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Abstract
Although the devil of the blues tradition has generally been interpreted as a Deep South phenomenon—an African-sourced crossroads spirit, a “devil's music” condemned by black evangelicalism—the urban north, too, was a key location in which the meaning of the blues-devil was arbitrated. This essay explores the way in which the very first devil-blues recording, Clara Smith's “Done Sold My Soul to the Devil” in 1924, along with other recordings by Sippie Wallace and Ma Rainey, evoke the promises and perils of urban modernity in a context dominated by public anxiety about the sexuality of black female migrants and the broader youth rebellion being engaged in by the so-called Lost Generation.
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