Being True to the Blues, Being True to the Crossroads

If you’ve seen the movie Sinners, or even just read any of the reviews, you’ll know that it is a loose retelling of Blues guitarist Robert Johnson’s insistence that he went to a crossroads, met the Devil, and in exchange for his soul, received the gift of musical genius. There are two songs combined that add to the story. First, Johnson,’s “Crossroad Blues” and second, “Me and the Devil Blues.”

I've been bubbling (in a fabulous way) all week since thinking about filmmaker Ryan Coogler and his glorious vision in Sinners—I loved it and I am a curmudgeon when it comes to Black art, so if I say I loved it, I really loved it—and the expansiveness of the Blues, which I've devoted 30 years to studying, writing about, and performing. One thing about writers in the second half of their lives—at least this writer—is that no matter how much we innovate, we have been trying to get something right for decades. For me, it's the Blues—and the notion of the crossroads.

I first explored the crossroads, the metaphorical location and notion of the Blues, in the 1990s. I was in graduate school at the University of Alabama when a professor (who intervened in racist bullying toward me, but that’s a whole other story) told me, “I know you can sing. I can hear it in the lovely, deep timbre of your voice. I’m putting together a Blues band, and you’ll be the lead singer.”

The professor was White. I had about a two-octave range then. (At this advanced age, it’s about a half-octave, okay?) I thought, “Oh Lord. This band is going to be horrible.” But I could belt, so I figured, “Why not?” This White professor was my protector, so it wasn’t even that I didn’t think I could say no—I didn’t want to say no. He had put his reputation on the line to cover me, and I hadn’t even taken a class from him. He was just being nice to a young Black woman.

In preparation for our band’s debut, the professor put me with the young White guy who would play the piano in the band. We went somewhere on campus—after all this time, the memory is vague—and I started singing some Aretha Franklin while he played along, riffing and playing by ear. When I tell you this guy and I vibed for about two hours, I’m telling you what I know! It was glorious. It was life-altering—literally. I was miserable at that school in the middle of all that racism. I needed something, and the Blues gave it to me.

The band's first performance took place in a venue that used to be a train station. My mama had driven over from Talladega to Tuscaloosa—about a two-hour drive. I remember I was wearing a deep pink silk blouse. Mama grabbed my hand before I got on the stage and whispered, “Show these White folks what you can do, girl!”

I can’t remember all the tunes from that night, but I do remember I sang a song by B.B. King, “Don’t Answer the Door,” which is about a toxic, jealous man who wants to keep his woman in the house—only I flipped it, and I was the jealous woman ordering my man to stay indoors. I flipped Muddy Waters “Mannish Boy,” too.

That was in 1995. I sang with the band for about a year, and the highlight of my time as a Blues singer was when I performed with Little Whitt and Big Bo, musicians with the Alabama Blues Project—and I got paid $20. (I was in grad school in the 1990s and hungry. That was some money to me.)

That last year of graduate school, I started thinking about the Blues as a means of survival, art, and spirit; the White professor had talked to me about Robert Johnson and the crossroads. And I’d encountered Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s groundbreaking, life-altering monograph, The Signifying Monkey, which discussed the crossroads as an African space. (I heard about Gates’s book, and then I went to the library and checked it out, because the library was better than the club for me.) I kept reading and reading and reading—my friends know this about me. I started writing Blues poems and Blues stories.

In 2003, I was a Poetry Fellow at Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and they offered me some money—I think it was $150—to present a craft lecture. (Do you see a common theme about how broke a young sister was?) As part of that, I was required to present a craft lecture, which I’d never done. (I didn’t even know what a craft lecture was.) Also, I was Black—and I wanted to seem wise to those White folks. So I told myself, “White folks don’t know much about the Blues, except for a discography. Black folks? Now, we invented the Blues.”

During the question-and-answer period of my craft lecture at Bread Loaf, one of the White poets asked me what the exact structure of a Blues poem was. I was stymied. I realized that not one of the Blues scholars I’d consulted—Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Angela Y. Davis—had discussed the craft specifics of what it took to write a Blues poem. For example, a sonnet has a metrical requirement and a line requirement. But for the Blues, the scholars had only talked about a feeling. That felt very problematic to me, because many White folks—not those at Bread Loaf, thank God—often give a direct or implied opinion that while Black folks can emote, we can’t think critically without the aid of White scholars.

Those ten days at Bread Loaf were terrific, though, for not only did it start me on my journey as a Blues critic, but I also put on a Blues concert with writer David Bain—we’d previously done that in 1997, when I had been there as a Poetry Scholar. Again, I can’t remember all the songs, but I sang B.B. King and “Sweet Home Chicago”—the latter song was fabulous because everybody was tipsy by then and made it a sing-along.

In 2004, the (now late) poet Ed Ochester put my name in the hat to be a visitor at the Bennington College Writing Seminars—again, a sister was being paid. I knew that if I presented something on a White poet or a European poetic, somebody in the audience would probably pick that to pieces. I was afraid, but that year began my now ever-present tendency to go down the scholarly rabbit hole obsessively. I wanted to ensure I had the entire craft structure in a row, along with the emotional components of the Blues and the crossroads.

Four months later, I presented that same craft lecture at the Furious Flower Poetry Conference in September, as part of a panel that included the well-known Black scholar Herman Beavers. The poet and critic Elizabeth Alexander was in the audience—yes, THE Elizabeth Alexander. Not only did she invent the title of my essay, but she also allowed me to use lines from her beautiful poem “Absence” as an epigraph for the piece.

I held onto my essay for eight years, afraid I’d written a hot mess, before sending it to David Lynn at The Kenyan Review (who was then the journal's editor) in 2012. I just wanted feedback, but when David emailed me, he said, “I am pleased to accept your essay!”

I was finally confident, and, based upon my research, I realized that I was breaking new ground myself: I was the first person to present a craft structure of the Blues, beyond a nebulous feeling. I had written the “blues-print” for the Blues poetic, as it were. Here is the link to that essay, “The Blues: A Craft Manifesto.”

So when you see the title of my latest book, Misbehaving at the Crossroads, know that, as the people say, “I'm not new to the Blues and the crossroads. I'm true to this.” And I can't forget, even if I try.