Crossroads and Kumbaya

Anyone else remember a cheesy 80s Ralph Macchio movie called Crossroads? The movie pays homage to blues great, Robert Johnson. It was mostly forgettable, except for the music; Ry Cooder did the soundtrack. That movie was my introduction to blues. I was an impressionable teenager who played guitar with my local church youth-group, along with a couple of other kids who played piano and drums. I'd absolutely never heard anything like that. (I'd especially never heard anything like the Steve Vai guitar duel at the end.) I had no idea a guitar could sound like that—and once that genie is out of the bottle, there's no going back. It's a crossroads.

If you're here on Blues Talk, you very likely already know why hearing Ry Cooder was a big deal to a teenager with an acoustic guitar, who mostly just knew how to strum Kumbaya. But just in case you don't, you should definitely watch the video embedded below. Even if you do know, in fact, you should still watch the video. Nobody but a fool passes up a chance to hear amazing music, for free.

Crossroads figure prominently in blues mythology, because Robert Johnson—so it was said—sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads, in return for his talent. Son House said he must have done so, to play that way. Most of Johnson's life, in fact, is surrounded by rumor and legend, and the few facts we have reveal the desperate and troubled life that's come to be synonymous with Delta blues. The mythology has attached itself to Johnson's famous song "Crossroad Blues" which developed a reputation over the intervening years of being cursed. In spite of that reputation, though, the generations of great guitar players following Johnson have continued to cover the song. If you're a guitar player, be warned: you might find yourself experimenting with a long-neck bottle or a glass slide and retuned strings, because there's just nothing else like the way that sounds.

Much of the mystique surrounding the music, at least for me, has to do with how much of it has been lost, and how much was never recorded in the first place. Blues is a music of time and place that exists in a moment never to be quite repeated. Son House's body of work, for instance, exists primarily on old 78s. Through the magic of the internet, some of his music has been digitized and captured for a much larger audience. Stephen King played with some of those archetypal and quintessentially American themes in Bag of Bones with the blues-singing and nomadic Sara and Son Tidwell characters. The music, the era, the songs themselves haunt us all, still.

I went to the crossroad

Fell down on my knees

I went to the crossroad

Fell down on my knees

Asked the Lord above "Have mercy now,

Save poor Bob, if you please"

(from "Crossroad Blues" - ROBERT JOHNSON)

Blues, to me, always come home to Mississippi delta blues. Always. Robert Johnson's guitar, sepia-tinted photos, bathtub gin, and singers who know what it is to pick cotton in the heat of the day until your fingers bleed. But while the Mississippi delta may be where blues began, it's most definitely not where the music remained.

So over the coming weeks, we'll be exploring the backroads of American blues together. Then we'll travel wherever those reads lead. I fervently hope that those of you reading will post your favorite links and recommendations, too, because there's so much music out there I haven't heard yet. I'm looking forward to the journey.