however, the many rural blues musicians in the South who retained their evangelical Protestant beliefs would probably not describe themselves as completely “free” and socially autonomous as others imagined. Instead, they had to reconcile the irreconcilable: making the music that they enjoy, with the belief that this music and attendant activities are sinful and damning. In contradiction to the assertion that the bluesmen had broken “free” of their community’s social restrictions—including its religious beliefs—Steven Calt writes: “As the Bible was the sole book of [the bluesman’s] acquaintance, and the church the sole repository of values for him, the Mississippi blues singer was unable to mount any intellectual opposition to his own condemnation. Although the Bible said nothing about blues-singing, the fact that pastors said that God stood firmly against it was enough to cow its practitioners, particularly when they lived in a stultified plantation environment” ([38], p. 169). This dynamic did not afflict every blues musician during the genre’s formative years in the early twentieth century, but it is an unmistakable and influential tension affecting much of the earliest blues musicians.
Despite the posthumous mythology of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the Devil, in reality
there are few, if any, instances where a bluesman made a clean break with his or her religious faith,
permanently casting a lot “with the Devil” or the “secular” world of blues and juke joints. Instead,
early bluesman who shared the religious faith of the community maintained an uneasy tension, unable
to leave behind the faith of their youth and community, yet unable to ignore the call to play blues and
enjoy its benefits. Francis Davis writes of Delta blues pioneer Son House, “House’s own songs suggest
that he thought of the blues as wicked, and of his talent for them as grim fate. This is what gives his
work its drenching intensity: the suspicion that he recognizes the blues as both his only means of
self-expression and a form of blasphemy” ([29], p. 108).
For example, Charley Patton and Son House both grew up in traditionally religious households in
the Mississippi Delta with fathers who were elders in the church. House, describing his early attitude
towards the blues, states he was “Brought up in church and didn’t believe in anything else but church,
and it always made me mad to see a man with a guitar and singing those blues” ([30], p. 30). Patton
had a similar upbringing and a dramatic early lesson about the sharp divide between “secular” and
“sacred” music when at the age of fourteen his father caught him playing the guitar (an instrument
synonymous with “sinful” music in the African American community) and then beat the boy as a
warning ([31], p. 50).
House and Patton had strong enough religious knowledge and faith for both to seriously consider
careers as preachers. House went farther in this direction than Patton, preaching his first sermon
at the age of 15 and serving as a minister at two different churches during his late teens through to
his mid-twenties ([31], p. 79). Patton “received a thorough religious education and knew the Bible
well” [39]. Although Patton never had a formal congregation, he preached numerous times in Delta
churches, and more frequently used his considerable musical talents to perform sacred music in
church [39].
Despite Patton’s and House’s overt and sustained religious faith and even semi-formal or formal
religious vocations, they eventually became full-time bluesmen. In keeping with the concepts of the
“Hell of a Fellow” and the “Christ-haunted South”, neither discarded their religious faith when it
became clear that they were confirmed bluesmen. Instead, they lived with the paradox. For example,
for several years House was a bluesman by night and a preacher by day, but his blues playing, drinking,
and womanizing eventually caught up with him, and his congregation fired the fallen preacher ([30],
p. 80). Although House’s formal career as a preacher ended, he spoke of his religious faith throughout
his long life, despite continuing his career as a bluesman. Even nearly four decades after House
preached his last official sermon, he would give long monologues during live performances where he:
“often lamented the sinfulness of the music he sang, and how the blues had become his calling rather
than the ministerial career to which he had once aspired . . . .The failed preacher finally had a large
congregation in front of him, and even if they did not come to hear the holy Word, he would make
sure that they got a dose of religion in the process” ([40], pp. 377–78). It seems House never personally
reconciled the tension between his “sacred” and “secular” callings, but he at least used his music as an
