Blind" Willie Johnson

Blind" Willie Johnson (January 22, 1897 – September 18, 1945) was a gospel blues singer and guitarist. While the

lyrics of his songs were usually religious, his music drew from both sacred and blues traditions. It is characterized

by his slide guitar accompaniment and tenor voice, and his frequent use of a lower-register 'growl' or false bass

voice.

Life

 According to his death certificate, Johnson was born in 1897, in Independence, near Brenham, Texas. (Earlier,

Temple, Texas had been suggested as his birthplace.)[2] When he was five, he told his father he wanted to be a

preacher and then made a cigar box guitar for himself. His mother died when he was young, and his father

remarried soon after her death.

Johnson was not born blind. Although it is not certain how he lost his sight, his alleged widow Angeline Johnson told Samuel Charters that when

Willie was seven his father beat his stepmother after catching her going out with another man; and that she in spite blinded young Willie by

throwing lye in his face.

 It is believed that Johnson married at least twice. He was married to Willie B. Harris. Her recollection of their initial meeting was recounted in the

liner notes for Yazoo Records's albumPraise God I'm Satisfied. He was later alleged to have been married to a woman named Angeline. Johnson

was also said to be married to a sister of blues artist L. C. Robinson No marriage certificates have yet been discovered. As Angeline Johnson often

sang and performed with him, the first person to attempt to research his biography, Samuel Charters, made the mistake of assuming it was

Angeline who had sung on several of Johnson's records. However, later research showed that it was Willie B. Harris.

Johnson remained poor until the end of his life, preaching and singing in the streets of several Texas cities including Beaumont. A city directory

shows that in 1945, a Rev. W. J. Johnson, undoubtedly Blind Willie, operated the House of Prayer at 1440 Forrest Street, Beaumont, Texas. This

is the same address listed on Johnson's death certificate. In 1945, his home burned to the ground. With nowhere else to go, Johnson lived in the

burned ruins of his home, sleeping on a wet bed in the August/September Texas heat. He lived like this until he contracted malarial fever, and died

on September 18, 1945. (The death certificate reports the cause of death as malarial fever, with syphilis and blindness as contributing factors.)

In an interview, Angeline said that she tried to take him to a hospital, which refused to admit him because he was blind. Other sources report that

the refusal was due to his being black.

According to his death certificate, he was buried in Blanchette Cemetery, Beaumont. The location of that cemetery had been forgotten until it was

rediscovered in 2009. His exact gravesite remains unknown; but in 2010, the researchers who had identified the cemetery erected a monument

there in his honor.

Musical career

                "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning"

The traditional blues song recorded in 1928 by Blind Willie Johnson and his first wife

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His father would often leave him on street corners to sing for money. Tradition has it that he was arrested for nearly starting a riot at a New

Orleans courthouse with a powerful rendition of "If I Had My Way I'd Tear the Building Down", a song about Samson and Delilah. According to

Samuel Charters, however, he was simply arrested while singing for tips in front of the Customs House by a police officer who misconstrued the

title lyric and mistook it for incitement Timothy Beal argued that the officer did not, in fact, misconstrue the meaning of the song, but that "the

ancient story suddenly sounded dangerously contemporary" to him.

Johnson made 30 commercial recording studio record sides (29 songs) in five separate sessions for Columbia Records from 1927–1930.  On some

of these recordings Johnson uses a fast rhythmic picking style, while on others he plays slide guitar. According to a reputed one-time acquaintance,

Blind Willie McTell (1898–1959), Johnson played with a brass ring; but the bluesman Tom Shaw, interviewed by Guido van Rijn in 1972, says that he

used a knife. However, in enlargement, the only known photograph of Johnson seems to show that there is an actual bottleneck on the little finger

of his left hand.[8] While his other fingers are apparently fretting the strings, his little finger is extended straight—which also suggests there is a

slide on it as well.

Legacy

Several of Blind Willie Johnson's songs have been interpreted by other musicians, including "Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed", "It's Nobody's Fault but

Mine", "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground", "John the Revelator", "You'll Need Somebody on Your Bond", "Motherless Children" and "Soul of

a Man".

"Dark Was the Night" is one of the music tracks on the Voyager Golden Record, copies of which were placed in 1977 on both the unmanned Voyager

Project space probes. It is the penultimate track, preceding only the Cavatina from Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 130: the blind musician and the

deaf one side by side. The astronomer Timothy Ferris, who worked with Carl Sagan in selecting those tracks, has said:

"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."

Ry Cooder's slide guitar title song and soundtrack music of the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas (1984) was based on "Dark Was the Night".

"Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was played in the TV series The West Wing (season 5) episode 13, The Warfare of Genghis Khan. "It's

Nobody's Fault but Mine" was played in the TV series The Walking Dead (season 5) episode 4 Slabtown.