Robert Johnson was reputed to have sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads in or near Clarksdale, Mississippi to gain his amazing abilities on the guitar. One time I was in Clarksdale for the annual Sunflower Festival, and I stopped in the Gitchee Gummo Art Gallery to look at some paintings of Robert Johnson that hung in the window. The proprietor, John Fewkes, was a Johnson fan, and he had painted an accurate portrait of Johnson based on a famous photograph - one of the few images of Johnson available.
At this point, I had already taken pictures of the two places in Clarksdale considered to be the famous crossroads: one at the intersection of Old U.S. Hwy 61 and Old U.S. Hwy 49, where an official monument was placed. The other spot was elsewhere in town near a nondescript railroad crossing.
In talking with Mr. Fewkes I found that there was another crossroads that in his estimation was much more likely to be the one where Robert Johnson practiced guitar. Back in 1931 Johnson left Clarksdale and moved back to his birthplace of Hazelhurst, Mississippi. “He met a guitar player named Ike Zimmerman there. He ended up moving in with Ike and his family and stayed for about a year. Ike became Robert’s instructor and Robert practiced religiously. Late at night they would go to a local cemetery and play while sitting atop tombstones in the graveyard so that they didn’t disturb anyone else while playing in the middle of the night.” Source: The Truth about Robert Johnson Johnson returned to Clarksdale a year or two later and astonished people with his command of the guitar.
Now this is where John Fewkes’s story comes in. John lived in Chicago in his younger days, but he moved down to Clarksdale after he visited the town just like I did, for the Sunflower Festival. As an outsider John looked on local language and customs with great interest, and he eventually blended in with the populace. He was also greatly interested in the Robert Johnson story.
At the moment I’m looking at an Army Corps of Engineers map of Coahoma County, Mississippi, of which Clarksdale is the county seat. East of Clarksdale there are the remains of the Bonnie Blue plantation, and there is a crossroads at the intersection of Crosstown Road (north-south) and the east-west road from Clarksdale. There’s also the standard symbol for a cemetery at the northeast corner of the intersection, a small cross within a a dashed-line box. John told me that the cemetery was on the site of the original Crosstown, a very small town set up near the site of the old slave cemetery on the Bonnie Blue plantation.
John related that he drove his pickup truck to the crossroads one night, and once he had parked, looked around, and was ready to leave, the truck would not start. He had a dead battery. Since there was nobody around he went to the side of the road and tried to “”flag a ride.” A county truck with the number 27 on it just zoomed by him. Now, Robert Johnson died at the age of twenty-seven. And compare John’s experience with the county truck with these lyrics from “Cross Road Blues”:
Yeoo, standin' at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride
Ooo eee, I tried to flag a ride
Didn't nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by.
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