The crossroads—then and now -The Occult Roots of Rock and Roll

[Dawn Marie]

The Occult Roots of 

Rock and Roll
At the crossroads—then and now

Michael Chapman

REMNANT COLUMNIST

Reprinted from The Remnant

21170 W. Linwood Drive NE

Wyoming, MN 55092

www.RemnantNewspaper.com

“Rock has always been the Devil’s music. You can’t convince me that it isn’t.” 

…David Bowie, 

Rolling Stone, Feb. 12, 1996

Rock and Roll music grew out of the Southern blues, which was itself a mix of black spirituals and African tribal music. The latter’s pagan and occult elements laced the southern blues. A clear example of this is found in the music of Robert Johnson, a self-destructive man, whose haunting music shaped some of the most successful (and subversive) rock bands of the last 40 years. 

    If you want to know why rock and roll is so destructive, look at Robert Johnson and those who followed in his footsteps, such as the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin who, in turn, have inspired thousands of other rock bands up to the present day.  It’s all there—the drugs, the sex, the death, and the demonic. And it all started in Mississippi, round about midnight, at a crossroads.

    According to the stories and sources of the time, Robert Johnson—who was 21 years old in 1930 and marginally proficient at playing acoustic blues guitar—disappeared that year for about six months. When he returned, he could play the blues like nobody’s business. He was good, too good it seemed. His songs were simple but powerful. The sound of his guitar and his voice was haunting. His former mentor and fellow blues great, Eddie “Son” House, after hearing the “new” Johnson play, said: “He sold his soul to play like that.” 

    The story was that Johnson went to a crossroads at midnight and made a deal with the Devil. In exchange for his soul, the Devil gave Johnson the power to play the blues like no one else, and live the life of a ramblin’ bluesman: whiskey, women, gambling—the “high” life.

     Johnson apparently never denied the crossroads story. Many of his songs are laced with references to Faustian bargains and the occult, and he even wrote and recorded a song called “Crossroad Blues,” which, like many blues songs, is metaphorical: It talks about one thing but means another (there are several layers to the song in terms of meaning).

     Johnson’s “Crossroad Blues,” for instance, is, on the first level, a song about hitchhiking: He’s trying “to flag a ride” and “everybody pass me by.” At another level, the song is about a man at an emotional and spiritual crossroads. Johnson falls down “on my knees” and “asked the lord above 'have mercy now, save poor Bob if you please.’" Then, “standin’ at the crossroad baby/eee eee eee, risin' sun goin' down/I believe to my soul now/Poor Bob is sinkin' down.”

    Is “Poor Bob” just disappointed about not finding a ride, or is something else going on? In the 1930s Mississippi, singing the blues about a crossroads, the Lord, praying on one’s knees, and a soul sinkin’ down was a clear allusion to the occult, something which many Southern blacks (and blues followers) knew then—and now.

Voodoo Blues

    In the Deep South, particularly Mississippi and Louisiana, many blacks knew about (and some practiced) what is called “hoodoo.” Hoodoo is African-American magic, i.e., voodoo. Among Southern blacks, it is also called “conjuring” and “witchcraft.” While many contemporary historians downplay the supernatural reality of hoodoo and go to great lengths to describe it as a quaint practice, the fact is that it is black magic. It is the occult, it is satanic. You can’t play around with the occult anymore than you can play around with a Ouija board or Tarot cards. To do so, is to open a door from which one’s soul might never exit. Robert Johnson, and many southern blues singers, knew that. They sang about it, they lived it, and some died because of it. Let’s look again at that “crossroads.” According to occult writer Catherine Yronwode, the crossroads—where two roads intersect—is a place considered suitable “to perform magical rituals and cast spells.” It is an “impromptu altar where offerings are placed and rituals performed.”

