Of musical styles, the blues seem to offer the most interesting journey when it comes to the winding historical and research paths chronicling its earliest days and performers. Maybe is something about the mystique of the O.G.’s, seen only in faded photographs, or the lyrics themselves that lend to an otherworldly litany of fact, fiction, and flexibility.
After all, can you imagine J.S. Bach, Hank Williams, or Grandmaster Melle Mel involved in a story about selling their soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for musical proficiency and success?
And there’s still new material being cropping up all the time, whether it’s the uncovered existence of a third known photograph of Robert Johnson, the publishing of the lost manuscript of Texas blues researchers Mack McCormick and Paul Oliver, or reel-to-reel tapes and one-of-a-kind 78 records turning up on some attic or closet in Mississippi or Chicago.
Texan Blind Willie Johnson hadn’t recorded anything in nearly two decades by the time he died in 1945 at the age of 48. He never gave an interview to a journalist or field archivist. And there is only one known photograph of him.
He did not have a compelling story or forceful personality of a Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, or Blind Lemon Jefferson. Nor did he live long enough to be unearthed during the early ‘60s boom in folk/blues music. He wasn’t brought out to play for college and festival audiences for the first time in decades like some phantom from the past as did Son House, Skip James, Mance Lipscomb or Mississippi John Hurt.
But Austin-based multi-media artist Shane Ford became obsessed with tracking down Johnson’s story, both uncovering new material and correcting bits and pieces that had gone unchallenged in terms of truthfulness for decades. He even spearheaded a campaign to honor Johnson with a cenotaph and historical marker in his final home of Beaumont.
Other bluesmen have more name recognition. But when NASA launched the two Voyager spacecraft in 1977, each included a “golden record” of sounds and data meant to show potential alien life forms that came across it (and, presumably, had a turntable).
The music on the disc included selections by Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, folk and world artists, Chuck Berry, and…Blind Willie Johnson’s wordless, moaning blues lament “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.”
Ford’s work has resulted in a book that not only provides the most complete and factual take on Johnson’s life and music to date, but so much more in The Ballad of “Blind” Willie Johnson: Race, Redemption, and the Soul of an American Artist (304 pp., $34, Texas A&M University Press).
Born in 1897, Johnson lost sight in both of his eyes around the age of seven. And though many theories abound, there is no definitive record as to how or why that happened (though Johnson’s second wife later claimed that his stepmother, during an argument with his father, splashed him with caustic lye). Fearful that he would be destitute, his father fashioned him a guitar out of cigar box in order to earn some money.
A whole other book could be written about all the “Blind” blues artists of the era, including not just Johnson but Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller. And when counterculture comics Cheech and Chong invented an old bluesman character, he was dubbed “Blind Melon Chitlin’.”
Adventurous, Johnson left his then-home of Galveston at the age of 20 and moved to Houston’s Fourth Ward Freedman’s town. Where for several years he’d regularly take a train to cities all over the state to both preach at Baptist churches and play guitar—though his main interest remained in the Lord. He began both writing his own songs and adapting old spiritual and folk tunes in his repertoire.
His first hotel room recording session yielded a number of religious-themed blues, with two of them—“Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed” and “It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine” would decades later morph into material for Led Zeppelin. As Johnson could not see the red lights when to start and stop performing, one of the two producers in the room would have to tap him on the shoulder.
Ford goes into great detail—probably the most complete ever put down on paper—about this and the remaining handful of sessions he had until 1930. His entire recorded output, 30 tunes altogether, were released on Columbia. Johnson usually sang in a froggy, razor-throated voice, but sometimes could coax out a sweet falsetto. He was sometimes accompanied by a female singer, including first wife Willie Harris.
For the next decade, Johnson was “elusive.” Going from town to town preaching the gospel in the pulpit and playing the blues on the streets, and even returning briefly to Houston. He met a woman named Angelina, who saw him playing on the street, and they married in 1941. Four years later, in Beaumont, Johnson would die of “malarial fever” at the age of 48.
The last part of the book chronicles the “rediscovery” of Johnson’s music in the ‘50s and ‘60s, largely through including one of his songs on the highly influential Anthology of American Folk Music and the digging of blues historian Samuel Charters, who conducted interviews with Angelina and from which much of what is “known” about Johnson and his life came from.
Ford’s book is almost another whole tome on the religious practices and racial challenges faced by Blacks in the era. And there’s a lot of history about preachers and pulpits (one such figure was the colorfully named Rev. J.L. “Sin-Killer” Griffin). There are details about other musicians of the era and social norms, historical incidents and the history of many of the traditional songs Johnson recorded and/or adapted.
Also, bits about noted song collectors/archivists/historians John and Alan Lomax, ancestors of former Houston Press music editor John Nova Lomax. And finally, Johnson’s influence on later artists like Pops Staples of the Staple Singers.
The Ballad of “Blind” Willie Johnson straddles a Venn diagram of music biography, cultural history, and academic tone. Enough that its author could be dubbed—with a nod to a blues standard and Johnson tune of similar name—Shane the Revelator.
