Jump to content

Blind Willie Johnson

This is a good article. Click here for more information.
Listen to this article
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blind Willie Johnson
The only known photograph of Johnson, 1927
The only known photograph of Johnson, 1927
Background information
Also known as
  • Blind Willie
  • Blind Texas Marlin
  • The Blind Pilgrim
Born(1897-01-25)January 25, 1897
Pendleton, Texas, U.S.
DiedSeptember 18, 1945(1945-09-18) (aged 48)
Beaumont, Texas, U.S.
Genres
Occupations
  • Musician
  • preacher
Instruments
  • Guitar
  • vocals
Years active1920s–1945
LabelsColumbia

Willie Johnson (January 25, 1897 – September 18, 1945), commonly known as Blind Willie Johnson, was an American gospel blues singer and guitarist. His landmark recordings completed between 1927 and 1930, thirty songs in all, display a combination of powerful chest 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 as Samuel 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 on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and by the efforts of the blues guitarist Reverend Gary Davis. Along with Davis, he has since been considered the dominant player of holy 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 through compilation albums such as American 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 hymn Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, is highly acclaimed. Other recordings by Johnson include Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed, It's Nobody's Fault but Mine and John the Revelator.

Biography

[edit]

Early life and career

[edit]

Blind Willie Johnson was born on January 25, 1897, in Pendleton, Texas, a small town near Temple, Texas, to sharecropper Dock Johnson and Mary King.[2] His family, which according to the blues historian Stephen Calt included at least one younger brother (named Carl), moved to the agriculturally rich community of Marlin, 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 a Baptist minister.[citation needed] When Johnson was five years old, his father gave him his first instrument, a cigar 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 of lye 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 historian Samuel Charters in the 1950s, recalled that while visiting his father in Hearne, Johnson would perform religious songs on street corners and had a tin cup tied to the neck of his Stella guitar to collect money. [6] Occasionally, Johnson would play on the same street as Blind 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 guitarist L. C. Robinson recalled that his sister Anne also claimed to have been married to Johnson in the late 1920s.[10]

Recording sessions (1927–1930)

[edit]

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 historian Paul Oliver notes.[11] On December 3, 1927, Johnson along with Billiken Johnson and Coley Jones got together at a temporary studio that talent scout Frank Buckley Walker had set up in the Deep Ellum neighborhood in Dallas to record them for Columbia Records. In the session, Johnson played six songs, 13 takes total. Among the songs he recorded in that day were Jesus 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, and If 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 forfeiting royalties 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, the B-side of Johnson's second release, best exemplifies his slide guitar playing in open D tuning. For the session, Johnson substituted a knife or penknife for the bottleneck and, according to Harris, he played with a thumb 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 for The 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 record I'm Gonna Run to the City of Refuge, Jesus Is Coming Soon, Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying and Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning.[17] He also recorded two unreleased and untitled tracks under the pseudonym Blind Texas Marlin but those recordings 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 in New Orleans also recording some duets with an unknown female singer who is thought to have been a member of Reverend J. 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 on Canal 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 to Atlanta, Georgia along with Harris who added vocal harmonies. They completed ten selections on April 20, 1930. Columbia chose Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right paired with Go with Me to That Land as the first record released from the session. However, the Great Depression had impoverished much of Johnson's audience and consequently only 800 copies were pressed. Some of his songs were re-released by Vocalion Records in 1932 but Johnson never recorded again.[6]

Later life and death

[edit]

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, including Beaumont. 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 contracted malarial 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 reported syphilis 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]

Musical style

[edit]

Johnson is considered one of the masters of blues singing and guitar playing particularly in the gospel blues style. Like his contemporary Blind 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 album The 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 on Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf.[23] He punctuated his playing with tonal 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 guitarist Blind 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-up Reverend 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]

Legacy

[edit]

Johnson's music was revived in the 1960s thanks in large part to Harry Smith including his version of John The Revelator in the second volume of his Anthology of American Folk Music, Social Music, along with the three Sam Charters blues collections for Folkways Records, The Country Blues, Rural Blues and Blind Willie Johnson: His Story and blues guitarist Reverend Gary Davis, a highly regarded figure in New York's folk scene, recording his Samson and Delilah which the Soul Stirrers, the Staples Singers, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Fairport Convention, and Peter, Paul and Mary covered 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 his self-titled debut album.[26] Rock bands and artists of the 1970s also covered Johnson's songs including Led Zeppelin, John Sebastian, and Eric Clapton.[21][27] In 2016, Alligator Records released the tribute album God Don't Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson produced by Jeffrey Gaskill with covers by various artists including Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Sinead O'Connor and Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi.[28][29] The album was nominated for two Grammy Awards: Best Roots Gospel Album and Best American Roots Performance for Blind Boys of Alabama recording of Mother's Children Have a Hard Time.

All of Johnson's released material has become easily available thanks to compilation albums such as Blind Willie Johnson 1927–1930 and The 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 book The Country Blues. In 1993, Charters corrected some factual inaccuracies in Johnson's biography in the liner notes to The Complete Blind Willie Johnson.[6][30] Other books related to Johnson include Shine a Light: My Year with Blind Willie Johnson and Revelation 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 the Voyager Golden Record, NASA consultant Timothy Ferris selected Dark 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, the Library of Congress also selected the recording as an addition to the National 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 series American Epic directed by Bernard 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]

