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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 |
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