Devil's music

The legend has been repeated so many times that it’s practically in the same canon of American folklore as Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed.

The down-on-his-luck blues singer Robert Johnson, as the story goes, went down to the crossroads at midnight sometime in 1933 to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for otherworldly guitar-playing abilities.

Jacobs School of Music Professor and rock historian Andy Hollinden doesn’t buy it.

“It’s a very racist story,” Hollinden said. “Johnson was a musical genius, but the idea that a black guy could be that good made it easier for people to imagine that voodoo was involved.”

Indeed, the Johnson legend didn’t arise until quite some time after his death in 1938. A lesser-known bluesman named Son House told the story to Pete Welding, who reported it as a serious belief in a 1966 edition of Down Beat magazine. Since then, the legend has outgrown the truth, which is considerably darker.

“There’s not even any mention in the song ‘Cross Road Blues’ of the devil,” Hollinden said. “It’s a song about a black person who needs to get out of a sundown town — a town where it was made obvious, sometimes with signs, that black people weren’t welcome there after dark.”

Racist undertones aside, Johnson’s alleged Faustian bargain wasn’t the first and certainly not the last appearance of the Christian conceptualization of Satan in musical mythology. The link between music and some grinning red guy with a pointy tail and horns extends long before the dawn of Delta blues.

The Hardanger fiddle, an instrument popularized in Norway in the 17th and 18th centuries, marks perhaps the first documented appearance of devil lore in popular music. The violin would often have a dragon carved into its wood and could be played in the sinister-sounding “troll tuning.” Legend has it this unconventional tuning was passed down to players by Satan himself. In a country as overwhelmingly Christian as Norway, using it was tantamount to damnation.

Fully aware of the devilish implications of the Hardanger fiddle, black metal stalwart Ihsahn (formerly of Emperor, a band whose songs have titles such as “Opus a Satana” and “The Loss and Curse of Reverence”), released an album called “Grimen” with the name Hardingrock. The album combined black metal song structure with the traditional instrument to create a new canon of vaguely satanic hymns.

A century after the introduction of the Hardanger fiddle, one very specific violinist drew the ire of the religious community.

Nicolo Paganini was in many ways the precursor to Robert Johnson, albeit one with far fewer racist barbs thrown his way. The Italian’s brilliance with a violin made him a revered figure, but also a feared one. European audiences accused Paganini of the same Faustian deal-making that would eventually plague Johnson.

Michael Young, a graduate student of ethnomusicology, said both religious fervor and personal grudges were responsible for the accusations against Paganini.

“When you see something so amazing and virtuosic, sometimes it seems like there’s no other explanation for it,” Young said. “There was this level of superstition, but there’s another level. People didn’t like Paganini.”

Like a whole continent of Salieris watching Mozart compose his best symphonies, Europe couldn’t wrap its head around Paganini’s playing. The jealousy led to grudges. The grudges led to accusations. The accusations led to Paganini being shackled in chains when he arrived in certain cities on tour. For all the racism that led to the claims of Johnson’s deal with the devil, he likely never faced the kind of widespread fear that Paganini inspired.

Young said the origin of devil myths in music can be traced to the convictions of popular Christianity.

“In church, it’s God’s music — music to glorify him,” Young said. “But the other places you hear music is at bars and dances where people aren’t being super-Christian. They’re drinking and swearing, and maybe they’re going home and having sexual intercourse out of wedlock.”

It was this Jesus-fueled fear of the unknown that made any music played outside the church walls dangerous and anything that worked young people into a frenzy (Paganini’s shredding performances, for example) more dangerous still.

“When you had people getting together and having a good time, and it wasn’t mediated by the church, it was for the devil,” Young said.

At some point, though, long after Paganini’s chained performances and Robert Johnson’s revolutionizing of the blues, evil undertones in music stopped being dangerous and started being cool.

In 1969, psychedelic rockers Coven released the devil-hailing “Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls.” A year later, Black Sabbath invented heavy metal with a handful of detuned guitar riffs and lyrics such as “Satan’s sitting there, he’s smiling/Watches those flames get higher and higher.”

In 1971, kids were playing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backward to find hidden passages allegedly proclaiming the band’s allegiance to the Dark One.

By 1972, even English pomp-rockers Genesis were playing with infernal fire, painting the Battle of Armageddon in the 23-minute epic “Supper’s Ready,” which included the line “666 is no longer alone/He’s getting out the marrow in your backbone.”

Clearly, the game had changed.

Hollinden chalks the shift up to a new paradigm in counterculture that the 1960s brought, which was subsequently crushed by Vietnam and Watergate.

“I think it’s safe to say bands came along and used the darkness to be anti-authority,” Hollinden said. “You can still shock people with the concept of Satan.”

Of course, it took three centuries for music to reach the sort of spooky, semi-ironic embrace of satanic motifs that came with the end of the hippie era. It only took another decade or so for a cluster of metal bands to take it a lot further.

Mike Lang, a graduate student in telecommunications researching metal, said he sees the rapidly snowballing extremeness of the metal genre as a reason for the true satanism that would pervade it by the early 1990s.

“You have Black Sabbath and Slayer’s Satan stuff that basically says, ‘Let’s have fun with this,’” Lang said. “But with the continual extremity and bands constantly pushing the boundaries, you’ve pushed the genre to the extreme so much that it becomes a viable avenue for satanists.”

Metal became so viable for the devil, in fact, that theistic satanists started becoming key players in major regional scenes. In Florida’s swampy death metal scene, Morbid Angel’s Trey Azagthoth ate worms on stage, and Deicide’s Glen Benton branded an inverted cross on his forehead.

In Norway, members of black metal’s inner circle, such as Mayhem’s Euronymous and Emperor’s Faust, began burning churches and committing murders in addition to singing Beelzebub’s praises.

Hollinden said some Norwegian acts, such as Burzum and Enslaved, felt even satanism was too mild a rejection of Christianity since it implicitly recognized its legitimacy. These bands instead embraced the old Viking gods of the Scandinavian Peninsula.

After the dust raised by the Norwegian black metal satanists settled, the paradigm for the devil in music shifted yet again. Today, mainstream-leaning acts, such as hip-hop crew Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All and surf-punk project Wavves, openly use inverted crosses and pentagrams in their album art and T-shirt designs.

Not surprisingly, metal is still the genre pushing satanism’s place in music to the next level. Swedish black metal quintet Watain is composed entirely of dyed-in-the-wool devil worshipers, and their stage show involving animal sacrifices and satanic invocations has raised plenty of eyebrows.

Lang said religious people voicing their opposition of Watain’s live performances are hypocritical.

“If you’re okay with Abraham killing the goat for God, you have to be okay with Watain killing the goat for Satan,” he said.

Amen.