R&B/jazz artist Booze who sang See See Rider Blues / FRI 4-30-21 / Uses a crystal ball / Farm animal in farm-speak / BuzzFeed fodder

... and couldn't come up with a word ending -SIT that made sense. My brain kept saying "TRANSIT" but that was nonsense. So instead of just jumping into the NE corner, I followed letters I already had and tumbled down into the SE, then swung back up the east coast and came at the NE that way. I very nearly got stymied again trying to get up into that corner because the back ends of so many of the Downs were useless to me. But once I got EVENT (25A: Dot on a timeline), I had VISIT at the end of that OSHA clue, so I hazarded a guess on the first four letters: was it SITE? 

It was. Here we get to the only parts of the puzzle that made me wince a little. The first was SCRIES, which I got almost immediately, but is a word I have always given helping heapings of side-eye, as I have only ever seen it in crosswords (it's somehow weirder and worse when it's just SCRY). Then, with "oof, it's not SCRIES, is it?" fresh in my head, I checked the "I" cross and got ... LIE-IN. All of the -IN answers (BE-IN, SIT-IN, LOVE-IN) are vaguely suspect to me in their ancientness, but LIE-IN ... I have seen people do some version of a LIE-IN in recent years, but I think it's more commonly known now as a DIE-IN. Anyway, SCRIES LIE-IN was a rocky 1-2, but everything evened out from there. In fact, my favorite parts of the solve came in that NE section. First, though it isn't my favorite answer, ESSIE delighted me because I tweeted just last week about the astonishing cast you could put together just from five-letter actors whose last name was Davis: I had VIOLA, OSSIE, GEENA. Someone reminded me "hey, you forgot BETTE." And then later on, another person chimed in, "Don't forget ESSIE!" Actually, now that I look, that "other person" was none other than 8-time American Crossword Puzzle Tournament champion Dan Feyer.

So because of this little thought experiment, I actually remembered ESSIE's name today. In fact, as I read the clue, my brain went "It's ESSIE! Wait, who's ESSIE!? Why do we know this?" And now you know why we knew. I don't think ESSIE is necessarily great fill, but I liked ESSIE insofar as my remembering the name at all proves that my brain is still admitting new information, however grudgingly. Finally (!), I liked that I ended my solve at END (22A: Redundant word before "result"). Felt good and fitting, and also very unlikely, in that I do not normally END my solves way up at the top of the grid like that. It was as if END was calling me, drawing me in like a beacon: "END here. . . END here . . ." And so I did.