# Language of the Blues: Conjure – The conjurer calls upon the web god of West Africa who links earth and sky: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/02/12/language-of-the-blues-conjure-the-conjurer-calls-upon-the-web-god-of-west-africa-who-links-earth-and-sky-video-photos/
- Published: 2023-02-12T00:02:11+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**In The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to ZuZu, author and rocker Debra Devi
explores the meaning of a word or phrase from a blues song. The award-winning book
includes a foreword by Dr. John and is blurbed by Bonnie Raitt and Joe Bonamassa.
Bessie Smith sang to him in “Spider Man Blues.”**

To conjure is to cast a spell, to call upon supernatural powers to help achieve 
one’s goal. Conjuration was “one of the African cultural survivals very early noted
in the New World,” according to renowned linguist J.L. Dillard’s Lexicon of Black
English. The conjurer calls upon the web god of West Africa who links earth and 
sky. Bessie Smith sang to him in “Spider Man Blues.”

![How Bessie Smith Influenced A Century Of Popular Music : NPR](https://i0.wp.com/
media.npr.org/assets/img/2019/08/02/gettyimages-74296266_wide-afcc02a47199a49733c9e68a4a43a7e414c7f8e3-
s1100-c50.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

African conjure rituals were noticed quite early by nervous colonists. James Grainger’s
1763 poem “The Sugar Cane” described “conjurers” and “Negro-magicians” who carried
carved staffs and cast spells to make themselves “secure from poison; for to poison
they are infamously prone.”

Grainger was probably describing tribal priests, who were among the Africans imported
as slaves into in the American colonies. Although enslaved priests tried to keep
African religious practices alive in the new world, these were harshly suppressed
by slave owners. Those practices that did survive into the 1800s were camouflaged
as herbal “medicine” or “superstitions.”

In Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and Jamaica, in contrast, more elements of West Africa’s
Vodun, one of the world’s oldest religions, survived to become the Vodou, Santeria,
Candomblé, and Obeah religions, respectively. This happened, in part, because slaves
in the very Catholic West Indies noticed the similarity between their tradition 
of appealing to ancestral spirits to intercede in their favor with God (Vodun) and
that of Catholics praying to their saints for similar intercession. They grafted
Catholic saints onto their spirit-gods and created new religious hybrids that were
able to survive waves of repression and persecution.

In the United States, meanwhile, the term hoodoo emerged in the early 1800s as a
catch-all name for African American medicinal and magic practices. Mojos, foot track
magic, and other conjuration practices survived to become important elements of 
hoodoo, which combined herbal healing and spells with aspects of African and European
religions, as well as Native American herbal lore.

![](https://i0.wp.com/www.americanbluesscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/9781624071850-
us.jpg?resize=640%2C988&ssl=1)

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