How God used a skeptic, spaceships, and Led Zeppelin to preserve gospel blues

In 1945, bluesman Blind Willie Johnson died while sleeping in the damp, burnt ruins of his home — reduced to ashes by a fire days earlier. He passed away in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave in Beaumont, Texas.

But three decades later, Johnson’s signature gospel tune — about the Passion of Christ — was among a handful of songs chosen to be sent hurtling billions of miles through space on two NASA Voyager space probes.

Here on Earth, Johnson’s blues continue to find thousands of new fans, spurred in part by an anthology of his music released earlier this year.

“Blind Willie’s” story began in 1897, when he was born with perfect eyesight in Pendleton, Texas. He could see his future too. At age 5, he told his dad he wanted to become a preacher. He also fashioned his first guitar using a wooden cigar box as a resonator.

Somewhere between the ages of 7 and 13, Johnson was blinded—the result of a domestic abuse incident between his father and his stepmother. Whether intentionally or accidentally, his stepmother threw lye in young Willie’s face—searing his eyes and causing him to lose his sight.

With few avenues for a blind black man to make a living in the Depression, Johnson took his Stella bottleneck guitar to the streets and sang for tips, according to biographer Joslyn Lane.

He developed a mastery of the slide guitar, using a pocket knife for a slide. And he combined his guitar playing with deep, piercing, raspy vocals.

Johnson later became a Baptist preacher, and put together a catalog of gospel blues mixed with Baptist hymns, African-American spirituals, and some originals. He began traveling across Texas, and his unique brand of fiery preaching and blues gospel evangelism electrified street corners in Dallas, Houston, and beyond.

In Louisiana, Johnson performed “If I Had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down” in front of the New Orleans Customs House. The performance was so powerful, he was arrested for inciting a riot. The police officer, seeing the crowd’s reaction and hearing the song’s title, didn’t know the tune was about Samson and Delilah.

This recording of “Tear the Building Down” was one of 30 songs Johnson recorded in five sessions for Columbia Records over a three-year period between 1927 and 1930.

Sadly for music fans, Johnson never recorded again.

But he continued to perform on the streets — and on the airwaves.

Once, on a Corpus Christi radio broadcast during World War II, he added some lyrics to his song “God Moves on the Waters”—a song about the sinking of the Titanic. The improvised lyrics issued a warning to Nazi U-boat commanders feared to be off the Gulf Coast. Assuming the Nazis were using the radio station’s signal to triangulate their position, Johnson put the Germans on notice: “Can’t nobody hide from God.”

Today, Johnson’s gospel blues records and his slide guitar picking style in open D tuning are legendary.

They’ve inspired — and have been imitated by — the likes of Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, the Grateful Dead, Ry Cooder, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Bob Dylan.

A recent anthology of Johnson’s music, God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson, from Alligator Records, peaked at Not. 3 on Billboard’s blues charts.

It features 11 Johnson classics performed by Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, Sinead O’Connor, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and others.

The Cowboy Junkies version of “Jesus is Coming Soon”—about the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic—is blended with digital samples from Johnson’s original vocals.

Johnson’s most famous recording is of a song adapted from the 18th century hymn, “Dark Was the Night—Cold Was the Ground,” about Christ’s suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane. Johnson vocalizes, but without words.

“Instead of singing the words, Johnson cast aside the lyrics and went for pure emotion,” said American music historian Samuel Charters.

Johnson’s performance of the song made such an impression on astronomer and religious skeptic Carl Sagan that he requested it be included on the Voyager Golden Record placed on the two Voyager space probes launched in 1977.

Fellow astronomer Timothy Ferris said he and Sagan chose the tune because it’s about facing 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,” Ferris said.

As it turned out in Johnson’s own life, the song was prescient. In September 1945, Johnson’s house and the location for his ministry burned down, leaving him homeless at the age of 48.

Broke and with no place to go, Johnson spent several dark nights sleeping on the cold ground. Then he died.

His widow, Angeline Johnson, told a biographer her husband died of pneumonia. But his death certificate lists malaria as the primary cause of death, with syphilis and blindness as contributing factors.

Blindness, of course, can be one effect of syphilis, so it is possible whoever filled out the death certificate assumed syphilis as the cause. No one knows. The evidence simply isn’t conclusive.

What is certain is this: Johnson spent his final earthly moments under the stars but was unable to see the very heavens that one day would be traversed by two spaceships cuddling his trademark gospel tune. Nor could he envision the recording stars who decades later would carry forth his music about Jesus.

Listen to Jim Long’s report about the life and music of Blind Willie Johnson on the July 22, 2016, edition of The World and Everything in It.