    “The crossroads is the most popular place to perform a specific hoodoo crossroads ritual to learn a skill—to play a musical instrument, for instance, or to become proficient at throwing dice, dancing, public speaking, or whatever one chooses,” says Yronwode. “As this ritual is usually described, you bring the item you wish to master—your banjo, guitar, fiddle, deck of cards, or dice—and wait at the crossroads on three or nine specified nights or mornings. On your successive visits you may witness the mysterious appearances of a series of animals. [Satan has appeared to many saints often as a deformed animal or a black dog or black cat.]  On your last visit, a 'big black man’ will arrive. If you are not afraid and do not run away, he will ask to borrow the item you wish to learn. He will show you the proper way to use the item by using it himself. When he returns it to you, you will suddenly have the gift of greatness.

    “The man who meets people at the crossroads and teaches them skills is sometimes called 'the devil.’ He is also called 'the rider,’ the 'l’il ole funny boy’ or 'the big black man,’ black in this case meaning the actual color, not a brown-skinned ('colored’ or Negro) person. ... This African-derived crossroads ritual is one of the most widely distributed beliefs in African-American folklore and is practiced throughout the South.”

    In the late 1930s, Harry Middleton Hyatt traveled the South and gathered material for a book, Hoodoo - Conjuration - Witchcraft - Rootwork. In his record of findings, he noted from several people deeply familiar with hoodoo that “if you want to know how to play a banjo or a guitar or do magic tricks [i.e., witchcraft], you have to sell yourself to the devil.” In another book, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, Newbell Puckett writes: “Playing the fiddle or banjo is thought to be a special accomplishment of the devil.... Take your banjo to the forks of the road at midnight and Satan will teach you how to play it .... A New Orleans conjurer described the procedure to me as follows: If you want to make a contract with the devil, first trim your fingernails as close as you possibly can. Take a black cat bone and a guitar and go to a lonely fork in the roads at midnight. Sit down there and play your best piece, thinking of and wishing for the devil all the while. By and by you will hear music, dim at first but growing louder and louder as the music approaches nearer ... After a time you feel something tugging at your instrument .... Let the devil take it and keep thumping along with your fingers as if you still had a guitar in your hands. Then the devil will hand you his instrument to play and will accompany you on yours. After doing this for a time, he will seize your fingers and trim the nails until they bleed, finally taking his guitar back and returning your own. ... You will be able to play any piece you desire on the guitar and you can do anything you want in the world, but you have sold your eternal soul to the devil and are his in the world to come.”

    In many other stories about this practice the person first has to visit a graveyard for successive nights, gather some dirt there and put it into a bottle, and then go to the crossroads with a guitar and conjure the devil.

    According to rock and roll historian R. Gary Patterson, Robert Johnson learned guitar from the famous bluesman “Son” House, but he also was reportedly taught by a man named Ike Zimmerman. The latter “claimed to have learned to play the guitar at night, sitting in old country churchyards, with his only companions being the tombstones of the dead and an eager pupil, Robert Johnson.” Patterson also says that the crossroads were viewed as “the final resting place for suicides and those unworthy of being buried in hallowed ground” and “were also supposed to be the site where witches held their gatherings.”

    In his song, “Me and the Devil Blues,” Johnson sings about a deal with the Devil that he cannot escape from. He ends the song: “You may bury my body down by the highway side/So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.” ... Bury him down at the crossroads?

    Incidentally, members of the Allman Brothers Band—who were fervent devotees of Robert Johnson—played their guitars in graveyards early on and wrote several songs with titles taken from the names on gravestones: for example, “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” and “Little Martha.” Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident at a crossroads in Macon, Georgia, on Oct. 29, 1971. One year later, fellow band member Berry Oakley was killed at the exact same crossroads, also in a motorcycle accident.

