The Lynching Blues: Robert Johnson\u27s Hellhound on My Trail as a Lynching Ballad

Despite Johnson’s small body of recorded blues, his “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937) is noted as one of blues music’s most terrifying songs, as well as a cornerstone of early blues music. Blues historians have interpreted “Hellhound on My Trail” in a variety of ways; however, the most popular interpretation is that the song evokes Johnson’s fabled deal with the Devil—a deal in which Johnson sold his soul in exchange for musical prowess. Though there are dangers in assuming that Johnson’s lyrics are real-to-life biographical descriptions, I will argue that the impetus and context for Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” may be partially biographical, specifically, that Robert Johnson’s stepfather Charles Dodds’s near lynching and flight from the Mississippi Delta in 1909 is a plausible rhetorical context in which to understand the song. Rather than simply an ode to his deal with the Devil, Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” can also be understood as a lynching ballad that describes grassroots responses to lynching, such as flight and the anxieties that arise from perpetually fleeing lynch mob violence.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studythesouth/1021/thumbnail.jp