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Me and the devil

The devil ain’t got no music. All music is God’s music.
— Mavis Staples


Archibald Motley: “Gettin’ Religion” (1948, oil on canvas, detail) (Chicago History Museum; Whitney Museum)

Blues is shadow music. “Shadow” in the Jüngian sense, meaning it expresses facets of the psyche generally kept hidden from polite company and the easily offended. In its Southern, African-American spawning ground – both a psychic landscape scarred by the whip and countless lynchings and a physical locale of back-breaking labor with little hope of escape – the blues gave voice to the Delta’s id and rested uneasily beside the indigenous sacred music that was its counterpart. If blues was Saturday night – restless, reckless, and raw, gospel was Sunday morning – righteous or repentant. In prewar times a strident dualism defined the two, with blues musicians seen mostly as disreputable if not downright demonic. Jüng notably rejected such schemas: to assert the light while denying the shadow risked turbulent inner imbalance. Rather, such poles were complementary, and over time blues and gospel achieved a kind of yin-yang stasis in the popular imagination. At times, as in the gloriously sensual blues-gospel of the Staple Singers, they even merged. Robert Johnson legends aside, many modern listeners – affluent fans of “smooth” blues like Robert Cray, Keb’ Mo’, or Clapton Unplugged – seem to have little real sense of the form’s dark and desperate origins. The night might belong to Michelob, but the blues – ultimately – belongs to the night.

Shadow and light: cover art for Robert Johnson’s “King of the Delta Blues Singers” LP (1961) (Columbia Records, artist unknown; Robert Johnson Blues Foundation)

A recurring motif in blues is the woman (or man – lest we forget, the earliest recorded blues singers were tough, outspoken women) who’s done her lover wrong, and a common adjunct involves fantasies of revenge ranging from retaliatory infidelity to physical violence. This can get ugly: to deny there’s misogyny in the blues is as wrongheaded as generalizing the blues (or rock, or rap, or country) as misogynistic. But context is instructive. In a dislocated culture, broken by slavery and still bleeding from Jim Crow, nominally patriarchal but symbolically emasculated, it’s unsurprising that some men would cling to the last perceived hierarchic relationship that seemed to offer them power – the lovers’ or marriage bond – and channel the pain and rage resulting from their lowly status against their partner if that bond was broken. “Me and the devil / were walking side by side,” sang Robert Johnson in 1937, having answered a sepulchral knock that many of his contemporaries no doubt heard as well; “I’m going to beat my woman / until I get satisfied.”

Robert Johnson: “Me and the Devil Blues” (1937)

Johnson’s haunting image and hypnotic vocal in “Me and the Devil Blues” are atypical: blues is rarely so earnest, even when its subject matter is dire, and humor – often dark, sometimes deadly so – tends to dull its sharpest barbs and broadsides. So when Pat Hare preempts his own arrest, trial, and conviction in “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby” – preempts, in fact, his own crime – all the while interjecting asides like, “I just thought you’d like to know, jury,” it’s both a boast worthy of the most over-the-top bluesman (or rapper, reggae toaster, or calypso singer) and riotously, subversively funny. The only real difference between his song and a score of others like it is that, blind drunk and tormented by who knows what devils of his own, he made good on his musical threat.

My baby used to help her man

Treat me right

But then she goes out

And stay all night long



I’m gonna murder my baby

Yes, I’m gonna murder my baby

Yes, I’m gonna murder my baby

Don’t do nothin’ but cheat and lie

Pat Hare (right) performing with Muddy Waters (center) (late ’50s/early ’60s) (un-sourced news photo)

The prestige of Pat Hare’s final employer obscures his personal disintegration. In 1957, Muddy Waters hired him to replace guitarist Jimmy Rogers in his band, and for the next six years Hare gigged and recorded with the iconic bluesman (he’s heard on both At Newport 1960 and the same year’s Muddy Waters Sings “Big Bill”). By the end of their collaboration, Hare was passing out drunk on the bandstand. Now divorced, he had a tempestuous relationship with a Chicago woman he suspected of infidelity. Unable to raise her by phone one night (and no doubt deep in his cups) he fired a rifle through her window. No one was hurt but a warrant was issued for his arrest. Hare dodged it, hiding out in the city before returning to the family farm in Arkansas. Waters sent scouts to find and recruit him for a new band he was forming in Minneapolis (despite his decline he remained an electrifying guitarist). Hare joined, but his drinking worsened and a pay dispute ended with him threatening a fellow musician with a gun. Had homicide not intervened, it’s likely that Hare’s last stint with Waters would still have been short-lived.

Muddy Waters, live at Newport (with Pat Hare on his right):
“Got My Mojo Workin'” (1960)

In 1963, Hare was living with a married woman named Agnes Winje. Paranoid that she was going to return to her estranged husband, on December 15 he drank all day, fought with and took potshots at his frightened paramour, and told a friend on the phone, “That woman is going to make me kill her.” Alas, the fatal trigger was pulled by no one but Hare. Officer James E. Hendricks was the first-responder killed at the scene. Hare later stated he had no memory of the shooting (though police claimed he confessed) – plausibly stating he was in an alcoholic blackout. While serving life for first and third degree murder, he quit drinking, attended AA meetings, and joined the Stillwater Prison band (Sounds Incarcerated). Sober, his more even-keeled self reemerged and he seemed destined for eventual parole. He was allowed to leave prison at times to play music – including at a reunion gig with Muddy Waters – but died of cancer in 1980, age 50.

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