![]() Peetie Wheatstraw, an influential blues musician in the 30s, re-branded himself as “The High Sheriff From Hell” and “The Devil’s Son-In-Law.”įor some musicians brought up in the church and with a tradition of gospel singing, the links between the blues and the Devil were troubling, and many failed to see the romance in the Robert Johnson legend. In his autobiography, The Doggfather, Snoop Dogg claimed that the Devil agreed to make the rapper rich and famous in exchange for his soul, a theme he explored in the song “Murder Was The Case.” But using the mystique of the dark side to your career advantage is nothing new. Bon Jovi even told teen pop magazine Smash Hits that “I’d kill my mother for rock’n’roll. John Lennon told a press conference that the reason The Beatles were so successful was that he had sold his soul, and Katy Perry and Eazy-E are among those to have made the claim in recent times. It has since proved attractive for musicians to claim (with varying degrees of seriousness) that they also made their own deal with the Devil. The plotline of a blues guitarist selling his soul is also part of the Coen Brothers’ wonderful movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and it provided the inspiration for the 1979 hit song “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band. The legend of how “The King Of The Delta Blues” earned his powers has remained potent, inspiring Walter Hill’s 1986 film Crossroads, which has an original score by Ry Cooder and also features legendary bluesman Sonny Terry on harmonica. And the legend of the man who composed “Hell Hound On My Trail” was only strengthened by his mysterious death (possibly a murder) at the age of 27. According to the myth, Johnson was transformed from an average itinerant musician into one of the greatest guitarists of all time after his pact with Beelzebub (maybe the Devil has almost as many names as Lady Gaga has outfits). The legend found its apotheosis in Robert Johnson, a Mississippi-born musician who supposedly sold his soul to Satan himself, at midnight, near the very Dockery plantation where blues singer Charlie Patton was raised. ![]() So even though the Devil is an archetypal character who has shown up as a key player in popular music ever since the dawn of the recording era, what really cemented a potent, pseudo-romantic link between music and the occult was the belief that musicians could sell their soul to him in a Faustian exchange for musical greatness. It apparently was the sound used to call up the beast.” Selling your soul to the Devil In the documentary film Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, producer Bob Ezrin, who has worked with Alice Cooper, KISS, and Deep Purple, said: “There is something very sexual about the tritone. Tartini was one of a number of composers who used tritones, a musical interval that goes across three entire tones, and which was branded “Diabolus in Musica” or “The Devil’s Interval.” These dissonant chords reappear in heavy metal music by bands such as Slayer and Black Sabbath, and even in the edgy theme tune to The Simpsons. Satan was something of a multi-instrumentalist himself, because as well as playing the fiddle, Ezekiel 28:13 states that he had his own instruments (tabrets – small drums – and pipes) built into his very being. Venetian composer Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770) said he was inspired to write the “Sonata In G Minor,” the so-called “Devil’s Trill,” after Satan, playing a violin, appeared to him in a dream. No one knows for sure which 18th-century cleric said that “the Devil has the best tunes” (some of which you will find in our playlist) but long before Jelly Roll Morton had recorded a Devil-related song called “Boogaboo,” classical music had aroused consternation over “dance macabres” and immoral symphonies. It wasn’t just syncopated rhythms that caused trouble. ![]() For a time in the 20s, jazz was banned in hundreds of public dance halls. The Devil knew how to tempt, after all, whether with an apple or a sexy rhythm. Saxophones were viewed with suspicion (the “scandalous” instrument had been banned by Pope Pius X in 1903) and when they were used to belt out jazz that aroused lewd dancing, it provoked alarm and moral outrage. Even with big-band music in concert halls, there were anxieties.
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