There has always been something strange about music. It has captured the imaginations of people in ways that nothing else has ever been able to do. This was true during the days of traveling minstrels, when folk music emerged from the Appalachian Mountains, when the first jazz music was played in the brothels of New Orleans, and when the first bluegrass songs rattled across the American South. But when the first notes of the blues – which eventually gave birth to rock-n-roll – began to be heard from roadhouses and juke joints, the fundamentalists were convinced that the Devil himself had invented his own brand of music.

And maybe they’re right. The origins of rock-n-roll are murky, at best. It is, by its nature, difficult to define, and even harder to explain. There may never be a single, clear-cut, universally accepted explanation for the origins of rock-n-roll. From its inception, it’s been twisted by myth, folklore, legend, rumor, and fact. There is no other kind of music – or even type of popular culture – that has such a rich history of depravity, untimely deaths, bizarre curses, and lives filled with excess.

It’s almost as if someone sold their soul to the Devil to end up with the kind of lifestyle that music can offer.

As John Torrio was dividing up Chicago into territories so that the gangs could fairly supply the city with bootleg liquor, Al Capone was coming into his own in the Windy City...

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This episode was written by Troy Taylor

Produced and edited by Cody Beck

There were few faces as recognizable to anyone with an interest in the occult as his was in the twentieth century. His clean-shaven head and piercing eyes got the attention of everyone from would-be disciples in the 1920s to rock stars in the 1960s.

Musicians like the Beatles put him on the cover of their Sgt. Pepper album and Ozzy Osborne used his name as the title of one of his songs. Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin was an ardent collector of his books, relics, and artifacts and he even bought the man’s home on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland – yes, that Loch Ness, where the monster lives.

But the former owner of that home was a monster of another kind. His name was Aleister Crowley, and he not only was a man closely linked to the Devil and the occult, but he also helped to shape the rabid interest in the occult that exploded in America decades after his death.