By Stephen T. Asma

(originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Nov. 8, 2002. ( The Chronicle Review magazine).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                          

 

In Muddy Water's classic performance of "Got My Mojo Workin", he sings the following well known verse. "I'm goin' down to Louisana, get me a mojo hand./ Goin' down to Louisana, get me a mojo hand./ I'm gonna have all you women right here at my command." A mojo hand is a small leather or satin sack that contains voodoo charms, and it can be carried in one's jacket pocket for power and protection. It's a well known piece of African American blues culture, and references to it abound in song lyrics and folk tales. Basically, the mojo is a much hipper version of the rabbit's foot charm, and you're metaphysically ill-prepared without it. Facing evil and throwing off curses generally goes much smoother when you've got a mojo with you.

 

I've been a blues fan and even a blues musician for many years, but only recently did I finally resolve to go down to Louisiana to get me a mojo hand. Who doesn't want an all-purpose lucky charm --especially one that will get untold numbers of women to submit to "my commands"? Actually, my luck with women is so hopeless that I'd gladly settle for a lucky charm that would improve my guitar playing. I don't think Louisiana is too far to go for that kind of vantage. This is the story of how I traveled from Chicago to the Big Easy, and how I contemplated selling my soul at a crossroads in the Mississippi Delta.  

 

Chicago is an ironic place to start this journey, because it's actually the final destination of the great post-war migration. Many African Americans migrated up to Chicago from the Delta during the 1940s and 50s to avoid dead-end share-cropping jobs or worse. This migration made Chicago the epicenter of modern urban blues, and it remains the home of the most uncompromising, authentic, gritty music to be found anywhere in the world. I grew up listening to Chicago blues, and everywhere I travel I am invariably disappointed by the muzak which other cities try to peddle as "blues." Even some of the other important American music meccas proffer a limp and happy-go-lucky style of drivel (smiley versions of "Mustang Sally" and "Thrill is Gone"), but fail to deliver the hard stuff. This sad fact is more about the tourist function of blues, than about any regionally isolated inauthenticity. But for some reason, in the real blues clubs of Chicago, you can still witness artists rip their hearts out on stage and otherwise lose their minds for your cathartic enjoyment. Sometimes it's not pretty, or smiley, or even pleasant, but then again it wasn't supposed to be.   You can find this music being played at obscure clubs, like the Southside "Checkerboard Lounge" or more mainstream clubs like Buddy Guy's "Legends", but you probably won't hear its strains pouring out of the "House of Blues."

 

Despite its title, the House of Blues chain, which boasts clubs in Boston, L.A., Las Vegas, and Disney World, sponsors almost no actual blues music on its well-frocked corporate stage. Despite the aesthetic bid for authenticity, the House of Blues is a slick big-business venue that appeals mostly to tourists. The chain has commodified blues culture into a trendy bit of kitsch; safe, sanitized, and totally devoid of any social or historical context. The reality of blues culture (economic hardship, political disenfranchisement, romantic suffering and so on) have been removed, and a simulacrum of imagery remains.

 

I've played in blues bands for fifteen years, having the very good fortune to play with legends like Buddy Guy and Bo Diddley, but it wasn't until I started playing in a rock band that I got invited to play the House of Blues. So, the night before I left Chicago on my mojo mission I stood on the expansive spot-lighted stage playing for a packed house of tourists and wealthy yuppies who felt guilty about all the money they make. While they were wrestling with their guilt, I was wrestling with mine. Don't get me wrong. It was sweet to play a club that actually had a glitzy dressing room, complete with sumptuous snack trays and overstocked beer fridge. This must be what it's like to be a rock star. This is not what it's like to be a blues musician. But I could feel comfortable in this corporate setting, sucking up to Mammon, because I could console myself with the fact that our dressing-room came complete with a shower! No kidding, a shower . . . with stacks of immaculate white towels. The sins of my musical prostitution would be wiped clean. I could go forth purified and moisturized.

 

The whole strange experience, standing on stage at the House of Blues the night before I leave to explore the absurdly poor Mississippi Delta, got me thinking about authenticity, integrity, and selling out. Blues itself is a paragon of integrity, resolutely refusing to sell-out. But all artists have struggled with these issues at one time or another, and Western culture has well-worn archetypes for this particular temptation and struggle.

