stones in my pass way, distanced from god

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Stones in my Passway, Distanced From God

Robert Johnson, Johnny Cash, and Rav Soloveitchik's Dialectic of Teshuva

By Akiva Weisinger

We know precious little about Robert Johnson as a historical figure, and what is known is

obscured by legends and exaggerations. All we know for certain is that he was born in 1911, died in

1938 at the age of 27, and in that intervening period recorded 29 songs on blues guitar that have

become some of the most influential recordings in American music, especially rock n' roll. Beyond

that, we know nothing. Yet the mythology remains, speaking of a life lived hard and lived fast, a life

lived alternately on the road or in the arms of strange woman, a life that ended abruptly, perhaps by the

knife of a jealous husband. And by themselves, such myths would not merit any special attention,

being as all it would prove is that entertainers in the 20's and 30's were no different than the rock stars

of today. However, when we hear Son House, a contemporary blues musician speak of Robert Johnson

selling his soul to the devil in exchange for his otherworldly ability to pluck the strings of a Gibson G,

then the legends take on an altogether different character. Now they are no longer stories of a young

man sowing his wild oats, but rather blend into the grand narrative of man's struggle with sin and

temptation. We can laugh derisively at such a supernatural claim, but I believe that Robert Johnson did

indeed sell his soul to the devil, and that Johnson believed the devil had bought his soul. We must first

realize, however, what it means to sell one's soul to the devil.

The roots for such an idea probably originate with the idea of sin as a debt to be paid. Anderson

traces the imagery used to describe sin throughout the bible, and comes to the conclusion that the

imagery evolves from using the metaphor of a weight or burden to be lifted off one's shoulders to a

debt that must be repaid. Anderson sees this as a positive development, for, as he says, “if sins are

debts, then acts of virtue, like the giving of alms, are credits which fund a ‘treasury of merits in



heaven'1”. In other words, the virtue of imagining sin as a debt is that a debt can be repaid through the

credit of good deeds, whereas other images will necessitate repentance through the means of tackling

the sin itself.

This idea of Anderson's, that sin is a debt can be repaid, and that that idea is a hopeful one, is all

well and good if one has the capital to repay the debt. If a man has been a generally upstanding member

of society, who has made a couple of mistakes in his life, then yes, it is encouraging for him to know

that he can pay his debt through r good deeds. But what if someone is so steeped in sin, so depraved, so

distant from God, and so bereft of virtue that the repayment of such a debt seems to be a virtual

impossibility? What if someone takes an honest look at his life and sees it as beyond repair? Is this

image of a debt so hopeful and optimistic?

It is from this perspective that Robert Johnson writes his songs, and it is this outlook that

provides the driving force behind the power of his music and mythology. Throughout all his travels,

through dive bars and the warm beds of strange women, to hasty backdoor escapes to the cold, lonely

walls of his motel, to the train to the next town to repeat this process, Johnson is not unaware of what

kind of man he is. In “Phonograph Blues”, he sings

Beatrice, she got a phonograph

And it won't play a lonesome word

Beatrice she got a phonograph

And it won't play a lonesome word

What evil have I done?

What evil has the poor girl heard?

Johnson uses the metaphor of the phonograph to describe his affair with this girl, apparently

named Beatrice. The phonograph is the affair and she will no longer let it play a lonesome word. She

1 Garvey, Michael. "Notre Dame Theologian Gary Anderson Examines Sin." Notre Dame Theologian Gary Anderson

Examines Sin // News // Notre Dame News // University of Notre Dame. Notre Dame News, 25 Nov. 2009. Web. 22 Jan.

2013.



has looked at him and seen a man steeped in sin, and she refuses to play his records anymore. Johnson,

in turn, recognizes that the girl has a point. He sings the line not with accusatory tone of a rhetorical

question, but with the melancholy of a man overwhelmed by the evil he sees in the mirror. “My god,

what evil have I done? What have I done to this girl over the course of our affair?,” he thinks, as she

slowly closes the door in his face. Yet, despite this realization, despite the knowledge of his evil ways,

he cannot extract himself from the clutches of temptation.

Beatrice I go crazy,

Baby I lose my mind

And I go crazy

Honey, I will lose my mind,

Whyn't you bring your clothes back home

and try me one more time

Johnson's hand shoots up to stop the door from closing, and he makes one last desperate plea to

Beatrice. Bring your clothes back home, go back to your husband and pretend like nothing happened,

and give me one more chance. There's no promise to reform, because he is not interested in reforming.

He is merely interested in continuing the affair, drowning his guilt in more hedonism. She shuts the

door in his face, as the song returns to its first verse.

