Cross Road Blues
"Cross Road Blues" is one of Delta Blues singer Robert Johnson's most famous songs. The lyrics plainly have the narrator attempting to hitch a ride from an intersection as darkness falls. But in close association with the mythic legend of Johnson's short life and death, it has come to represent the tale of a blues man going to a metaphorical crossroads to meet the devil to sell his soul in exchange for becoming a famous blues player.
While the legend of the Johnson selling his soul to the Devil is fascinating and evocative, the song itself plainly describes the very real, harrowing situation feared by Johnson and other African Americans in the Deep South in the early 20th century. Historian Leon Litwack has suggested that the song refers to the common fear felt by blacks who were discovered out alone after dark. As late as 1930s in parts of the South, the well-known expression, "Nigger, don't let the sun go down on you here," was, according to Litwack, "understood and vigorously enforced." In an era when lynchings were still common, Johnson was likely singing about the desperation of finding his way home from an unfamiliar place as quickly as possible because, as the song says, "the sun goin' down, boy/ dark gon' catch me here." This interpretation also makes sense of the closing line "You can run/ tell my friend poor Willie Brown/ that I'm standing at the crossroads" as Johnson's appeal for help from a real-life fellow musician."[1]
Cream recreated the song for their 1968 album Wheels of Fire as "Crossroads".
The song has been covered by many other artists, including Elmore James, Lynyrd Skynyrd (live), Homesick James and Rush.
An episode of Supernatural is titled Crossroad Blues, as a nod to the Robert Johnson song.
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Notes
- ^ Litwack, Leon F (1998). Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Vintage Books, 410-411.
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