down the road, and a dark stranger appearing suddenly from out of the corn.”

It’s going to take a spectacular beer to stand up to that memory.

10 thoughts on “Blues & beers at the crossroads”

  1. Wasn’t the Robert Johnson story re-enacted in the Coen brothers’ film “O Brother, Where Art Thou” (probably should have been “where art thee”, but that’s another discussion)? In the film, he’s called Tommy Johnson.

    Great film in any case, with or without beer.

    Hey, Stan, with all the discussions about matching food and beer, how about matching beer and films?

  2. “…we’re pretty sure that Johnson didn’t actually enter in a transaction with the devil it…”

    Speak for yourself, baby. And that is some bad mojo making a beer about a Satanic grade curse. Although, come to think of it, Unibroue’s Maudit pretty much covers the same territory with a flying canoe and I’ve had buckets of that. I am so doomed.

  3. Mike – yes, the Robert Johnson story was one of many touched on in “O Brother.” Another movie, “Crossroads” in 1986, focused attention on the whole crossroads myth a few years before Sony released a Johnson boxed set and Living Blues did that special issue. The movie starred Ralph Macchio, otherwise known as the Karate Kid, but the best part was the soundtrack by Ry Cooder.

  4. Stan,

    I can’t believe you left out Steve Vai who played both parts of the duel on the soundtrack.

  5. Thanks for the reminder. Well worth the 7 minutes to join 3.5 million others who watched the video.

  6. Knowing Sam Calagione’s work, it will be an 8% beer with lemons, malted milk, dead shrimp, and red hots, and yet somehow it will still be drinkable.

  7. “The movie starred Ralph Macchio, otherwise known as the Karate Kid…”

    Ralph Macchio as a Julliard guitar student… yet Julliard doesn’t have a guitar curriculum (or at least didn’t in 1986 — was that really 86?).

    Anyone know what the beer will be? You would think it would be based on something Johnson would have liked to drink, but I suppose any beer available during his lifetime wasn’t terribly memorable.

  8. Coincidentally, I just tweeted before reading this, that 3 of 3 African American Jazz tribute beers in my memory are all dark SRM beers.

    Would a Stan Getz beer get a light cream ale treatment by these brewers or am I reading too much into this?

    I’ll hold my tongue until the Lemon drops.

  9. Crossroads was hilarious. It was actually Stevie Ray Vaughn who played the solo for Ralph Macchio’s part in the duel. Steve Vai played the solo for the devil.

    I think you could make a pretty good comparison between some breweries and musicians. I’d say that Dogfish Head is much more Steve Vai than they are Robert Johnson.

    It’s also fairly amusing to me that Sony has decided to have a commemorative beer brewed for a man who most commonly is reported to have died from a poisoned alcoholic drink.

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