Blind Willie Johnson | |
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 The only known photograph of Johnson, 1927 | |
| Background information | |
| Also known as |
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| Born | (1897-01-25)January 25, 1897 Pendleton, Texas, U.S. |
| Died | September 18, 1945(1945-09-18) (aged 48) Beaumont, Texas, U.S. |
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| Years active | 1920s–1945 |
| Labels | Columbia |
Willie Johnson (January 25, 1897 – September 18, 1945), commonly known asBlind Willie Johnson, was an Americangospel blues singer and guitarist. His landmark recordings completed between 1927 and 1930, thirty songs in all, display a combination of powerfulchest voice singing,slide guitar skills and originality that has influenced generations of musicians. His records sold well though as a street performer and preacher, he had little wealth in his lifetime. His life was poorly documented, but over time, music historians such asSamuel Charters have uncovered more about him and his five recording sessions.
A revival of interest in Johnson's music began in the 1960s following his inclusion onHarry Smith'sAnthology of American Folk Music and by the efforts of the blues guitaristReverend Gary Davis. Along with Davis, he has since been considered the dominant player ofholy blues music which convey religious themes in a blues style, often with a blues style of guitar accompaniment.[1]
Johnson's work has become more accessible throughcompilation albums such asAmerican Epic: The Best of Blind Willie Johnson and the Charters compilations. As a result, Johnson is credited as one of the most influential practitioners of the blues and his slide guitar playing, particularly on his hymnDark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, is highly acclaimed. Other recordings by Johnson includeJesus Make Up My Dying Bed,It's Nobody's Fault but Mine andJohn the Revelator.
Blind Willie Johnson was born on January 25, 1897, inPendleton, Texas, a small town nearTemple, Texas, tosharecropper Dock Johnson and Mary King.[2] His family, which according to theblues historianStephen Calt included at least one younger brother (named Carl), moved to the agriculturally rich community ofMarlin, where Johnson spent most of his childhood. There, the Johnson family attended church, most likely the Marlin Missionary Baptist Church, every Sunday, a habit that had a lasting impact on Johnson and fueled his desire to be ordained as aBaptist minister.[citation needed] When Johnson was five years old, his father gave him his first instrument, acigar box guitar.[3]
Johnson was not born blind though he was visually impaired at an early age. It is uncertain how he lost his sight but it is generally agreed by most of his biographers that he was blinded by his stepmother when he was seven years old, a claim that was first made by Johnson's widow, Angeline Johnson.[4][5] In her recollection, Willie's father had violently confronted Willie's stepmother about her infidelity and during the argument, she splashed Willie with a caustic solution oflye water permanently blinding him.[6]
Few other details are known about his childhood. At some point, he met another blind musician, Madkin Butler, who had a powerful singing and preaching style that influenced Johnson's own vocal delivery and repertoire.[7] Adam Booker, a blind minister interviewed by the blues historianSamuel Charters in the 1950s, recalled that while visiting his father inHearne, Johnson would perform religious songs on street corners and had a tin cup tied to the neck of hisStella guitar to collect money.[6] Occasionally, Johnson would play on the same street asBlind Lemon Jefferson but the extent of the two songsters' involvement with each other is unknown.[6] In 1926 or early 1927, Johnson began an unregistered marriage with Willis B. Harris who occasionally sang on the street with him and accompanied him on piano at benefits for the Marlin Church of God in Christ. They had a daughter, Sam Faye Johnson Kelly, in 1931.[8][9] The blues guitaristL. C. Robinson recalled that his sister Anne also claimed to have been married to Johnson in the late 1920s.[10]
By the time Johnson began his recording career, he was a well-known evangelist with a "remarkable technique and a wide range of songs" as blues historianPaul Oliver notes.[11] On December 3, 1927, Johnson along with Billiken Johnson andColey Jones got together at a temporary studio thattalent scoutFrank Buckley Walker had set up in theDeep Ellum neighborhood inDallas to record them forColumbia Records. In the session, Johnson played six songs, 13 takes total. Among the songs he recorded in that day wereJesus Make Up My Dying Bed,It's Nobody's Fault but Mine,Mother's Children Have a Hard Time,Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, andIf I Had My Way I'd Tear the Building Down".[12] He was compensated with $50 per usable side, a substantial amount for the period, plus a bonus for forfeitingroyalties from the sales of his records.[citation needed]
