The Devil and the Blues
Christopher Scapelliti
“AS A RACE, we didn’t have much to choose from as far as work goes. It was the field or basically nothing,” Steven Johnson, Robert Johnson’s grandson, relates in ReMastered: Devil at the Crossroads, the 2019 documentary tracing the Delta blues guitarist’s short life. Johnson, as we all know, chose the life of an itinerant musician - no easier, no less dangerous, but a life where, as much as the Jim Crow South allowed, he could be his own boss.
Ironically, he often found himself at plantations, playing for the workers. “People worked there all week long,” Taj Mahal says of the Will Dockery plantation, where Johnson often performed. “No radios. No music, no entertainment. But on the weekend the musicians came out. It served as a balm for a people who were in bondage, and it gave you a way out. You played that music, you could be outside of yourself. You could take everybody else outside of themselves.”