Johnson is left alone by Beatrice, to contemplate where his life has taken him. He realizes that

he is evil, that he is steeped in sin. Yet, that feeling does not prompt him to reform. How could he,

when he has become so entrenched in it? He sings in “Drunken Hearted Man”

I'm a drunken hearted man, my life seem so misery

I'm a drunken hearted man, my life seems so misery

And if I could change my way of livin It would mean so much to me.

I been dogged and I been driven ,ever since I left my mother's home I been dogged and I been driven ,ever since I left my mother's home

And I can't see no reason why

that I can't leave these no-good women alone



My father died and left me, my poor mother done the best she could

My father died and left me, my poor mother done the best she could

Every man likes the game you call love But it don't mean no man no good

Now, I'm the drunken hearted man, and sin was the cause of it all (Spoken) Oh play em now

I'm the drunken hearted man, and sin was the cause of it all

And the day you get weak for no-good womenThat's the day you bound to fall

He knows what he is doing is sinful, yet he cannot leave “these no-good women”, and “change

his way of livin”. He is “a drunken hearted man”, and sin was the cause of it all. He places this

statement in the past tense, implying that this transformation is already complete. Johnson has given up

on any possibility of repentance, and now he has taken to warning others not to make the same

mistakes he did.

Yet there is another aspect to this song that merits thinking about. Even though Johnson has

despaired of the possibility of changing his life, he still seems to believe the possibility is worthy of

mention. But why talk about how you wish you could change your life, when you do not think you

can? Let us think back to the metaphor of sin as a debt that needs to be repaid. If one is able to repay

the debt through repentance and good deeds, then everything is fine. But if he cannot? The fact that the

it was eminently possible to pay the debt makes it all the more damning when he is unable to do so.

The same factors that led Anderson to believe that this metaphor for sin was preferable is what dooms

Johnson. If repentance was so easy, he should have been able to do it. Yet, he cannot. The possibility of

repentance ceases to be a reachable goal, and, viewed in the far-off distance, becomes a scathing

indictment of what he has become. In perhaps his most emotionally charged song, “Stones in my

Passway”, Johnson sings:

I got stones in my passway, and my road seem dark as night

I got stones in my passway, and my road seem dark as night



I have pains in my hearts

they have taken my appetite

Now you tryin' to take my life

and all my lovin' too

You laid a passway for me

now what are you trying to do

I'm cryin' please

plea-ease let us be friends

And when you hear me howlin' in my passway, rider

plea-ease open your door and let me in

Johnson knows there is a path laid for him, and that, theoretically, the door could be opened and

he could be let in. But there are stones in his passway. The road is dark as night. Traversing such a path

is an impossibility. All he has left is to howl in his passway, pleading to be let in. But the stones remain

unmovable, the dark remains smothering. He cannot make it through that passway, and even if he did,

no one is opening that door.

Yet, Johnson does not even have the comfort of an exemption from traveling this passway. Just

because he cannot pay his debt does not mean the debt is forgiven. On the contrary, knowing you

cannot pay your debt means that you are never free from it, and its obligation will always chase you

down life's highways. Johnson, in his song “Hellhound on my Trail”, speaks to the kind of terror that is

the consequence of such a life:

I got to keep movin'

I got to keep movin'

blues fallin' down like hail blues fallin' down like hail

Umm mmm mmm mmm

blues fallin' down like hail

blues fallin' down like hail

And the days keeps on worryin' me

there's a hellhound on my trail hellhound on my trail

hellhound on my trail



Being unable to repent means a life of hellhounds on your trail, be they hellhounds of guilt,

hellhounds of sadness, or hellhounds of vengeance, living a life of evil necessitates that one keep

moving, trying to outrun his demons. The fact that Johnson refers to them as hellhounds is significant,

tying what is chasing him to the religious idea of hell. This brings us back to the idea of Johnson selling

his soul to the devil. We, of course, have no idea if Johnson negotiated the sale of his soul to Lucifer in

a literal, historical sense. However, with his debt to God unpaid, and Johnson caught in sin's clutches,

who does Johnson's soul belong to? Certainly not Johnson, bound as he is by temptation. And if sin has

brought him so far from God, if, as he sings in “Traveling Riverside Blues”, temptation (as personified

by woman) has “a mortgage on my body and a lien on my soul”, and if that distance is a result of his

own actions, then it is the devil who has the greatest claim on Johnson's soul, and Johnson who has sold

him that right. This sense of distance and the resulting impossibility of redemption permeates Johnson's

music. Rock critic Greil Marcus writes that “the weight of Johnson's blues was enough to make

salvation a joke, all he could do was cry for its beautiful lie 2”. When Johnson wants to condemn a

woman who wronged him to a terrible fate, he gives her the same sentence he has been given.

If I had possession over judgment day

If I had possession over judgment day

Oh, the woman I'm lovin' would have no right to pray.

Johnson's music speaks to an era in which temptation is ever-present and sin is easy. More and

more, people find themselves far enough from God, and believe themselves to have no right to pray.

