There is perhaps no more enduring American myth than the story of Robert Johnson at the crossroads. The tale has become a kind of secular scripture: the young bluesman walking out under a Mississippi midnight, guitar in hand, meeting something—some say the Devil, others say destiny—at a lonely intersection. Whether the meeting ever happened matters less than the meaning we give it. In “Cross Road Blues,” Johnson sings, “I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees,” and that gesture, kneeling in the dust at the threshold of uncertainty, captures the embodied reality of decision more truthfully than any historical account ever could. The crossroads, in Johnson’s rendering, is not a place of spectacle but of transformation. A site where identity is dismantled and remade. A place where the self must choose its next becoming.
What strikes me is how Johnson’s crossroads functions as a kind of epistemology. How it becomes a way of understanding experience. The crossroads is the moment when multiple futures press in on the present and demand a response. Existentially, it is Kierkegaard’s anxiety: the dizziness of possibility. Phenomenologically, it is the threshold between the familiar and the unknown. Psychologically, it is the liminal space Turner described, where the old identity has fallen away but the new one has not yet solidified. When Johnson cries out, “Tryin’ to flag a ride,” we hear the longing inherent in every moment of decision. We hear the desire for direction when no map is given.
Those of us who have lived long enough know the truth beneath the myth: most crossroads do not announce themselves. They do not arrive with midnight thunder or supernatural wagers. In fact, they are nearly invisible as we pass through them. We walk with our heads down, focused on the next step rather than the shape of the road. Only in retrospect do we turn and see the branching paths behind us.
John Rogers Cox’s Gray and Gold (1942) captures this truth with an almost haunting clarity. The painting presents a stark Midwestern landscape: golden wheat fields stretching to the horizon, a dusty intersection cutting through their expanse, and a vast sky swelling with storm clouds that hover between promise and threat. The composition itself is a crossroads. It is a horizontal band of cultivated earth interrupted by a vertical thrust of road that leads the eye toward a vanishing point made uncertain by gathering weather. The horizon glows with light, yet the sky churns with the inevitability of change. Cox visualizes what Johnson sounds: the tension of being suspended between what has been planted and what is about to break.
When I look at Gray and Gold, I recognize the quiet crossroads of my own life. I see the ones I did not understand as thresholds until long after I had crossed them. I think of quitting football my senior year, a decision I carried like shame at the time but later realized was my first act of self-authorship. I think of going to college, stepping into a future I hadn't believed was possible for me. I think of leaving the church of my upbringing, an exodus marked not by rebellion but by a deeper search for integrity. I think of getting married and later divorced, two choices that revealed the fragility and resilience of becoming an adult. I think of quitting my doctorate when the weight of everything became too much and then returning 2 years later to finish it, reclaiming a path I thought I had abandoned.
None of these moments felt like crossroads when I stood in them. They felt like survival, or confusion, or the simple, ordinary ache of growth. In Johnson’s words, I felt the pull of “the blues fallin’ down like hail.” Only with time did I look back and see how the road had split beneath my feet.
Psychology tells us that we make sense of our lives retrospectively. Bruner calls this narrative coherence. It's the way memory arranges experience into meaning. Ricoeur suggests that identity is not a static essence but a story we continually revise. Cox’s painting honors this truth. The crossroads sits plainly in the center of the canvas, unremarkable except for the significance we project onto it. The wheat fields represent what has already been cultivated, the accumulated efforts of the past. The storm represents possibility. It is the threatening or renewing, depending on how one reads the sky. And the road represents agency: the quiet, persistent truth that we move forward even when we do not fully know where we are heading.
Sometimes, when I reflect on my past, I imagine alternate versions of myself. I picture other selves wandering down other roads. The version of me who kept playing football. The one who stayed in the church and is maybe a pastor now. The one who never went to college and maybe works with my dad or joined the Army. The one who never returned to his dissertation forever defined by the letters ABD. These imagined selves move across Cox’s horizon like faint silhouettes, ghosts of unrealized stories. Johnson gives voice to this spectral sense of possibility when he sings, “I got to keep movin’… blues fallin’ down like hail.” Each of us walks forward knowing that other lives trail behind us like shadows, but as C. S. Lewis once warned, the realm of “might have been” is a place we are not meant to dwell. We inhabit only the lived road. The road beneath our feet.
Returning to Gray and Gold, I find myself drawn to its ordinariness. Unlike the mythic crossroads of Johnson’s legend, Cox offers no devil, no bargain, no drama. Just wheat. Wind. Road. Weather. Possibility. The sacredness of the everyday. Augustine wrote that time is experienced not in grand gestures but in the interior motion of memory, attention, and expectation. Cox paints that temporality. His landscape is not monumental; it is human-scaled, lived-in. The crossroads itself becomes sacramental. Scramental as a reminder that the most consequential decisions of our lives often occur in spaces that look, on the surface, unremarkable.
And so the mind circles back to Robert Johnson. For me, not the man at the crossroads of legend, but the artist whose music carries the emotional truth of choosing. The crossroads myth is less about the devil than it is about the courage to move when no certainty is offered. “Standin’ at the crossroads, babe,” Johnson sings, “risin’ sun goin’ down.” That suspended moment—caught between light and dark, clarity and ambiguity—is the emotional atmosphere Cox captures in his sky.
Coda
There is another voice that guides me through these reflections: Eric Clapton’s Me and Mr. Johnson. It is an homage album, yes, but also something more intimate. It is a conversation across time between artists, a gesture of respect from one traveler on the road to another. Clapton doesn’t imitate Johnson; he interprets him, allowing the old songs to move through the filter of his own life, his own crossroads, his own losses and reinventions. Listening to it, I am reminded that none of us walks alone. We carry the voices of those who came before us. We carry the bluesmen and painters, teachers and friends, family and former selves. Their songs become our companions.
If Robert Johnson gave us the myth of the crossroads and John Rogers Cox gave us its visual anatomy, Clapton gives us its echo. That sense that every decision reverberates, shaping not only who we become but how we hear the world afterward. In that sense, Me and Mr. Johnson is not merely an album but a reminder: the road continues, and we continue down it, guided by the voices that have shaped us, strengthened by the choices we have made, and accompanied by the music that helps us understand the meaning of our own crossroads.
Just me and the devil. Walking side by side.