Hellhound on His Trail

    In addition to the crossroads hoodoo, many of Robert Johnson’s songs involve other occult elements. For instance, in the song “Stones in My Passway,” Johnson sings: “I got stones in my passway and my road seems dark at night .... My enemies have betrayed me ... they have stones all in my pass. ... You have laid a passway for me, now what are you trying to do?/I’m crying 'Please, please, let us be friends’/ Now when you hear me howling in my passway, rider, please open your door and let me in .... I been feelin’ strange 'bout my rider, babe/I’m booked and I got to go.” Placing stones down in a certain way where someone will walk over them—the passway—is hoodoo. It is called “foot-track magic” or “poisoning through the feet,” and is designed to bring illness and suffering to another person. As Yronwode explained: “Another traditional method of working foot track magic is to lay out stones in a quincunx pattern, or artificial crossroads, sometimes with a button belonging to the victim at the center. Regional names for this type of snare include 'a line’ (as in the phrase, 'she made him cross a line) or 'cross marks’ ('she laid down cross-marks for him’).” The spell cast may produce in the victim mental disturbances, such as a “wandering mind,” the loss of self-control. This is also referred to as “crossed conditions”—imbalance in the mind and the soul.

     As Johnson sang: His enemies laid stones in his passway, they betrayed him.  That led him to howl (madness) outside the door of “the rider,” the Devil. The “rider” in this instance can also refer to “an other,” or “a familiar,” a term for a phenomenon of witchcraft and the occult in which a demon is assigned to perpetually follow and harass the person who has either conjured the demon himself or is the victim of a curse or a spell cast by someone else. 

    The road is, as Johnson laments, “dark at night,” and the enemies have “overtaken poor Bob at last.” He is trapped: “I’m booked and I got to go.” Robert Johnson wrote and sang another song entitled “Hellhound On My Trail.”  A hellhound, by definition, is “a very evil man,” or “a dog of hell; an agent of hell.” In the song, Johnson says: “I got to keep movin’/I got to keep movin’ .... And the days keep worryin’ me/There’s a hellhound on my trail/hellhound on my trail.” Clearly, Johnson is scared of something that is catching up with him: “the days keep worryin’ me.” And he says it comes from Hell, or is, at least, evil.

    The song then talks about foot-track magic: “You sprinkled hot foot powder/Mmmmm around my door/ All around my door .... It keep me with
ramblin’ mind, rider/Every old place I go.”  Again, Johnson sings about someone—in this case, a woman—who has used an occult practice to trick him to some purpose. It could be sexual or it could be something unearthly. In either case, the trick, the spell gives Johnson a “ramblin’ mind.” He can’t stay in one place. He is restless, a “crossed condition.” And he must keep running because the hellhound is chasing him. And perhaps this agent of Hell wants to collect a debt from Johnson, i.e., his soul.

    Another example of hoodoo, the occult, in Johnson’s music is found in the song “Come On In My Kitchen.” The song is about a loose woman, Johnson’s desire to leave her, and then the sadness and dejection associated with living an immoral life. “You better come on/in my kitchen/cause it’s goin’ to be rainin’ outdoors.” The woman should come inside, away from the social rejection of her immorality, for outside is only depression, sadness: “rainin’ outdoors.”

    In the song, Johnson also sings, “I’ve taken the last nickel/out of her nation sack.” That is hoodoo. A nation sack is also known as a mojo hand, a conjure bag, a toby or a root bag. In most cases, a woman uses the nation sack as a spell to get a man and keep him. The sack would contain objects from the man—hair, piece of cloth, money, picture, the man’s name written on paper—and the woman would wear the sack on a belt around her waist.

    According to hoodoo, the man must never touch or remove anything from the sack or the spell will be broken. Johnson sings that he took the “last nickel” from the woman’s “nation sack,” thus breaking the spell, which results in the woman drifting to other men, other relationships. She may have wanted monogamy, but Johnson destroyed it.

    Robert Johnson died in August 1938 at the age of 27. He reportedly was poisoned—whiskey laced with strychnine—by a man jealous of Johnson’s overtures to the man’s wife. Johnson suffered in terrible agony for three days. According to his friend and sometime band-mate Johnny Shine, "I heard that it was something to do with the Black Arts. Before he died, Robert was crawling along the ground on all fours; barking and snapping like a mad beast. That's what the poison done to him." Johnson was buried in a small cemetery on the edge of town. “You can bury my body/Down by the highway side/Where my old evil spirit/Can catch a Greyhound Bus and ride.”