Such are the negative consequences of the debt imagery of sin and repentance, turning it into the image

of a man being chased down an impassable road . Rav Soloveitchik, in “On Repentance” verbalizes this

perspective in metaphoric language that eerily echoes Johnson's:

2 Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975. 31. Print.



“The sinful soul shall die, evil pursues the wicked - the awesomeness of

sin itself tears man to pieces and there is no escaping it. 'The sinful soul

shall die' cries prophecy – all the roads are closed before the man who is

sunk in sin. 'Evil pursues the wicked' -echoes back Wisdom. Sin takesman in his clutches and refuses to release him from its grasp.....

Acknowledgment of sin gives expression to everything that is tragic in

man's predicament as he realizes his life has reached a dead end.....Thehorror of this condition brings utter despair, an overbearing sense of guilt,

and a feeling of worthlessness3”

Rav Soloveitchik uses the same road metaphors as Johnson describing the mindset of a sinner so set in

his ways he feels repentance is an impossibility. There is no escaping sin, a hellhound who threatens to

tear man to pieces, but the roads are closed, dark as night, and all we encounter are stones in our

passway and dead ends.

What, then, is the way out of such despair? To Johnson, the answer was to run from the

problem. When the problems, whatever form they took, did not go away, or caught up to him he took a

nihilistic laugh at them:

Early this mornin' when you knocked upon my door

Early this mornin', ooh, when you knocked upon my door

And I said, "Hello, Satan,"

I believe it's time to go."

Me and the Devil, was walkin' side by side

Me and the Devil, ooh, was walkin' side by side

And I'm goin' to beat my woman

until I get satisfied

When the devil finally shows up, deed for his soul in hand, Johnson laughs and treats him like

an old friend, stopping only to casually beat his woman for no reason other than his own satisfaction.

Johnson, no longer believing in repentance, has taken to denying the world has any worth other than a

means to his own satisfaction, to escape his overwhelming despair. He has given up, and freely walks

side by side with the devil now, instead of being chased by him.

Obviously, such an approach will not be sufficient for a religious individual who truly desires to

3 Soloveitchik, Joseph Dov. On Repentance. Trans. Pinchas Peli. Jerusalem: Oroth Pub. House, 1980. 259-260. Print.



repent. Johnson, however, has raised an important question, echoed by Soloveitchik after him: What

can man do when he is so distant from God he doubts the possibility of his salvation? While it is one

twentieth century musician who has posed the question, I believe it is another who has provided an

answer.

Johnny Cash, like Robert Johnson, was no saint, by his own admission. Cash himself was wont

to say that he was “the world's biggest sinner”. The evidence was in support of this statement. Cash's

self-destructive tendencies frequently brought him and the ones close to him down. He was, for much

of his life, seriously addicted to drugs. His constant affairs on the road broke up his marriage and his

family. Yet, at the same time, Cash remained a devoutly religious man, and overcame his problems to

have a long and storied career as one of the greatest country musicians ever. As a result, Cash seems

like a paradox, a devoutly religious man with obvious and serious flaws. At its heart though, Cash's

paradox is the same as Johnson's question. How can a man so far from God possibly justify still trying?

Cash, in his autobiography, tells the story of his repentance from drug addiction, which will

shed light on how Cash himself solved his own paradox. He describes the state he was in, a hopeless

addict, “nothing but leather and bones”, in total despair.

“There was nothing in my blood but amphetamines; there was nothing in my heart but

loneliness; nothing between me and my God but distance4”

Cash knows the same feeling that Johnson and Soloveitchik describe, the despair that comes

from an acknowledgment of one's wrong doing. He knows the lure of temptation, as he sings in “The

Wanderer”, “I went out there in search of experience/To taste and to touch and to feel as much/As a

man can before he repents.” And he knows the attractiveness of nihilism, in what is possibly his most

famous song, “Folsom Prison Blues”, shooting men in Reno just to watch them die, and pining for, of

all things, coffee. As pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman observes:

4 Cash, Johnny, and Patrick Carr. Johnny Cash: The Autobiography. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1997. 227. Print.



“Here is the easiest way to explain the genius of Johnny Cash: Singing

from the perspective of a convicted muderer in the song "Folsom Prison

Blues,: Cash is struck by pangs of regret when he sits in his cell and hears

a distant train whistle. This is because people on that train are "probablydrinkin' coffee." And this is also why Cash seems completely credible as

a felon: He doesn't want freedom or friendship or Jesus or a new lawyer.

