What's so great about the devil you know?

Ever hear the story of Robert Johnson going down to the crossroads to meet the devil and play the blues? This is a short story about the devil you haven't heard of, a story spanning centuries, mythology, and telling a slightly different perspective of that classic Delta Blues Southern folk tale.

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Book Excerpt:
You’ve surely heard the story, how Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to play the guitar, to play the Blues. The Delta Blues. Where the Blues was born: low country dark soil, richer than chocolate, richer than a man on a camel in the eye of the needle, bending down knees on the ground shuffling forward to get through that small doorway to Heaven. Richer than s-x, richer than pearls, richer than the most gold covered bit of any sweet liquor you’ve ever tasted. Richer than spring and summer and autumn all rolled into one glorious season. “There aint no winter on the Delta,” people might say, but there was winter in his heart, oh yes. There is in all of us, eventually.
You know he went down to that crossroads at midnight and met the devil who tuned his guitar for him and then the man became legendary. You know how white, British rock n’ rollers speak of him nowadays as their greatest influence, how he got his spot in the Hall of Fame. Oh, how funny that would be to him! He would be laughing so hard at that. Here he was, a man who lost everything, more than once, and then he stood on street corners in Memphis and Greenwood and San Antonio with his hat on the ground for tips, who sang to white audiences in Texas one night and Mississippi the next.
In front of the barber shop, busking for an invitation to the local juke. And his music enticing them to give money, enough money for a sweet black car to drive him from gig to gig. At least that much, if not much more. He always pulled the women out of the crowd, too, sang songs that gave them a look in their eyes that if you were that woman’s man, you watched her close, held her closer. His songs made a man pay attention to his woman ‘cause if he didn’t, she was liable to wander off into someone else’s arms. Often Robert’s, to be sure.
Oh! But! This music! HIS music!
What a story he would tell, with that little warble at the end of a long note. The “mmm hmmm” that let you know he was talking to you and only you. The guitar up high then squeaking to the slow beat of a dying man’s heart.
Growly, throaty. Sometimes wailing like a reed in a storm, sad and lonely. Sweet sometimes, but picking at the strings quick and chucka-chucka flickity others. Walkin’ blues, slow blues, music for those mornings you wake up with the worst of the night before, mornings you curse the devil and God himself, and pray for death to stop the pounding from the cheap whisky and smoky bars. Anything to make that pounding go away. Music of a train moving down the track fast, like, going somewhere. Or that same train in the middle of the night hollerin’ “whoooo? OOOOOOO.” Sad, so it makes your heart leap and cry and reach out to whatever body is layin’ next to you. Or even sometimes like something an angel might have sung to make you feel so sad you repented of every bad thing you ever did…. that music.
Everybody’s heard that music. Right? [. . .]
That story just doesn’t even know about me.