The cosmic blues of Blind Willie Johnson

Listening to “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”

This essay is also available in audio form, read by the author.

On September 5, 1977, the Voyager One spacecraft blasted off. Its mission was, and remains, to get as far away from earth as possible, gathering data and carrying evidence of humankind deep among the stars. It’s made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, sending images and measurements back home. In 2012, it became the first humanmade object to enter interstellar space.

If aliens ever encounter the craft, they’ll find inside a golden phonograph record containing sounds meant to represent life on earth. Music on the disc includes Beethoven, Mozart, and Chuck Berry. And a song called “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” by the bluesman Blind Willie Johnson.  

I could try describing the song, but it would probably be best if you just listened to it. It’s a bucket list tune, one everyone should hear before they die. The song owes its title and basic musical structure to “Gethsemane,” an 18^th century English hymn, which begins:

Dark was the night, and cold the ground
On which the Lord was laid;
His sweat like drops of blood ran down;
In agony he prayed.

Eventually, the hymn came to America and, with some changes to its music and lyrics, became known as “Dark Was the Night.” Johnson took its musical essence, and—replacing lyrics with grunts, groans, and slide guitar—produced a masterpiece. It sounds like nothing else. It doesn’t even sound particularly like other Blind Willie Johnson songs. It sounds like an expression of something universal about the human condition, our shared struggles and hopes.

The pain and genius of Blind Willie Johnson’s music came from a life steeped in the blues. Born into poverty around the year 1900, he was blinded at the age of seven. His stepmother threw lye in his face when she caught his father sleeping around. The story goes she was either aiming the lye at her husband and missed or she threw it at Willie deliberately, punishing the child, Medea-like, for the sexual sin of the father.

Around the time of his blinding, Johnson declared his intention to be a preacher. He also picked up the guitar. His preaching and playing would be forever intertwined, his tunes as much influenced by the Gospels as by the earthly concerns of the blues.

He stayed poor most of his life, playing on streetcorners for change. Some of the best money he ever made was probably when he recorded 30 songs, including “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” for the Columbia label, making around $30 per song. Decent earnings, but, as was often the case with bluesmen of that era, the music made American culture far richer than it ever made the artist.

In 1945, Johnson’s house burned down. With nowhere else to go, he slept in the damp remains of his home, caught pneumonia, and died. His wife said she tried to get him admitted to a hospital, but he was refused treatment, either because of his blindness or because he was black.

Because I’m a blues fan, Blind Willie Johnson has lived in my head for a while. I was interested to learn recently that he also lives in the kids’ section of Politics and Prose, the famed Washington, DC bookstore. Browsing there a few weeks ago, I happened upon A Song for the Cosmos: Blind Willie Johnson and Voyager’s Golden Record, written by Jan Lower and illustrated by Gary Kelley.

The book tells the story of Blind Willie Johnson’s life and music. Gorgeously illustrated, it traces his journey from poverty to the stars. It might be a bit of a rough read for very young kids—the book doesn’t flinch at depicting the sadder facts of Johnson’s life, including the circumstances of his blinding. But all in all, it’s a beautifully rendered introduction to a great American artist, who gave so much to the world.

Fifty years after Voyager’s liftoff, there’s something fitting about Blind Willie Johnson’s introduction to children’s literature. Maybe it’s because the only place as limitless as the depths of space are the expanding horizons of a child’s mind. For a man whose options in life were few, Johnson continues to defy barriers, blowing past the confines of place, race, and the space between generations like Voyager clearing the sun’s heliosphere, charting a course to transcendence. With Blind Willie Johnson up there, the night sky doesn’t seem so dark after all.