The Graytown Blues

In search of a Blues legend in the 1930s, young blues connoisseur Jackson Monroe learns the frightening truth behind the Graytown Blues.

From the Memoirs of Jackson Monroe:

To truly understand the haunting events that transpired on that fateful 1932 summer night, one must first know a bit about myself and the chilling legend surrounding Blind Willie Gray, the doomed bluesman whose music opened my eyes to cosmic revelations perhaps better left unknown.

I was born in 1908 to a well-off Memphis family who had fallen into hard times. Despite our poverty, my parents fostered within me a profound love and respect for the Delta blues tradition from an early age. I can still remember being cradled as an infant while my father's rich baritone carried the mournful, spiritual melodies echoing from the cotton fields into our ramshackle shanty.

My fascination with tracing the blues back to their authentically haunted roots became an all-consuming obsession in my late teens and twenties. While my peers sought earthly pleasures and simple creature comforts, I spent long, lonely nights holed up researching and analyzing field recordings, folk tales, and scattered oral histories of the Mississippi Delta's most notorious and obscure bluesmen.

It was during this period that I first encountered the terrifying legend of Blind Willie Gray while poring over a battered, anonymous journal in the archives of a forgotten Memphis library. The scrawled, unattributed passages told of a young blues prodigy in the 1910s who, like so many other iconic bluesmen before and since, it was said had willfully struck a Faustian bargain at the crossroads in exchange for otherworldly musical talent.

According to the cryptic journal entries, Willie wandered alone to the desolate intersection of old Highways 61 and 49 near the hamlet of Graytown on a dark, moonless night. There, it was written that he indeed met a shuf­fling, crisp-suited figure reeking of sulfur and harsh whiskey - the Devil himself.

The penman's descriptions of the ensuing Black Masses and ritualistic sacrifices were so depraved that I'll spare recounting them here. Suffice to say, Willie was forced to renounce his very soul and pledge unwavering fealty to the Prince of Darkness. In return, the Devil reached his claws deep into Willie's chest, extracting the solid essence of the young man's torment, regrets, shattered dreams, and ancestral pain.

With a sadistic grin, the Dark Lord then transmuted Willie's anguish into unearthly musical prowess, imbuing his voice with the wail of damned souls split across all planes of existence since the dawn of time. His fingers now capable of summoning profane, haunting melodies capable of warping the perceptions of the listener.

Blind Willie proceeded to roam the nomadic path of a true blues griot, seeking out drinkers and other lost souls to contaminate with his eldritch music. The journal's final entry hinted that he eventually fetched up in Graytown sometime in the late 1920s, having forged a perverse pact to serve as the Crossroads Inn's doomed entertainment for all eternity.

So you can likely comprehend my profound anticipation when, after exhausting every other lead, I found myself following the siren song of Willie's haunting compositions into that dreaded community on that fateful summer night in 1932. I was a man possessed, driven by delusions that I could intimately commune with authentically haunted Delta blues as some misguided attempt to compensate for my family's fallen fortunes.

Graytown.

Even approaching that benighted place, wisps of bone-chilling mist caressed my flesh while eerie blues notes seemed to coalesce from the ether itself, beckoning me towards my damnation. The winding streets reverberated with anguished harmonies carrying the weight of profound ancestral suffering. I shuddered, sensing I was venturing into a realm where the veil separating our world from realms of cosmic unplumbered horror grew perilously thin.

Yet I persisted in my foolhardy pursuit, drawn inexorably to the ramshackle Crossroads Inn where the music poured forth in profane, discordant waves. Even as I crossed the threshold, a miasma of stale beer and cigarette smoke assaulted my senses, near-choking me with its accursed, foreboding ambiance. The other patrons appeared shell-shocked, their countenances reflecting the rictus grins of the eternally damned.

