Crossroads — Clarksdale, Mississippi

The intersection of US Highway 61 and US Highway 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, is the site most commonly associated with the legend of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil in exchange for his extraordinary guitar mastery. According to the myth — first attached to Johnson in the 1930s and embellished over subsequent decades — Johnson met a mysterious figure at a Mississippi crossroads at midnight, handed over his guitar, and received it back transformed. Johnson's 1936 recording 'Cross Road Blues' contributed to the association, though the song itself is not literally about a Faustian bargain. The Clarksdale intersection is one of several locations claiming to be the authentic site.

The legend reflects something real about Johnson's musical development. By all accounts he was an unremarkable guitarist as a young man, but when he returned to the Delta after a period of absence in the early 1930s, he had developed a technique that astonished his contemporaries — a two-handed independence suggesting two guitarists playing simultaneously. How this development actually occurred is unknown. Johnson left almost no documentary record of his life outside his recordings.

The Clarksdale crossroads is now marked with three large blue electric guitar sculptures. The area around Clarksdale is the heart of the Mississippi Blues Trail, with numerous marked sites including the Delta Blues Museum on Blues Alley, the Riverside Hotel where Bessie Smith died after a car accident, and various markers related to Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Sam Cooke. Clarksdale is the most important single destination for blues heritage tourism in the United States.