The first releases were I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole and Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed, on Columbia's popular 14000 Race series. His debut was a substantial success as 9,400 copies were pressed, more than the latest release by one of Columbia's most established stars,Bessie Smith with an additional pressing of 6,000 copies followed.[13] His fifth recorded song, Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, theB-side of Johnson's second release, best exemplifies his slide guitar playing inopen D tuning. For the session, Johnson substituted a knife or penknife for the bottleneck and, according to Harris, he played with athumb pick.[14] His melancholy humming of the guitar part creates the impression of unison moaning, a style of singing hymns that is common in southern African-American church groups.[15] In 1928, the blues critic Edward Abbe Niles praised Johnson in his column forThe Bookman, emphasizing his "violent, tortured, and abysmal shouts and groans, and his inspired guitar playing".[16]
Johnson and Harris returned to Dallas on December 5, 1928 to recordI'm Gonna Run to the City of Refuge, Jesus Is Coming Soon,Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying andKeep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning.[17] He also recorded two unreleased and untitled tracks under the pseudonym Blind Texas Marlin but thoserecordings were never recovered.[18] Another year passed before Johnson recorded again, on December 10 and 11, 1929, the longest sessions of his career. He completed ten sides in 16 takes at Werlein's Music Store inNew Orleans also recording some duets with an unknown female singer who is thought to have been a member of ReverendJ. M. Gates's congregation.[citation needed] The blind street performer, Dave Ross reported hearing Johnson performing on the street in New Orleans in December of 1929.[6] Jazz historian Richard Allen recalls hearing a story that Johnson was arrested while performing in front of the Custom House onCanal Street for allegedly attempting to incite a riot with his impassioned rendition of If I Had My Way I'd Tear the Building Down.[6][19]
For his fifth and final recording session, Johnson journeyed toAtlanta, Georgia along with Harris who added vocal harmonies. They completed ten selections on April 20, 1930. Columbia choseEverybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right paired withGo with Me to That Land as the first record released from the session. However, theGreat Depression had impoverished much of Johnson's audience and consequently only 800 copies were pressed. Some of his songs were re-released byVocalion Records in 1932 but Johnson never recorded again.[6]
Johnson allegedly remarried, this time to Angeline Johnson, in the early 1930s but, as with Harris, it is unlikely that the union was officially registered.[citation needed] Throughout the Great Depression and the 1940s, he performed in several cities and towns in Texas, includingBeaumont. A city directory shows that in 1945, a Reverend W. J. Johnson, undoubtedly Blind Willie, operated the House of Prayer at 1440 Forrest Street there.[6][20] In 1945, a fire destroyed their home and, with nowhere else to go, Johnson continued to live in its ruins where he was soaked and cold. Standing out in the winter winds the next day, singing to earn a little money, Willie got sick and within a few days was dying of pneumonia. He contractedmalarial fever and no hospital would admit him either because of his visual impairment or, as Angeline Johnson stated in an interview with Charters, because he was black.[6] Over the course of the year, his condition steadily worsened until he died, on September 18, 1945. His death certificate reportedsyphilis and blindness as contributing factors.[21]
According to his death certificate, he was buried in Blanchette Cemetery, in Beaumont. The location of the cemetery had been forgotten until it was rediscovered in 2009. His grave site remains unknown but the researchers who identified the cemetery erected a monument there in his honor in 2010.[22]
Johnson is considered one of the masters of blues singing and guitar playing particularly in thegospel blues style. Like his contemporaryBlind Lemon Jefferson, he channeled the expressiveness of the blues into his religious messages which he took from hymnbooks.[4] Samuel Charters, in the liner notes to the compilation albumThe Complete Blind Willie Johnson, wrote that, in fact, Johnson was not a bluesman in the traditional sense, "but here still is so much similarity between his relentless guitar rhythms and his harsh, insistent voice, and the same fierce intensities of the blues singers, that they become images of each other, seen in the mirror of the society that produced them".[6]
