The Crossroads
Mississippi
This is the legendary Crossroads, the meeting of Highway Sixty-One and Highway Forty-Nine in Clarksdale, marked today by three giant blue guitars. According to the most famous story in the blues, it was at a Delta crossroads like this one that a young musician named Robert Johnson met a stranger in the dark who tuned his guitar and handed it back, and with it, supernatural skill.
The price, the legend says, was his soul. Johnson recorded Cross Road Blues in nineteen thirty-six and died young and mysteriously two years later, which only fed the myth. Historians stress there is no real evidence of any bargain with the devil. The tale grew up after his death. But the music was real, and from this dusty intersection of two highways, the blues helped give birth to rock and roll.
