Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground: How Blues Musician Willie Johnson Reached Outer Space
There isn’t much known about Blind Willie Johnson, the legendary Blues musician who received posthumous fame much after his short recording career. His recording career is as hazy as the smoke he burned and so tragically died in.
Blind Willie Johnson was born on January 25, 1897, in Pendleton, Texas, a small town near Waco where he would live out his childhood as the son of a sharecropper. Willie Johnson wasn’t born blind, but according to several accounts, he was blinded by his stepmother when he was seven years old.
In a fateful moment and fit of anger which Blues historians now recount, young Willie was blinded by a solution of caustic lye water which was splashed on his eyes after an argument between his real father and stepmother about her infidelity.
According to legend, the last thing young Willie Johnson saw was the night sky studded with stars and constellations.
However, despite his disability, he had his outlet in a cigar-box guitar his father gifted him when he was five years old.
Johnson went on to perform as a street musician in Texas in the 1920s and ’30s and became quite popular for a “remarkable technique and a wide range of songs”, as noted by the blues historian Paul Oliver.
He recorded 30 songs for Columbia Records between 1927 and 1930, out of which ‘Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground’ was the standout track for its eerie, almost being touched by a ghost-like enveloping feeling and Johnson’s troubled humming and moaning accompanied by an unearthly piece of music on slide guitar.
He died in abysmal conditions after his house was burned down in 1945. With nowhere else to go, Johnson continued to stay in the ruins of his house, where he was exposed to the humidity and fire and ash. He contracted malarial fever soon after, and no hospital would admit him, either because of his visual impairment or because he was black. Over the course of the year, his condition steadily worsened until he died, on September 18, 1945. People didn’t take much notice of his untimely death at the time.
However, Blind Willie Johnson would get his redemption in the stars he saw just before he went blind.
In the year 1977, NASA sent out a space probe called the ‘Voyager 1’ which was meant to study the outer solar system. Onboard the spacecraft were two phonograph records called the ‘Voyager Golden Records’, which consisted of sounds and images carefully selected to showcase the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The records were intended for extraterrestrial life out in space who might find it. On the record, out of 27 pieces of music as selected by a committee headed by Carl Sagan, was Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground’.
“Johnson’s song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight,” said Carl Sagan, on including Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (1927) on the Voyager Golden Records.
Now, Blind Willie Johnson’s slide guitar and moan encapsulating and portraying the struggle and tribulation of his life here on this planet will echo not only on Earth but through the far reaches space.
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