The lone photo of Blind Willie.
Forty years ago this week, man stepped on the moon. I can’t find any mention of music aboard that Apollo 11 flight, but eight years later, in 1977, Voyager I was launched into space, and aboard it was the Golden Record, comprising sounds from across the world selected by Carl Sagan. Among the American songs included, that extraterrestrials might now be grooving to, are Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Louis Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues,” and Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” wherein Blind Willie’s sorrow is made manifest through a series of gut-wrenching moans.
“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”
Blind Willie’s time on Earth is as sketchy as the only known photo of him. The most telling details can be found in Austin music writer Michael Corcoran’s award-winning article “The Soul of Blind Willie Johnson.” Corcoran explains Blind Willie’s influence all the way through Jack White. Others who have fallen under the spell of this black gospel pioneer — he sounds like a bullfrog with a three-pack-a-day habit — include none other than Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton, who respectively covered the following songs. For more on black gospel music, check out my story “How Sweet the Sound,” about Baylor University professor Robert Darden’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project.
“Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed”
“It’s Nobody’s Fault but Mine”
“Mother’s Children Have a Hard Time”
2 Comments
July 24, 2009 at 12:47 am
Hey Mike, great article on Blind Willie Johnson. One small correction. The song title for the last clip is: “Motherless Children Have a Hard Time”. Your blogs are really fun to read.
July 24, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Thanks, David. I think all of these songs have taken on different titles over the years, and “Motherless Children” is the title under which Clapton recorded it. “Mother’s Children” is how it’s listed on the Blind Willie double-disc The Complete Blind Willie Johnson, which I highly recommend as a primer. For what it’s worth, I also think Dylan recorded “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed” under “In My Time of Dyin’.”