He wants coffee. Within the mind of a killer, complex feeling are eerilysimple. This is why killers can shoot men in Reno just to watch them die,

and the rest of us usually can't.”5

Cash knows all these feelings, and as a result of this despair, he tells, he decides to crawl into

Chattanooga's Nickajack Cave and “let god take me from this earth and put me wherever he puts

people like me.” Cash starts crawling and two to three hours later, runs out of light on his flashlight,

and decides to lay down and die. The darkness seems to him to reflect his distance from God. “My

separation from him, the deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I had endured

over the years, seemed complete.” Suddenly, though Cash is overwhelmed by a sensation of “utter

peace, clarity and sobriety”. He considers it, and comes to the conclusion that “I was not in charge of

my own destiny. I was not in charge of my own death. I was going to die at God's time, not mine”. But

how? He's crawled so deep into the cave, there's no light left, how will he, practically speaking, get

out? Nevertheless an inner feeling tells him to just keep crawling, and soon, he finds himself out of the

cave6.

Whether this event is true or a product of Cash's imagination does not change the fact it is

cogent metaphor for Cash's view of repentance. You could be, indeed, trapped deep within a cave with

darkness all around you. There could be stones in your passway and hellhounds on your trail. Yet, man

is not given the option of giving up, he cannot decide to crawl into a cave and die. Moreover, as Cash

writes in a song describing the death of Jesus,

“From his hands it came down From his side it came down

From his feet it came down

And ran to the ground

5 Klosterman, Chuck. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. New York: Scribner, 2004. 143. Print.

6 Cash, 229-232



And a small inner voice Said "You do have a choice."

The vine engrafted me

And I clung to the tree”

Cash views his religion and his beliefs as the “small inner voice” assuring him that he has a choice, and

that gives him the strength to “cling to the tree” Though, on the surface level this seems to contradict

his previous statement about God not giving him the choice of when to die, upon investigation the two

statements are not contradictory at all. God does not give him permission to deny his own ability to

choose the right path for himself, and thus, he is assured that there will always be, somehow, a road

back. In the words of Rav Soloveitchik:

“...even when all roads are barred to him, there still exists somewhere a

secret path that twists and turns between hills and valleys, that climbs up

to dizzying heights and drops to bewildering depths, that goes forwardand retraces its steps backward, and he knows that if he follows this path

no one can stand in his way....though the highway may be blocked, it is

still possible to travel the hidden byways that wind their way through the jungle. Though the main gate is sealed, there is a tiny window through

which man may seek entry. The public thoroughfare does not lead mean

to the goal – only the solitary path. And every man must travel his

individual path7”

No matter how far you are from God, Cash and Soloveitchik say that it is imperative that man

knows of the possibility of repentance. Yet, that fails to answer Johnson's question. All we have is a

debate about possibilities. Johnson says its impossible. Cash says its possible. Now what? What would

Cash reply to Johnson? Cash's answer may be seen from the lyrics of his song “Why Me, Lord?”

Why me Lord?What have I ever done?

To deserve even one

Of the blessings I've known

Why me Lord?What did I ever do?That was worth love from You

And the kindness You've shown

Lord help me, Jesus

I've wasted it

So help me Jesus

7 Soloveitchik, 260



I know what I am

Now that I know

That I've needed YouSo help me Jesus

My soul's in Your hand

Try me Lord

If You think there's a way

That I can repayWhat I've taken from You

Maybe LordI could show someone else

What I've been through myself

On my way back to You

We have here, at first, Cash's sense of unworthiness of the gifts his god has bestowed upon him,

followed by his admission that he has wasted those gifts, presumably through sin. Which, so far, is no

different than Johnson. Where Cash differs is the attitude he takes towards those sins. He asks God if he

could repay the debt he owes to him, the same debt that Johnson believes to be default, by helping

guide those struggling with those same issues. He has taken the sins he did, and turned them into an

advantage he has. We know of at least one man, country legend Merle Haggard, who was present at one

of Cash's prison concerts and decided to turn his life around based on that. Furthermore, on a more

fundamental level, it is those very sins that have caused him to realize his unworthiness and thus devote

his life to helping people. He has taken his sins, and instead of dwelling upon how bad they are, or how

bad he is as a result of them, he has turned them into a positive force. R' Soloveitchik similarly writes

“The penitent who does not wipe out the past nor tear the pages of sin

from his memory, but rather makes a point to use the memory of his sins

to enhance his longings for holiness that are bursting forth from inside of him – such a person achieves the quality of repentance which elevates

evil to a state of goodness. With regard to such a penitent, the Holy One,

blessed be he does not “overlook transgression” but “bears sin andtransgression”, it is as if He lifts up and elevates sin and transgression to

unimaginable heights.8”

When Robert Johnson looks at his sins, he sees a long and winding road before him, marred by

8 Soloveitchik, 274



all sorts of obstacles, and with the hellhounds closing in, he doubts the door will ever open, he despairs

of ever being let in, and he embraces nihilism. Johnny Cash, on the other hand, even in his worst

moments, knows that all there is between him and God is distance.

stones in my pass way, distanced from god

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