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John Sinclair

The hardest working poet in the industry

[08] "Cross Road Blues" E-mail
We Just Change The Beat
Wednesday, 28 December 2005 09:27
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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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