    The occult permeates a lot of Robert Johnson’s music. Some of the things he sang about may seem like silly superstition or common and harmless aspects of the Southern black culture. Many other Blues musicians in the South sang about similar things, and they all weren’t running around in graveyards at night making deals with the Devil.  But there’s the catch: the harmless mixed with the harmful, the good with the bad, the truth with the lie. That begets confusion: crossed conditions. And that is the usual tactic of the Devil, to mix truth with a lie, light with darkness.  This is evident in Robert Johnson’s music, some of which is hauntingly beautiful, in the natural and supernatural sense. Therein lays its power. Johnson’s followers in the rock and roll world used the same mojo.

Hellhound Still Around

    Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) was influenced by Robert Johnson’s music.  And like Johnson, Hendrix was sexually promiscuous, an abuser of drugs and alcohol who physically abused women, and a full-fledged disciple of voodoo and the occult. In “Voodoo Chile,” for example, Hendrix sings: “Well, I’m a voodoo child/Lord I’m a voodoo child/The night I was born/Lord, I swear the moon turned a fire red/ ... My poor mother cried out now the gypsy was right/And I seen her fell down right dead/ ... Cause I’m a voodoo child/Lord knows, I’m a voodoo child ....”

    According to his biographer David Henderson ('Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky), “Hendrix demonstrated a high order of voodoo ... [he] showed the voodoo that related to the stars and to magical transformation.”  Hendrix also believed in numerology (as did John Lennon, who was deeply involved in the occult and witchcraft), in UFOs, shamanism, and in fortune telling.

    The British rock drummer Rocki—real name Kwasi Dzidzornu—was the son of an African voodoo priest. Rocki had the chance to jam with Hendrix on occasion. During one session, according to David Henderson, Rocki asked Hendrix “where he got that voodoo rhythm from.” Hendrix didn’t answer at first, so Rocki pressed him. Rocki explained “that many of the signature rhythms Jimi played on guitar were very often the same rhythms that his father played in voodoo ceremonies. The way Jimi danced to the rhythms of his playing reminded Rocki of the ceremonial dances to the rhythms his father played to Oxun, the god of thunder and lightning. The ceremony is called voodooshi.” 

    Like Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix also reportedly believed that a hellhound was on his trail, if not already in possession of his soul. In 1970, Hendrix told a reporter, “I’ve been dead for a long time; I don’t think I will live to see 28.”  His girlfriend, Fayne Pridgon, later revealed: "He used to always talk about some devil or something was in him, you know. He didn't know what made him act the way he acted and what made him say the things he said, and the songs and different things like that ... just came out of him. It seems to me he was so tormented and just torn apart and like he really was obsessed, you know, with something really evil. ... He said, 'You're from Georgia ... you should know how people drive demons out.’ He used to talk about us going ... and having some root lady or somebody see if she could drive this demon out of him."
    The root lady in the South is pure hoodoo, as Johnson knew. Hendrix, like Johnson, died at the age of 27. Johnson’s brand of blues—and the occult—shaped many other bands in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Keith Richards, lead guitarist for the Stones, is a Johnson devotee. He credits Johnson with shaping the musical foundation of the Stones, whose blues acted “like a comet or meteor” on the band, he said. Stones founder Brian Jones, who died at 27 like Johnson and Hendrix, was strongly influenced by the southern blues. The Stones did a cover version of Johnson’s song, “Love in Vain,” which appeared on their “Let It Bleed” album and in their movie, “Gimme’ Shelter.”

    The Stones, considered by many critics as the “greatest” rock and roll band in the world, became heavily involved in the occult, in very explicit ways, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Keith Richards, his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, and lead singer Mick Jagger engaged in myriad occult practices. These are documented in countless biographies of the band and in the book, The Gods of Wasteland, by this newspaper’s editor, Michael Matt.

