The intersection of highways 61 and 49 near Clarksdale in northwest Mississippi doesn't look particularly special: there's a car yard, a service station, a couple of kids listlessly kicking a ball outside Abe's barbecue shop . . . Just the usual stuff.

The only thing to distinguish it from hundreds of other such intersections in the state is the odd looking monument-cum-sculpture thing at the middle: only when you look closely can you decipher it. Guitars on top of a column.

"Hey brother, you got change for coffee?" barks a broke-down guy in overalls outside the service station.

I dig for a piece of folding, he shuffles off down a pathway between the mesh fences and wind-blown litter.

This, and nearby Clarksdale, is what we have driven up Mississippi to see. This is the crossroad. Not just any crossroad, but The Crossroad, the one where bluesman Robert Johnson allegedly made his pact with the Devil on a lonely midnight hour some time around 1930.

What is now a suburban sprawl of drycleaners, fast-food joints and rundown houses was once empty fields on the flat, almost featureless plain that is the Delta. It must have been kinda spooky at midnight -- although if you believe the sign on Abe's which says it's been there since 1924 then maybe Johnson and the Devil sat down for a plate of ribs.

Robert Johnson is a figure conveniently shrouded in myth: only two known photographs, poisoned by a jealous rival, and a formidable reputation that rests on a little more than a couple of dozen songs recorded, many of them eerie and haunted. Recent research shows however that Johnson was a marginal figure in his time and the story of his Faustian pact may have actually been inherited from Tommy Johnson, an earlier singer and no relation. But his music provided a cornerstone for the British blues revival in the mid 60s and a rediscovery of this seminal music.

When a teenage Rolling Stone Keith Richards first heard Johnson play he wondered who the second guitarist was. The Stones, Eric Clapton, John Mayall and hundreds of others have recorded versions of Johnson's often spooky songs. It's a safe bet that fewer people know Johnson's music than his story: how he was a laughably inadequate young guitarist who disappeared for a while then came back full of spectral songs like Hellbound on My Trail and If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day.

His sound was so innovative, and unexpected, that rivals said he'd made a pact with the Devil. His songs Me and the Devil Blues and Crossroad Blues hinted at it. Conveniently feeding the legend is that Johnson has two graves in Mississippi -- one near Morgan City, the other south of Greenwood -- and some say the song Crossroad Blues has a curse on it. They cite the deaths in groups like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers who covered it, and Clapton's troubled life as evidence.

This is the stuff of myth, and Clarksdale -- widely considered the crucible of the blues -- is steeped in it.  Read More...