The Soul of a Man

Who was Blind Willie Johnson?

by Michael Hall

December 2010

Illustration by Marc Burckhardt

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On August 20, 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 2 spaceship on a one-way ticket to oblivion. Three weeks later, its sister craft, Voyager 1, blasted off with the same destination. Their mission for the first dozen years or so, as they cruised through the solar system, was to gather data from the planets. Their goal for the next 60,000 years or so, as they leave us far behind, is to carry a message in a bottle to the stars. Alongside an array of high-tech cameras, infrared instruments, and a large parabolic radio antenna, each Voyager bears a stylus, a phonograph record, and directions for playing it. The record isn’t Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Kiss’s Love Gun, both of which were top ten albums in the summer of 1977. This record is made of copper and plated in gold, created to last forever, to offer an audio and visual slide show of all things Earthly. This is who we are, it says. Or were. The record includes words (greetings in 55 languages), sounds (a train, a kiss, a barking dog), pictures (mountains, dolphins, sprinters), and ninety minutes of music. There are panpipes from Peru, bagpipes from Bulgaria, and drums from Senegal.

And at the very end, summing up the power and the pathos of everything that went before, are two singular pieces of music by two singular men who couldn’t have been more different. One was a deaf German whose song was recorded by a string quartet in a professional studio. The other was a blind Texan who played his song on a cheap guitar in a Dallas hotel room. The German is Ludwig van Beethoven, and he closes the album, befitting his reputation as the greatest composer ever. The Cavatina from his thirteenth string quartet was written in his last years, when he was dying. It is six and a half minutes of sweet elegy, music that says what couldn’t be put into words. This is it. This is the end.

Leading into it is a song recorded and played by a twentieth-century street musician, Blind Willie Johnson. The song is “Dark Was the Night—Cold Was the Ground,” a largely wordless hymn built around the yearning cries of Johnson’s slide guitar and the moans and melodies of his voice. The two musical elements track each other, finishing each other’s phrases; Johnson hums fragments of the diffuse melody, then answers with the fluttering sighs of steel or glass moving over the strings. Sometimes the guitar jimmies a low, ascending melody that sounds like a man trying to climb out of a mud hole. Then the guitar goes up high, playing an inquisitive, hopeful line, and the voice goes high too, copying the melody. There’s no meter or rhythm. In fact, “Dark Was the Night” sounds less like a song than a scene—the Passion of Jesus, his suffering on the cross, the ultimate pairing of despair and belief. The original melody and lyrics (“Dark was the night and cold was the ground, on which the Lord was laid”) may have originated in eighteenth-century England, but Johnson reinvented them. Occasionally his slide clicks against the neck of the guitar, and you remember that this was just a man playing a song in front of a microphone. You can hear the air in the room. You can hear the longing in his voice. This is what it sounds like to be a human being.

The slide guitarist and producer Ry Cooder, who used “Dark Was the Night” as the motif for his melancholy sound track to Paris, Texas, once called the song “the most transcendent piece in all American music.” In about 60,000 years, one of the Voyagers just might enter another solar system. Maybe it will be intercepted. Maybe the interceptors will figure out how to play that record. Maybe they’ll hear “Dark Was the Night.” Maybe they’ll wonder, What kind of creature made that music?

There are hundreds of books on Beethoven; though he was born 240 years ago, we know almost everything there is to know about him. But Johnson is an utter mystery. We know that he died on September 18, 1945, in Beaumont. But we don’t know for certain when and where he was born, and it’s possible we never will. Almost everyone who knew him is gone. And though a few of his contemporaries told stories about him before passing on, many of them had lively imaginations.