See also

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Weissman, Dick; Weissman, Richard (2005). Blues: The Basics. Routledge. p. 77. ISBN 9780415970686.
  2. ^ Ford, Shane (2014). Shine a Light: My Year with "Blind" Willie Johnson (2nd ed.). Lulu Press.
  3. ^ Pinkard, Ryan (26 February 2016). "Dark Was the Night: The Legacy of Blind Willie Johnson". Tidal. Retrieved October 17, 2016.
  4. ^ a b Charters, Smauel (1965). Blind Willie Johnson 1927–1930 (PDF) (liner notes). Smithsonian Folkways. RBF-10.
  5. ^ Layne, Joslyn. "Blind Willie Johnson: Biography". AllMusic. Retrieved October 17, 2016.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Charters, Samuel (1993). The Complete Blind Willie Johnson (CD booklet). Columbia Legacy. CK 52836.
  7. ^ Hall, Michael. "The Soul of a Man". Texas Monthly. Retrieved October 17, 2016.
  8. ^ "Legendary Blind Willie Johnson". Acoustic Guitar. Retrieved October 18, 2016.
  9. ^ Komara, Edward (2006). The Blues Encyclopedia. T & F Bomara. p. 327. ISBN 0-415-92699-8.
  10. ^ Jasinski, Laurie (2012). Handbook of Texas Music. Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 978-0-87611-297-7.
  11. ^ Smith, Brad. "Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground"" (PDF). American Music. American-music.org. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 28, 2016. Retrieved October 25, 2016.
  12. ^ Green, Elon (5 March 2016). "How Do You Sing Blind Willie Johnson?". The New Yorker. Retrieved October 21, 2016.
  13. ^ a b c d Makin, Mark (2006). Blind Willie Johnson, Volume 1 (CD booklet). Document Records. DOCD-5690.
  14. ^ a b Obrecht, Jas (1998). "Can't Nobody Hide from God: The Steel-String Evangelism of Blind Willie Johnson". Guitar Player. Vol. 32, no. 6. pp. 57–62.
  15. ^ Dargan, William (2006). Lining Out the Word: Dr. Watts Hymn Singing in the Music of Black Americans. University of California Press. p. 70. ISBN 0-520-23448-0.
  16. ^ Hurwitt, Elliot (2008). Ramblin' on My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues. University of Illinois Press. pp. 131–134. ISBN 978-0-252-07448-6.
  17. ^ "Blind Willie Johnson Discography". Wirz.de. Retrieved October 21, 2016.[self-published source]
  18. ^ Baier, Mark. "Blind Willie Johnson". Chicago Blues Guide. Archived from the original on October 24, 2016. Retrieved October 21, 2016.
  19. ^ "Johnson, Blind Willie". The Handbook of Texas. Tshaonline.org. Retrieved October 21, 2016.
  20. ^ Carlson, James (December 30, 2009). "Dark Was the Night: The Life and Times of Blind Willie Johnson". No Depression. Archived from the original on August 13, 2018. Retrieved October 17, 2016.
  21. ^ a b Greenblatt, Mike. "Blind Willie Johnson's Singing Eclipses Music, Lyrics". Goldmine. Retrieved October 21, 2016.
  22. ^ "Blind Willie Johnson Historical Marker Approved". News Wire (Press release). March 3, 2010. Retrieved October 22, 2016.
  23. ^ a b Smith, Nathan (May 16, 2016). "Pioneers: Blind Willie Johnson". Texas Music Magazine. Archived from the original on October 24, 2016. Retrieved October 21, 2016.
  24. ^ Calt, Steve (2012). Praise God, I'm Satisfied (CD booklet). Yazoo Records. L-1085.
  25. ^ a b Lewis, James. "Master of Slide Guitar Blind Willie Johnson". Cross Rhythms. Retrieved October 21, 2016.
  26. ^ "Bob Dylan (1962)". Bobdylan.com. Retrieved October 25, 2016.
  27. ^ Coppedge, Clay (June 4, 2007). "Blind Willie Johnson's History in Temple a Little Murky". Temple Daily Telegram. Retrieved October 25, 2016.
  28. ^ Horowitz, Hal (October 25, 2016). "Various artists, God Don't Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson". American Songwriter. Archived from the original on August 7, 2018. Retrieved October 25, 2016.
  29. ^ Jurek, Thom. "Blind Willie Johnson, God Don't Never Change: Review". AllMusic. Retrieved October 25, 2016.
  30. ^ Koda, Cub. "Blind Willie Johnson, The Complete Blind Willie Johnson: Review". AllMusic. Retrieved October 25, 2016.
  31. ^ "Review: Blind Willie Johnson: The Biography". Document Records. Retrieved October 25, 2016.
  32. ^ Nelson, Stephanie; Polansky, Larry (1993). "The Music of the Voyager Interstellar Record". Journal of Applied Communication Research. 21 (4): 358–375. doi:10.1080/00909889309365379.
  33. ^ a b Ferris, Timothy (1978). "Voyager's Music," in Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (Carl Sagan ed.). New York City: Random House. p. 162. ISBN 978-1531888374.
  34. ^ "The National Recording Registry 2010". Library of Congress. Loc.gov. Retrieved October 25, 2016.
  35. ^ "BBC - Arena: American Epic - Media Centre". Bbc.co.uk. Retrieved August 7, 2018.
  36. ^ "The first time America heard itself sing". 1843. May 20, 2017. Retrieved August 7, 2018.
  37. ^ "American Epic: The Collection & The Soundtrack Out May 12th | Legacy Recordings". Legacy Recordings. April 28, 2017. Retrieved August 7, 2018.
  38. ^ "American Epic". Stereophile.com. June 12, 2017. Retrieved August 7, 2018.
  39. ^ Lewis, Randy (May 14, 2017). "'American Epic' explores how a business crisis ignited a musical revolution". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved August 7, 2018.
[edit]
Listen to this article (8 minutes)
Spoken Wikipedia icon
This audio file was created from a revision of this article dated 5 April 2015 (2015-04-05), and does not reflect subsequent edits.