A Crossroads God

Abstract

One thing is for certain, it was not easy for blues singers to claim their identities as both blues singers and church people. As important as their churches were to them, they just could not part from blues. No one demonstrated this more than Sippie Wallace. She knew since she was a little girl that blues was considered the devil’s music. She knew that as a blues singer she would be scorned, if not rejected, by her church. Her church meant a lot to her, but so did blues. Try as she might, she simply could not stop singing blues. Blues enabled her to get through life as much as her faith did. In talking with Wallace, Daphne Harrison was sure that “Wallace could not stop singing the blues and live.”3 There was something about blues that compelled Wallace and others to sing them, regardless of what the good church people thought about the music. Even if they could not quite articulate it, or fully understand it, there was something about blues that was like the spirituals to them, that made it, as Hunter says, “almost sacred.”4 Bluesman Henry Townsend was clear that something they told was the truth. “Even if the blues is of evil” he said, “if I sing the blues and tell the truth, what have I done?”5