I worked this one up when I wrote Riding with Strangers, because it was an obvious choice for someone who had written a book about Robert Johnson and now was doing a tour centered on hitchhiking. I didn’t do a lot of playing on that tour, but for five dates in Idaho I was traveling with Rosalie Sorrels, who with incredible generosity added her name and voice to my presentations, trading songs and doing the driving.

There’s a funny story about that: since I’d written a book about how much I enjoyed that form of travel, I figured I had to live the part, so I hitched from the first date, in Portland, Oregon, to the last one in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rosalie lived way up in the mountains above Boise, down a dirt road, and I’d been wondering how I’d get past Boise and up to her place… which wasn’t made easier when a driver dropped me off on the highway west of town… and then a taxi pulled over.

The driver was a young woman, and it turned out that she was off work and just driving around because it was a beautiful day, and damned if she didn’t take me all the way up into the mountains and down the dirt road to Rosalie’s cabin. So I showed up in a taxi, and Rosalie came out, ready to tease me for chickening out and paying for the ride… and, long story short, the driver came in for a drink, we had a lovely evening, and Rosalie told that story at every stop on the tour.

I hadn’t performed “Cross Road Blues” before that, because so many other people played it, but worked up a version for that tour and tailored it to fit my own experience. I didn’t change much, in terms of the lyrics, but obviously my attitude and experiences as a white guy hitchhiking in the  twenty-first centuries were different from what inspired Robert Johnson to compose the song as a Black man in the Depression-era Mississippi Delta.

Before I get to that, though: Johnson’s song is about being stuck at a crossroads in rural Mississippi, trying to “flag a ride,” not about selling his soul to the Devil. Samuel Charters had another theory: that it was about a crisis of faith, with Johnson at life’s crossroads, calling on the Lord to save him — and it’s true that he starts with the verse about falling on his knees and praying, which supports Sam’s interpretation. But there is also a verse where he calls on his friend Willie Brown (a terrific guitarist, who I’ve covered in my post about “Future Blues“) and the one about wishing his girlfriend knew he was out there.

So I can see Sam’s interpretation, but I still hear it as a song about hitchhiking, and I sing the verse about falling on my knees after the one about flagging ride, remembering a couple of times when, despite being a lifelong atheist, I waited so long on a hot day, with no water and night falling, that I did get on my knees and pray. Those moments were brief and I was laughing at myself, even while I hoped the gesture might change my luck and certainly couldn’t hurt it.

Johnson’s situation was a lot less funny. That verse about the sun going down — if I got stuck on the road at night, the worst that could happen was I’d be cold and miserable for a few hours, but Mississippi was full of “sundown towns,” where Black people could be jailed if they were found after dark… if someone wasn’t mean or drunk enough to kill them.

So I sing a lot of the same words, but they have a very different feel. I’m also playing a different guitar part, because this is a project about memory, and even the parts I thought I remembered from his playing seem to have evolved into other licks.

So it’s still his song, but when I sing it I’m picturing my own experiences — which makes a lot more sense than trying to pretend, even for a minute, that I’m Robert Johnson.

(Though I generally try to reshape them to fit my own style and abilities, I’ve reworked a few other Johnson songs and written about them in previous posts: “Traveling Riverside Blues (Rolling and Tumbling),” “From Four Until Late,” and “Walking Blues.”)