And now, seventy-one years after he died, the gospel-blues great has been nominated for two Grammys.
The nominations are for the above album God Don’t Never Change, a widely praised tribute album of his tunes reinterpreted by the likes of Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, and Lucinda Williams.
They’re just the latest to sign onto the long list of Blind Willie Johnson’s admirers. Countless others—including Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Reverend Gary Davis, Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder, Eric Clapton, the Blues Project, the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, and Captain Beefheart have been inspired by his potent musical mix of godly lyrics and the blues’ visceral impact.
Blind Willie Johnson was born in 1897 to a sharecropper and his wife in a small town near Waco, Texas, he grew up attending the Baptist church among the most music-driven fundamentalist Protestant sects. Baptist choirs and congregations took an otherworldly “unison moaning” approach to hymns that, to the un-devout, can seem sexual as hell.
The feeling of rapture shaking his Baptist church is one likely reason the boy wanted to become a preacher. And the cigar-box guitar his father gave him when he was five set him on the road toward becoming a gospel-blues street musician. It was around this time that the young Willie went blind. Depending on who you believe, either he tried staring at a 1905 partial eclipse and suffered the consequences, or his stepmother threw lye water mixed with Caustic Soda at his father when he attacked her because she was playing around with other men, and some of it hit the boy’s face.
As blues historian Samuel Charters is the main reason we know as much about Johnson as we do put it in his liner notes for the Roots and Blues series Complete Recordings of Willie Johnson, “Singing and begging are about the only two ways a blind man can make a living in farm country.”
By his teens, Johnson was an itinerant performer who worked city streets and burgeoning Christian Conventions with a fiery panache. He honed the ferocious preaching-singing delivery out of the Baptist church that he’d also heard other street preachers use. And he developed his deft, multifaceted slide-guitar attack, mostly tuning his Stella to open-D. For recordings, at least, he wielded a knife as a slide, finessing his unparalleled dexterity to double his vocals, play call-and-response, or bristle with edgy rhythms. Over the years, Johnson played guitar most often in an open D tuning, picking single-note melodies, while using his slide and strumming a bass line with his thumb. He was, however, known to play in a different tuning and without the slide on a few rare occasions. Regardless of his excellent blues technique and sound, Johnson didn’t want to be a bluesman, for he was a passionate believer in the Bible. So, he began singing the gospel and interpreting Negro spirituals.
By 1927, Johnson had built a big enough regional reputation to interest Columbia Records‘ “race records” scouts. Race records by black artists were aimed primarily at the 1.6 million black emigrants fleeing the rural South for the urban North and the (often unfulfilled) promise of better jobs and living conditions. (This modern-day Exodus was immortalized in painter Jacob Lawrence’s famed Migration series.) For them, race records brought the nostalgic sounds of home. Later, they became invaluable documents tracing the development of blues and roots music.
For black artists, cutting race records offered cash upfront but no royalties. They served as over-the-airwaves ads, hopefully paying off in bigger earnings on the streets and stages. Columbia rated Johnson’s popularity highly enough to pay him $50 per “usable” side—above the norm, and several times the $10-15 Robert Johnson would get for his recordings a decade later, during the Great Depression.
The label’s bet paid off: his debut single “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed b/w I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole outsold their leading race records star, Bessie Smith. Over the next three years, he’d cut 30 tracks in Texas and Louisiana hotel rooms.
But the Depression dropped the bottom out of that market. Johnson’s three-year career as a recording star ended abruptly in 1930, though he continued to perform on the streets of Texas towns and cities into the 1940s. By 1945, he had his own church, the House of Prayer in Beaumont.
Despite the fact that Johnson did not record after 1930, he continued to perform on the Texas streets during the ’30s and ’40s. Unfortunately, in 1947, the Johnsons home burned to the ground. Unable to afford repairs, he lived in the wreckage until he contracted malarial fever from exposure. His second wife told Charters no hospital would admit him—either because he was black, or because he was blind. He caught pneumonia shortly thereafter and died in the ashes of his former home approximately one week after it was destroyed. His second wife Angeline went on to work as a nurse during the 1950s.
His second wife told Charters no hospital would admit him—either because he was black, or because he was blind. When he died that September, his death certificate listed syphilis as a contributing factor to his demise.
Maybe the travelling preacher-musician found women besides his wives for company on the road. He’d be far from alone among gospel singers, whose history is ironically checkered with sexual scandals.
Whatever Johnson’s human foibles, one story suggests the effects he could have.
In December 1929, in front of the New Orleans Customs House, Johnson delivered a performance of “If I Had My Way” . The song, which would become a much-covered classic, narrates the tale of Samson and Delilah, and turns on the refrain, “If I had my way, I would tear this building down.” Apparently Johnson’s intensity so moved the crowd—and so frightened the cops—that he was arrested for inciting a riot.
This chilling track, inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011, marks a pinnacle of Blind Willie Johnson’s art. His keening guitar and wordless moans pulse with imminent fear and dread the Pale Rider of the Apocalypse as a blind black guy armed with a guitar. In 1977, astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s NASA team included it among the 27 pieces of music on the Voyager probe’s Golden Record, intended to help extraterrestrials understand who we are.
Ry Cooder has always named Johnson as a foundational influence. You can hear it any time he plays guitar, but especially on the soundtrack for Paris Texas, where he channels Blind Willie with an eerie timelessness that’ll make your scalp crawl.
Jesus Is A Dying Bed Maker
Led Zeppelin did—what else?!—an 11-minute version, for which they—what else?!—claimed writing credit.
Deeply studied in roots music, Tom Waits has transformed it into something all his own. John The Revelator.
Son House was a young preacher who hated the blues as “devil’s music,” started drinking and whoring and playing bottleneck guitar, and then served time at Parchman Farm for murder. He became the musical link between his friend Charley Patton and younger bluesmen Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.
Nick Cave’s dark outlook chimed with the blues, thanks to the idiosyncratic Hal Willner, who produced this live performance. of John the Revelator. Here Tom Waits mixes the blues, ghostly choirs, and typically bizarre sounds
Nick Cave singing ‘John the Revelator’ by Blind Willie Johnson. This is from one of the classic Hal Willner concerts that took place in 1999 and 2001. This can be found on The Harry Smith Project: The Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited box set
Taj Mahal, an amazingly wide-ranging, versatile musician, was a key mover in the 1960s folk revival, along with his former Rising Sons bandmate Ry Cooder.
The Fat Angel Sings 