And there, hunched over a battered steel guitar, sat the wiry, unhinged figure of Blind Willie Gray - eyes devoid of sight, yet channeling some profane spirit through his feverish fretwork and otherworldly growls. His harrowing voice carried the combined pain of a thousand condemned souls crying across the centuries. Each blasphemous verse seemed to describe scenes of cosmic desolation, profound betrayal, and the agonizing plight of souls having struck ruinous pacts at the existential crossroads.

I was frozen, jaw agape, utterly transfixed by Willie's harrowing performance, my heart seized by primordial terrors scarcely fit for the human mind to behold. As the last damning chord faded to silence, those ruined eyes somehow snapped in my direction, as though he could smell my inquisitive presence.

"Well now, looks like we got ourselves a music lover," his decrepit voice cackled like stone dragging across bone. I could only gape further, rooted to the spot, as he continued sadistically toying with me.

"Most folks don't appreciate the blues 'til they lived it, son. I sure as hell didn't before I paid my dues at the crossroads. Once that old Prince comes callin' for your soul, you better pray he don't take too keen a likin' to you."

Then...then that monster launched once more into a hypnotic melody that seemed to open a vertiginous portal directly into the nightmare realm of the perpetually tormented. The inn's walls began writhing as if composed of pulsating flesh. Flickering shadows coalesced into ever-shifting forms too profane and uncanny for the human mind to comprehend - men crucified upon lightning-blasted trees for all eternity, howling in exquisite anguish. I caught glimpses of leviathans endlessly roaming the scorched plains beyond the crossroads, forever seeking out souls to torment.

And then IT emerged - a bestial colossus of shadows and razors, pooling from the all-consuming miasma before me. Fixing Its ravenous gaze upon my insignificant form, It stretched forth a curved, hooked claw the length of a scythe towards my hammering heart. Its cavernous, leech-lined maw unfurled, unleashing a keening damnation resonant across all planes of existence.

I awoke to reality like a drowning man breaking the surface, spinning on my heels and sprinting for the door in a mad panic. I trampled anyone foolish enough to stand in my path, caring only for putting as much distance between myself and that profane nexus of diabolical revelation. Graytown and its cursed crossroads vanished in my wake, yet the baneful verses of Blind Willie Gray lingered like the revenant shades of the damned.

For I had seen a truth no mortal was meant to witness - Blind Willie's blues were no mere artistic expressions, but the perpetual, unresolved torment of humanity's million shattered souls scattered across eternity. Cosmic grist for the mill of that merciless, unstoppable darkness razing all hope and joy to oblivion.

Those final agonized screams, rising like the wail of a thousand damned concurrences - the awful, inescapable truth that we are all irredeemably bound for the crossroads, whether we strike our Faustian bargains willfully or through the simple sin of being born into this world of terror and spiritual nullity. No mortal constitution can withstand the full enormity of such a dire existential realization indefinitely.

My only solace was embracing the overwhelming mundanity of mere existence - chasing earthly pleasures to numb my senses and outpace the ever-encroaching shadow of Blind Willie's eternal damnation nipping at my heels. I became a reveler, chasing vice after vice until each mortal day blurred senselessly to the next. When inebriation proved insufficient to drown the horrors, I lost myself in other...companionship beneath the sheets, for the empty physical passions of the flesh at least provided momentary escape.

Yet even in the throes of hedonistic frenzies, that blasphemous tune would creep back into my consciousness like the fanged tendrils of some nameless outer entity, sinking its hooks into my soul anew. Once you've been granted a glimpse behind the veil into the abyssal, unnamable outer planes, there is no unseeing what has been seen, no forgetting the unbearable truth at the inescapable, crossroads core of our doomed existence.

I am damned to walk the Earth carrying this heavy spiritual burden, praying each day is my last before the crossroads finally calls me home to Papa Legba's eternal embrace. But always, in the furthest reaches of night when the veil skims its thinnest, I hear those mocking strains on the infinite delta wind:

"Remember boy...once you've tasted the blues, there's no turning back."

Author's Note

As I'm not from the United States, this story took a lot of research, but also takes quite a bit of artistic license.