Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) Read Online Free PDF Page B

sexually explicit, but theyare emotionally explicit, dealing plainly with love’s gains and loss. As the late writer and poet LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) explains, the blues humanized the slave songs by making the hopes and suffering more earthbound and not simply a part of a great cosmic drama. And while the blues often suggest that the trouble is merely bad luck that befalls you, there was something you could do about it, if only to locate the source of misfortune: hoodoo inserted agency and will into the black spiritual identity. Personal agency, however, was often in opposition to the will of God. For example, if you didn’t have much talent for playing the guitar, well, this was just the hand God dealt you. It wasn’t for you to make any kind of deal behind his back.
    If you are heartsick over a lover who has run away, Jesus can’t help, but a “gipsy woman” might, as in a song by Joshua Johnson: “Well I went to the gipsy an’ I laid my money on the line, / I said, ‘Bring back my baby, or please taker her off my mind.’” If your mate is cheating, don’t ask God to change your lover’s ways. The root of a certain orchid resembling a withered hand—known as a mojo hand—will help you in a way frowned upon by your Christian fellows: “I’m going to Louisiana, to get myself a mojo hand / ’Cause these backbiting women are trying to take my man.” Freedom, even if it was by the hand of God, didn’t necessarily mean life would be easy. Work was still hard to find. Manual labor for little money meant that gambling became more than a pastime. It was a hope that things could get better. And hoodoo could shake up the odds in your favor: “He give me some good luck tea and said, ‘Drink it before it gets cold’ / He give me some good luck tea and said, ‘Drink it before it gets cold’ / He said, ‘Drink it all day, doggone your bad luck soul.’”
    Sometimes, however, hoodoo was the reason for luck gone bad: “I believe, somebody’s / done hoodoo’d poor me / I believe, somebody’s done hoodoo’d poor me / Every card I pick’s the first one that falls, / Dice won’t do nothing but two, twelves, and three.” And hoodoo won’t help you with a cheating lover if it’s hoodoo luring her away: “Now, when your woman start actin’ funny, and begin to run aroun’, / You better get you somebody, ’cause she’s fittin’ to put you down, / Better let her go, man, just as quick as you can, / Because that hoodoo girl is going to hoodoo the hoodoo man.” As the blues made its way out of the South and into the northern cities, the superstitions and occult beliefs were cast off like old clothes in the hope for better things to come. Where there was industry there was likely more work. And this meant less time to be concerned with the curses spat out by an old conjurer.
    It’s the legend of Robert Johnson that remains, however, even though the consensus among music critics and historians is that for Johnson himself, the devil was not part of his self-identity. As the blues historian Elijah Wald explains, “There is no suggestions from any of his friends or acquaintances that the hellish or demon-harried aspects of his work were of particular importance to him, or that they were even noticed by the people that crowded around on the streets of Friar’s Point.” The fact the legend persists is valuable in and of itself: Robert Johnson meeting the devil is a cultural crossroad: the place where all the avenues of occult meet and a point where the occult will continue to reveal itself in the music and culture of rock. The music itself is a product of a synthesis consisting mainly of those rhythms and vocal expressions coming directly out of the religious practicesof Africa, practices that involve precisely what we now term the occult. These