An important aspect of Johnson's recordings was his mastery of bottleneck, slide guitar technique which was influential onRobert Johnson andHowlin' Wolf.[23] He punctuated his playing withtonal control and a sense of timing, often using the guitar to sing harmony and to fill in lines, as on Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.[13] By most accounts, including one by the reputable blues guitaristBlind Willie McTell, Johnson used a knife as a slide but other claims by Harris and the bluesman Thom Shaw say he used a thumb pick or brass ring on his recordings.[citation needed] The music historian Steve Calt said of Johnson's style, "opposed to other bottleneck artists he varies the speed of his vibrato drastically, often speeding up as he slides into a note. He is also one of the few bottleneck artists with the ability to consistently sound three or four discreet melody notes upon striking a string once, a skill that reflects uncanny left-handed strength, accuracy and agility".[24]
Johnson sang in a gravelly, falsetto bass voice that was powerful enough for passersby on the streets to hear.[25] His vocal interplay with his guitar was described by the blues writer Mark Makin as "fierce" and "not unlike the 'Hell and Damnation' of a Baptist preacher such as a fired-upReverend A. W. Nix".[13] On some instances in his recordings, Johnson also sang in his natural tenor voice.[13] The only known influence on Johnson's singing style is the blind musician Madkin Butler, who, like Johnson, sang his religious message on the streets of Texas cities.[25]
Johnson's music was revived in the 1960s thanks in large part toHarry Smith including his version ofJohn The Revelator in the second volume of hisAnthology of American Folk Music,Social Music, along with the three Sam Charters blues collections forFolkways Records,The Country Blues,Rural Blues andBlind Willie Johnson: His Story and blues guitaristReverend Gary Davis, a highly regarded figure in New York'sfolk scene, recording hisSamson and Delilah whichthe Soul Stirrers,the Staples Singers,Buffy Sainte-Marie,Fairport Convention, andPeter, Paul and Marycovered or re-interpreted.[14][23] In November 1962,Bob Dylan recorded a rendition of Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed, retitled In My Time of Dying for hisself-titled debut album.[26]Rock bands and artists of the 1970s also covered Johnson's songs includingLed Zeppelin,John Sebastian, andEric Clapton.[21][27] In 2016, Alligator Records released thetribute albumGod Don't Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson produced by Jeffrey Gaskill with covers by various artists includingTom Waits,Lucinda Williams,Sinead O'Connor andDerek Trucks andSusan Tedeschi.[28][29] The album was nominated for two Grammy Awards: Best Roots Gospel Album and Best American Roots Performance forBlind Boys of Alabama recording of Mother's Children Have a Hard Time.
All of Johnson's released material has become easily available thanks tocompilation albums such asBlind Willie Johnson 1927–1930 andThe Complete Blind Willie Johnson, among others. Samuel Charters was the first major blues historian to attempt to uncover more about Johnson's life, first documenting him in his 1959 bookThe Country Blues. In 1993, Charters corrected some factual inaccuracies in Johnson's biography in the liner notes toThe Complete Blind Willie Johnson.[6][30] Other books related to Johnson includeShine a Light: My Year with Blind Willie Johnson andRevelation The Blind Willie Johnson Biography.[31]
In 1977,Carl Sagan and a team of researchers were tasked with collecting a representation of the human experience here on Earth and sending it into space on the Voyager probe for other life forms in the universe.[32] Among the 27 songs selected for theVoyager Golden Record,NASA consultantTimothy Ferris choseDark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground[33] because, according to Ferris, "Johnson's song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans first appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight".[33] In 2010, theLibrary of Congress also selected the recording as an addition to theNational Recording Registry which annually selects recordings that they deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[34]
In 2017, the story of Blind Willie Johnson's inclusion on the Voyager probe was told in the multi-award-winning documentary seriesAmerican Epic directed byBernard MacMahon.[35][36] A compilation album,American Epic: The Best of Blind Willie Johnson, accompanied the film and featured radically improved restorations of sixteen of Johnson's recordings.[37][38][39]
