My All-Timers: 30. Blind Willie Johnson — The Complete Blind Willie Johnson
This whole “getting into scratchy blues recordings from 80 years ago” thing started right after high school with Robert Johnson. I saw a brief thing about him on a VH1 documentary, talking about how he supposedly sold his soul to Satan, and then months later a professor at Kirkwood played me one of his songs, and a million watts of light went off in my head.
From there it was Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James and many others, but I kept returning to my favorite of all: Blind Willie Johnson.
Not too many of my friends share my affinity for the very old blues. I don’t say this to earn cred as an astute appreciator of music that no one else could possibly understand. I totally get where people are coming from. Much of this stuff is poorly recorded, it has little to no full band accompaniment, and it’s not…fun. It’s not a good time. It’s usually just a guy in a room playing songs that you absolutely cannot dance or groove to.
It’s even more impractical considering how Blind Willie Johnson was a Christian blues singer, through and through. Nearly every one of his songs proclaims a deep faith in God. By all rights, this should not work for me. I am not religious. I guess I am an atheist, though people sure do call you a chump for calling yourself that, so who the hell knows. The point is, I should not love a bluesman who almost exclusively sang about the awesomeness of Jesus.
But there was something deeper than just Christianity going on in Johnson’s blues. The Definitive Blind Willie Johnson collects all 30 of the songs he recorded from 1927 to 1930 (I can’t find this specific version on Spotify, but you’ll find the same record with Complete Recorded Titles, Vol. 1 and 2). The recording quality varies throughout, but most of it actually comes across pretty well. There is not a lot of static and scratchiness to distract you.
Johnson’s guitar playing jumps around like a wild animal — slide guitar going up and down the neck at will and hitting sudden stops right in the middle of phrases. Yet you never feel that Johnson is unskilled or out of control. In the midst of his thrashing, the song’s insistent melody comes cutting through and refuses to die until it has made its point. I’m not sure that even if I practiced forever that I would be able to play like him.
I know for sure that I would never be able to sing like Blind Willie Johnson. He has a voice that once you hear it, will likely never leave you. He roars with his chest in a style that seems impossible to replicate over several recording sessions, just like the unearthly growl that Tom Waits would perfect 50 years later. But also like Waits, Johnson was more than a growl. Even within his deep-chested singing he could use a vibrato that’s just haunting. That’s perhaps what I love most about his music — those moments when he’s in a fury but he suddenly sings like a haggard angel, summoning the spirit of the Lord through his non-church-friendly voice.
Johnson might be most famous for “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” — a wordless meditation on the crucifixion of Jesus. The song was sent into space in 1977, as part of Carl Sagan’s mission to send a “Golden Record” out into the cosmos on the Voyager probe. He sits on that record alongside people like Beethoven, Stravinsky and Chuck Berry — all giants of music. A less harsh piece of music than most of his songs, “Dark Was the Night” is still a harrowing journey. Johnson rambles up and down the neck with a knife substituting for his bottleneck slide, and he mimics the slide melodies with “mmmms” and “aaaaaaahs” that still strike me with the same awe as the first time I heard it.
Half of Johnson’s recorded output features a female singer who to this day is still not fully identified. Spotify lists her as “Willie B. Richardson,” but that’s speculation. Historians think she was a member of Johnson’s church, which would check out since that’s probably where he spent most of his time. Whoever she is, she’s okay. She gets a little warbly here and there, but at her most effective, she acts as a brilliant call and response to Johnson’s growls. “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning” is the best usage of her talents — maybe Johnson’s sexiest song, though he certainly didn’t intend that. It’s his most groovable song, and Johnson and the woman share lines and duet with precision.
As mentioned, Blind Willie Johnson was a devout Christian, and his songs reflect that. Even though I would never listen to pretty much any other Christian music, somehow I’m able to be okay with all this God stuff. Johnson’s voice and tunes help, obviously, but it’s also the pureness of Johnson’s message. He’s definitely telling you that you should love God too — “Can’t Nobody Hide From God” makes that clear enough. And while that might annoy me, I still feel like Johnson was coming from a good place. He was simply a poor man from Texas, blinded at a young age from his mom throwing a household chemical in his face, and all he had was music and religion. He was happy, and how can one be mad about that?
The inspiration for my first tattoo came from one of Johnson’s songs, “Trouble Will Soon Be Over” (that video above is a reenactment — no video exists of Johnson, and only one picture is known to be him). Those words are on my right arm, below the tree from the TV show Six Feet Under. Both that show and Johnson’s songs dealt heavily in themes of death and the hereafter. I don’t believe that I’m going anywhere when I die. I don’t think my dad, who died 30 years ago this April, went anywhere when he died. I simply believe that when he died, and when I will die, all of the troubles, both good and bad are done. And all you can leave behind is what you said and did, and you just have to hope that you did alright. And maybe “soon” means next year (hopefully not) and maybe it means 60 years from now (let’s go with that one). Either way, it will come to an end, and whatever we do on our way toward that end, whether it’s praising God or it’s loving your family and friends with all of your love, we all get to the same place. Good music just helps us along while we get there.