 

One of the recent incarnations of the Faustian bargain is the well known story of Mississippi blues man Robert Johnson. Born in 1911, Johnson spent most of his short life in the delta area where he substituted the life of the rambling blues singer for the back breaking life of the sharecropper. In the early 1930s, when he left the area of Robinsonville for Hazelhurst, he was known only as a mediocre talent. But when he returned sometime later he was manifestly changed. He was so talented when he strolled back into town that rumors began to circulate. A story evolved that Johnson had made a deal with the devil at a desolate crossroads. Here he supposedly wagered his soul for the power to play his instrument and sing with supernatural skill. Johnson's own eerie songs "Me and the Devil," "Crossroads,"   and "Hell hound on my trail"   fueled the legends. He was indeed a phenomenal finger-style and slide guitarist, a talented composer of ironic and moving songs, and a passionate singer of the blues. His work represents a kind of prism through which delta blues passed on its way up north to the urban blues of Chicago. Contemporary blues culture still harks back to Johnson as a patron saint of all things "blue"; sorrowful heartache, struttin' and gamblin', prideful self-affirmation, ramblin', and regret.  

 

Johnson played his last gig at a juke joint named "Three Forks" on a Saturday night, August 13, 1938.   Some say that the devil finally came to collect his debt, but most scholars agree that Johnson messed around with the wrong woman (one who had a very jealous lover) and paid the price. He died of poisoning at the age of 27.

 

I drove to Mississippi and spent a week hunting down obscure geographical references that appear in Johnson's songs. Some towns were gone altogether, and others had dilapidated vestiges of earlier eras. I spent time in Rosedale, Greenvile, Robinsonville, and other tiny towns --collecting little pieces of cotton and Mississippi mud for my future mojo. I wanted to find the "Three Forks" joint where Robert Johnson met his Maker. I didn't find the bar, but I did find the sign that hung above the juke-joint door.

 

In Clarksdale Mississippi there is a "Delta Blues Museum" (opened in 1979) that houses the historic bar sign in one of their display rooms. The director of the very modest museum sent me to the nearby corner of highways 61 and 49. No one actually knows where Johnson's real crossroads is located, but 61/49 is the conventionally designated spot where Mississippi folks tip their hats. I found there to be an excellent hole-in-the-wall barbecue joint on the junction of 61 and 49 called "Abe's", and it serves no-frills rib specials; the eating of which certainly constitutes your own private deal with the devil, or at the very least it hastens the meeting with your Maker.

 

While I was toweling off the barbecue sauce and drinking some decidedly local beer, I stared out Abe's window at the crossroads sign. Robert Johnson is a modern day Faust, and like Marlow's and Goethe's Dr. Faust he simultaneously elicits our admiration and our reproach. The reproach is obvious of course and doesn't require much explanation --people who sell their souls to the devil are not the kind of people whom you want your daughter to marry. But Johnson's deal, like Faust before him, is not as crass and shallow as one might think. Johnson didn't make a deal to become famous. In fact, "fame" per se doesn't even enter into the legend or into Johnson's real life. By the time musicologists came to the delta looking for him, he was already dead (so, they found Muddy Waters instead).   All Robert did was make a deal to become "talented." This is very different from a wager for fame. Selling your soul to become famous or wealthy is obscene, selling your soul to become talented is strangely beautiful.

 

Selling your soul to become a talented musician is a metaphor for the deep and profound sacrifices that artists make as they try to perfect themselves and their craft. This applies not just to artists per se but also scientists and other selflessly ambitious people. Our culture is understandably ambivalent about these people because we respect and love their art, but we lament the damage that their passionate pursuit does to their families and friends and even their own health. I would like to have the talent of a Van Gogh, for example, but I certainly wouldn't want to be Van Gogh.