    Needless to say, the occult beliefs of the band members are translated through the Stones’s music, explicitly and implicitly. For instance, the Stones produced an album entitled “Her Satanic Majesties Request,” which is riddled with references and paeans to the demonic, as is the album “Goat’s Head Soup.” The Stones produced the widely popular—and entrancing—song, “Sympathy for the Devil.” During one performance of the song in the Stones’s movie “Rock and Roll Circus,” Jagger dances, crouches on all fours like an animal, and then stands up and strips off his shirt to reveal a large tattoo of Lucifer on his chest and tattoos of demons on his arms.

    Jagger and his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull worked with the film-maker Kenneth Anger, himself a fervent disciple of the occult guru Aleister Crowley. Jagger, for instance, originally was cast to play Satan in Anger’s film Lucifer Rising, a film that Anger wanted to use to actually conjure Satan to materialize, literally, in the world. Jagger ended up writing some of the sound track for the film while Faithfull played the role of the demonic Lilith. (Jagger’s sound track ended up in another Anger film, Invocation of My Demon Brother, which included scenes of occult practices and the Stones in concert.)

    “The occult unit within the Stones was Keith [Richards] and Anita [Pallenberg] and Brian [Jones],” said Anger. “I believe that Anita is, for want of a better word, a witch. You see, Brian was a witch, too. I’m convinced.” Brian Jones and Mick Jagger both made trips to North Africa where they recorded the voodoo music of the Joujouka tribe. This music is used in ceremonies by the tribe to worship and conjure up demons.

    Led Zeppelin’s lead guitarist Jimmy Page and singer Robert Plant are both devoted to the music of Robert Johnson. They use Johnson’s lyrics in some of their own songs—for example, “The Lemon Song”—and Plant tries to imitate Johnson’s voice on “Bring It on Home.” According to R. Gary Patterson, Plant reportedly has a glass bottle filled with dirt taken from a crossroads in Mississippi. In 1998, Plant and Page released the album, Walking into Clarksdale — Clarksdale, Mississippi is considered one of the birthplaces of the blues and the album is considered by some critics as a partial tribute to Robert Johnson.

    Jimmy Page, as is well-documented, is an occultist with a strong devotion to the satanic Aleister Crowley. And, like Jagger, Page has worked over the years with Kenneth Anger (Page also wrote music for the film Lucifer Rising.) There are numerous reports that in 1968 Page, Plant, and drummer John Bonham actually drew up and signed a contract with the Devil in exchange for career success—their version of hoodoo’s crossroads.    While the Stones and Zeppelin members are aging rockers now, their music has influenced thousands of other bands and millions of fans around the world, and continues to do so today. That music, in turn, and its messages are largely rooted in the southern blues and the mysterious Robert Johnson.

    In recent years, there has been a Johnson revival. Several video documentaries on Johnson have been released. For PBS (and DVD commercial release), director Martin Scorcese recently produced a series on the blues that included a long segment on Johnson. And, this year, guitarist Eric Clapton produced his musical tribute to Robert Johnson, the CD Me and Mr. Johnson, which includes Clapton covers of 14 of Johnson’s songs.

    In one of his most disturbing songs, “Me and the Devil Blues,” Johnson sings: “Early this mornin'/when you knocked upon my door/And I said, 'Hello, Satan,’ I believe it's time to go/ Me and the Devil/was walking' side by side/Me and the Devil, ooh/was walking' side by side ....”

    That, as metaphor or not, seems to epitomize rock and roll. This does not mean that every rock and roller is a devil-worshipping voodoo child. That’s silly nonsense peddled by fundamentalists. But the lesson is clear: If you play with fire, you might get burned. Or, as Mick Jagger, “a man of wealth and taste” might say, “So don’t play with me, ‘cause you’re playing with fire.”