Page:The Evangelical Roots of Rock n’ Roll.pdf/8

Religions 2016, 7, 24 outlet for both his desires for this world and the hereafter. No one who saw House play, whether in a 1920s juke joint, during a 1960s concert, or on YouTube today, can doubt his intensity and sincerity as he sings about whisky, women, and God.

Similar to House, during Charley Patton’s successful career as a bluesman he “would periodically repent, renounce loose women and alcohol, and take to studying his Bible in preparation for a preaching career... But his conversions never lasted very long” (, p. 52). Although Patton’s “interest in religion continued throughout his life”, he primarily cast his lot with blues music and its attendant lifestyle that Patton’s own faith defined as sinful. The most telling detail of Patton’s conflicted nature comes from the fact that he recorded gospel music at the same time as he was making blues records, but he released each style of music under different names.

Patton recorded 10 religious songs during his career, including religious material in three of his four recording sessions with Paramount. His blues records were released under his real name, but his gospel pseudonym was the preacher “Elder J. J. Hadley”, which was inspired in part by his record label (correctly) believing that the “African American consumers who bought gospel music would shy away from tunes written by a bluesman with questionable morals” (, p. 138). Patton died in his early forties due to heart troubles (, p. 74). Steven Calt writes, “for many bluesmen, the onset of an illness (signifying, in their minds, a foretaste of heavenly retribution) was a sign to stop singing the blues” (, p. 174). Patton’s niece reported that on his deathbed the raucous bluesman repeatedly preached his favorite sermon about Revelation. Fittingly, it was the same sermon that Patton preached during a brief spoken interlude on his 1929 song “You’re Gona to Need Somebody When You Die”.

Patton’s deathbed display of his religious faith, despite his career as a bluesman, is similar to the most famous Delta Bluesman, Robert Johnson, who wrote on his deathbed (at age 27, likely poisoned by a jealous husband): “Jesus of Nazareth, King of Jerusalem, I know that my Redeemer liveth and that He will call me from the Grave” (, p. 10). Because of the persistent, unfortunate posthumous legend of Johnson selling his soul to the Devil, many of Johnson’s current admirers view his career strictly through the lens of religious struggle. However, there are few confirmed facts about Johnson’s personal life, including details of his religious faith, and only two of the 29 songs he recorded directly reference the Devil. Therefore, it is important not to turn Robert Johnson into some kind of blues existentialist superhero (see Griel Marcus’s Mystery Train for the most overheated and influential example).

While it is essential not to romanticize Johnson’s religious struggles, those struggles are undeniable in the songs, “Hellhounds on My Trail” (1937), and “Me and the Devil Blues” (1937). Their power lies primarily in Johnson’s intense, beautiful, and haunting delivery. As Robert Palmer points out, other bluesmen of Johnson’s era sang about the Devil, often in boasting ways, but they “never recorded anything as chilling and apparently dead serious” as these two songs (, p. 127). In “Hellhounds” Johnson appears to be running from Divine judgment. He evokes a wintery landscape where “blues fall down like hail” as he yearns to pause for a moment with a female lover; however, “I’ve got to keep movin’/Keep movin’. . . .There’s a Hellhound on my trail”. In “Me and the Devil Blues”, rather than fearing divine judgment, Johnson sings of accepting his fate, of walking “side-by-side” with the Devil as “I’m going to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. The song hauntingly ends with Johnson declaring that he does not care about where they bury his body—since presumably he is beyond the benefits of a Christian burial—and instead his body can be buried by the highway side so his “evil spirit can get a greyhound bus and ride”. In these two songs, the joy of travel and hedonism found in “Traveling Riverside Blues” is gone, leaving only a haunting despair about—as W.J. Cash describes with the “hell of a fellow,”—“the piper and his fee” (, p. 55). Based on Johnson’s deathbed confession of faith, the “hellhounds” weighed heavily on his mind.

Although the blues was not uniformly “Christ-haunted”, it is clear that many of its earliest and most influential musicians struggled deeply when defying their own evangelical Protestant beliefs that defined their desires and activities as “worldly” and therefore “sinful”. This conflict did not stop