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This chapter explores the origins and meaning of the phrase "the devil's music," paying particular attention to the way in which black southern blues performers, male and female, contest the term. Africa, through the mechanism of the slave trade and the condemnation of instrumental music by Islamic clerics, offers one possible origin for devil's music concept. The prelude to the demonization of the blues and its representative instrument, the steel-stringed guitar, is the evangelization of the slaves and the demonization of the fiddle during the second Great Revival. As blues emerged in the Mississippi Delta early in the Twentieth Century, blues musicians like John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, and the Mississippi Sheiks, along with an irreverent "young modern" generation of black youth, mocked the hypocrisy of black ministers and spurned the religious certainties of their parents and the church.

This chapter argues that the meaning of the blues-devil has shifted over time, with white understandings that highlight Robert Johnson's soul-sale at the crossroads coming to dominate the contemporary conversation. Clarksdale, Mississippi has become a center of touristic interest in Johnson and a place where artists and investors seek to profit from a stereotyped, gothic-laden idea of the crossroads; this development bothers some black residents of the city, who feel as though their neighborhood, one historically connected with the blues, has been bypassed. The devil-blues lyric tradition, meanwhile, has flourished in the first fifteen years of the new millennium, a development driven both by Johnson's popularity and by a post-9/11 anxiety about "evil" at large in the world. The longstanding struggle between black southern ministers and purveyors of "the devil's music" continues into the present, at least in Mississippi, but with noticeably less intensity than in days gone by.

This chapter argues that the connection between the devil and the blues is much more extensive than prevailing popular mythologies, which tend to focus narrowly on the phrase "the devil's music" and Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads. The whitening of the blues audience is partly responsible for this development; so, too, are Afrocentric understandings of Johnson that substitute Legba for the European devil and reinforce the popular overvaluation of the crossroads location, drawing attention away from black social worlds where so many devil blues recordings are set. The devil imagined by African American blues people served a range of functions; he was "just" the devil—the opponent warned about in the Bible—but he was also a figure of useable power for some bluesmen, an agent of vengeance who could "get" a wayward lover, and a symbol of the white man.