We Just Change The Beat
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Wednesday, 28 December 2005 09:27 |
Cross Road Blues
for Harry Duncans
Tommy Johnson, born in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, in 1896 left home around 1912 with an older woman
& traveled north to Rolling Fork, then settled farther north, by Boyle, near the Dockery Farm,
in 1913 right on the line of the Pea Vine Special, where he spent a year or two
studying with Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Dick Bankston, Ben Maree & them at Dockery s
& then returned south to Crystal Springs & his family & the peoples who used to know him.
2
By this time Tommy Johnson had developed a style of his own not just in his music
but as a com- pulsive womanizer, an acute alcoholic who would drink almost anything: Sterno, shoe polish, the works
His brother LeDell asked him how he had learned to play so well in such a short time . . . .
He said the reason he knowed so much, said he sold himself to the Devil. . . . I asked him how?
& Tommy Johnson said: If you want to learn how to play anything you wanna play & learn how to make songs yourself,
you take your guitar & you go to where a road crosses that way, where a crossroads is.
Get there, be sure to get there just a little fore 12 o clock that night, so you know you ll be there.
You have your guitar & be playing a piece, sitting there by yourself. You have to go by yourself & be sitting there
playing a piece. A big black man will walk up there & take your guitar, & he ll tune it.
And then he ll play a piece & hand it back to you. That's the way I learned how to play anything I want.
3
& Bob Palmer adds, The black man [referred to] is recognizable as Legba, a Yoruba trickster god
who opens the path for other supernatural powers & is traditionally associated with crossroads.
As the only wholly unpredictable deity in the Yoruba pantheon the rituals that are virtually guaranteed
to bring a desired result from all others do not always work in his case Legba
became identified with the Devil of Christianity early on . . . . early on
Detroit March 11, 1982
3.1.669 |