While waiting at the crossroads, like many before me throughout history, I reflected my life and how it might be better were I to forget my morals and make a deal with the devil. Not really, I just spotted a nice place for a cache in a gap on the map.
But I couldn't stop humming a few old blues tunes as I remembered the story of Mississippi Delta blues legend Robert Johnson who claimed to have felt compelled to take his guitar down to a crossroads at midnight where he met with the Devil. The Devil took Johnson's guitar, tuned it and played some tunes on it before returning it to him. Johnson suddenly found that he had complete mastery of the instrument and later claimed that he had, in effect, sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for this skill. His contemporaries noted that he went from novice to mater of the guitar in less than two years.
Although Johnson later became a legendary bluesman and an inspiration for guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Jack White and Jimmy Page, his faustian pact with "Old Nick" did him no good within his lifetime. In a foretaste of others after him like Kurt Kobain and Amy Winehouse, he died in 1938 at the tender age of 27. It was only upon the reissue of his recordings in the early 1960s that the musical world rediscovered him and acknowledged his far-reaching influence upon contemporary music.
Listen here to Johnson sing the story for himself (or here for Clapton's version of the same song) and linger not at the crossroads, unless you're just waiting for the green man!