 

At the end of Goethe's Faust there is a beautifully redemptive moment. After we have watched Faust do alot of stupid stuff (facilitated of course by Mephistopheles), we find him at death's door. He is a tragic figure because he is still striving to understand himself and the human condition, he is still struggling to grasp the deeper truths. He has made many mistakes and taken many wrong turns, but he struggles on. His passionate pursuit has made a mess of his life, but his will to understand and to create (his underlying Promethean desire to be God) is somehow noble and awesome. Goethe has a choir of angels announce at the end of the play, "Whoever strives in ceaseless toil, him we may grant redemption." So, here's how you cut a deal with the devil and still come out okay.

 

  The Robert Johnson legend contains within it the lesson of artistic integrity. It's the story of a man who changed his basic outlook on life from one who first pursued happiness and pleasure directly --using his guitar and voice to get women and get local fame --to a man who pursues "excellence" instead, and then reaps rewards as a mere unintended consequence of that sacred pursuit. He didn't use music for personal gain. On the contrary, he sacrificed himself for the pursuit of musical excellence. But there's nothing about such pursuits that insures recognition, or peer understanding, or even happiness. That's why Johnson and all other Faustian characters are tragic. They are possessed by some sort of mysterious pursuit and the consequences be damned. Robert Johnson may have sold his soul, but he didn't sell-out.

 

I arrived in New Orleans on a Thursday afternoon and proceeded to meander through the French District. I ate Jambalaya and Gumbo across the way from a great street-band playing the gospel favorite "Just a Further Walk with Thee." Tarot card readers were in abundance along the cobbled streets, and street musicians and magicians crowded the sidewalk outside of Cafe du Monde (where the only thing on the menu is powdered sugar donuts and coffee). The first night that I was in the Big Easy was dedicated to feeling out the vibes and getting a sense for the more authentic spots. Everything in New Orleans is sort of gritty and earthy. Even the touristy places seem less sanitized and there's always a refreshing hint of the ominous. I needed to sort the wheat from the chaff because one doesn't want to get a mojo at just any old place --it must be from a place of esoteric power.

 

The next afternoon I found a good place to purchase my Mojo bag. It was a voodoo shop off the beaten path and it was absolutely crammed with trinkets of weirdness. Like the "curiosity cabinets" of 17th century Europe, this shop had a chaotic mixture of man-made and natural oddities bulging forth from every shelf --it was an overstocked apothecary of magic totems. I found a bluish-purple satin bag about the size of a credit card. It had a little draw-string mouth and I began searching the store for voodoo objects of significance. The shelves had boxes of items and each box had a hand scrawled sign that explained the specific powers of the item. For example, one box contained real alligator heads (about the size of my hand), which seemed to be sawed off their bodies and shellacked. I would have bought one but it wouldn't fit in my Mojo bag. The sign on the alligator box said "Good for warding off evil in-laws", and a sign on a box of tiny turtle shells said "Good for improving gambling luck."

 

I chose a little carved scarab beetle, that seemed to be made of soap-stone, in order to "Increase financial status." I also secured some very small sea-shells to "Insure safe travel." But the real jewel in the crown was the swamp-rat's foot. It was the size and shape of my bent thumb and it was quite hideous, with sharp black claws and dark brown hair. The sign on the box assured me that this was the item to help with "Romantic Relations." At last, that infamous Muddy Waters charm would be mine! I didn't find any charms that improved musical ability per se, but I figured that the confluence of the other totems would suffice.

 

Well, I've had my mojo for a few months now, and I can't really tell if it's working. Maybe the problem is that I don't really believe in the power of a rat's foot, or a mojo even. Hell, not even Muddy Waters really believed it. He reveals in Robert Palmer's book "Deep Blues" that such voodoo stuff was popular among superstitious rural folk, but he didn't go in for supernaturalism.

 

My disbelief is not bred from any anti-supernatural sentiment. Instead, I think it comes from a deep-seated distrust of all so called "quick fixes." You don't become excellent by carrying a mojo, or by making a deal with the devil, or by sucking-up to a corporate record executive. Robert Johnson didn't become great because he drew up an unholy contract --and to think he did is to degrade the real work into which Johnson poured his heart. His real "deal" was to consecrate his life to music; to dedicate himself to practice, to the countless hours of skill-mastery, and to the amateur love of self expression. So, I've hit upon a good compromise these days. I carry my mojo in my pocket when I play my guitar, but I also just try to practice a little more.