What we know for sure is that for a brief period of time, Johnson was a recording star, one of the most popular gospel “race” artists of his era, outselling the renowned blues singer Bessie Smith during the Depression. He recorded thirty songs between 1927 and 1930; many featured a female background singer. His first two sessions were in Dallas, in 1927 and 1928, and he recorded many of his best songs there—“Dark Was the Night,” “If I Had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down,” “Mother’s Children Have a Hard Time.” His first song, “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole,” was released in January 1928 and sold 15,400 copies, a lot for the time. He received attention in unusual places. Johnson was “apparently a religious fanatic,” wrote one critic for the New York literary review The Bookman, who also noted his “violent, tortured and abysmal shouts and groans and his inspired guitar.” Johnson’s third session took place in New Orleans in 1929, and his last was in Atlanta in April 1930. Only 800 copies of that final record were even pressed. He never recorded again.

And then Johnson disappeared. His style of guitar playing lived on through the thirties and forties, as musicians like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Mance Lipscomb listened to those records and copied his slide technique. Others couldn’t get the sound of those songs and that voice out of their heads. They were driven to find more, to solve the mystery of the man whose affliction had become part of his very name. So they hit the road, drawn to the small towns they thought he had lived in, the ruins of homes he may have slept in, the run-down cemeteries he may have been buried in. They pieced together fact and fiction, and the more they found, the more mysterious he became.

The first to seek Johnson was Samuel Charters. In 1948 Charters was a teenager in Berkeley, California, playing clarinet in a Dixieland band. After rehearsals, he and his bandmates would sit around and listen to a mysterious 78 rpm record that they knew nothing about except for the title of the song and the name of the artist: “Dark Was the Night—Cold Was the Ground,” Blind Willie Johnson. It sounded like it came from another world. Sixty-two years later, Charters still remembers that sound, that feeling. It was, he told me, “a shattering experience. It changed my life.”

In 1953 Charters settled into New Orleans with a big tape recorder and dreams of recording blues and folk artists. The one he really wanted to find was Johnson. Soon he came across a blind street singer named Dave Ross who played some of Johnson’s songs. Ross told Charters that he had met Johnson in Beaumont in 1929 and again later that year in New Orleans, when Johnson had come to the city to record. Ross said he thought Johnson was living in Dallas. So Charters and his wife at the time, Mary, were off, pounding the streets of that city’s black neighborhoods. The director of a Lighthouse for the Blind just outside Dallas had heard of Johnson and said there was a blind preacher named Adam Booker in Brenham who might know him.

The couple drove southeast and on November 6, 1955, found Booker in a small cabin on the outskirts of Brenham. Booker told Charters that he had led a church in Hearne in 1925 and that Willie’s father, George, had been a member. Willie lived in Marlin then, but he would visit his father in Hearne and play on the streets on Saturday afternoons, when the cotton farmers and their families would come to town to socialize and buy provisions. “He’d get on the street and sing and pick the guitar and they would listen and would give him money,” remembered Booker. “Every Saturday, he wouldn’t hardly miss.” Booker said Johnson had a tin cup tied to the neck of his guitar with some wire. He also remembered days when Johnson would be on one corner and the great bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson would be on another.

This whole scenario fascinated Charters. He was traveling through the heartland of some of the great Texas bluesmen—Jefferson was from nearby Coutchman, Lipscomb was from Navasota, and Lightnin’ Hopkins was from Centerville. But Charters knew that, unlike these men, Johnson was a gospel singer, not a bluesman. He sang old spirituals and hymns and occasionally a topical, or “message,” song. His songs were about the love of Jesus and the hope of salvation but also the wrath of God; Johnson believed in the fire and brimstone. He sang in two voices—one clear and high, the other deep and raspy, a voice that a lot of street singers and preachers used to get attention and rise above the din.

Booker said he’d met Johnson again, in Dallas, in 1928, and that he later moved to Waco; he thought Johnson was living in Beaumont. Two days later Charters was there too, walking along Forsythe Street in the black section of town, asking residents if they knew of a blind gospel singer. “Which one?” was the reply. An elderly man, a guitarist. Again: “Which one?” Eventually he met people who remembered Johnson as “a tall, heavy man, not dark in color; a dignified man and a magnificent singer.” Finally a druggist sent him to a shack on the south side of town, where he met a woman in her mid-fifties who said her name was Angeline Johnson. Yes, she knew Blind Willie Johnson, she said. She had been married to him.

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