crossroads blues

Recently, I called out for help on this blogsite, much the same way Robert Johnson called out for his good friend Willie Brown, in the song Crossroads Blues. I asked for everyone’s help in locating the title for my truck and the VHS of the movie Crossroads, both of which I felt I should be able to locate, but couldn’t. For those of you who may have missed the movie Crossroads back in the 1980s, I can assure you it is worth watching. It is, in my opinion, the only good movie Ralph Macchio ever made. It is about a student of classical guitar at the Julliard School of Music who plays the blues on the side. In his research to find a lost Robert Johnson song, he discovers the aforementioned Willie Brown in a minimum-security prison—kind of an old folks’ home for convicts—and crashes him out. They go on a journey to Mississippi, he looking for the song and Brown for redemption.

I didn’t go down to the crossroads and fall down on my knees and ask for divine help as Robert Johnson did in the following lines from the song:


Asked the Lord above, have mercy now,
Save poor Bob if you please


When I received no clues from anyone, I went to my brother-in-law, who applied to the state for a duplicate title and we went down to Amazon.com and bought a DVD of Crossroads. We watched it last week and it was as good as the first time, for me.

I got a phone message from my ex-wife this week saying she had found something I had said I was looking for on the Internet. I figured it was going to be Pamela Sue Anderson’s website, but when I called her back, she said she had my tape of Crossroads. Her boyfriend is a blues man. He plays the keyboards for a couple of blues bands—a Korg electric piano and a Hammond B3 organ. Anyway, she had borrowed the tape so he could watch it and she hadn’t returned it. She confirmed she had watched the movie several times and could watch it again—it was that good.

What was once lost is now found. Unfortunately for Robert Johnson, if he did his deal with the devil at the crossroads as legend has it, he failed to live to see the fame and fortune he bargained for. He is massively more popular today, more than sixty years after his death, than he ever was in his lifetime, and many of us have never heard of him. Those of us that have, however, recognize the genius. Perhaps that is the immortality for which he traded away his soul—that is if you believe in things like that.

As for me, I think I’ll hang on to my soul as long as I can and try to keep it out of the hands of Dubya and the religious right. Maybe Robert Johnson was anticipating Bush’s America when he wrote:


Standin' at the crossroads baby, the risin' sun goin' down
I believe to my soul now, po' Bob is sinkin' down


Or, maybe not.

But that is the way it looks here in Jimbo’s world.