Dark was the Night: The Gospel of Blind Willie Johnson

Tuesday Mayhem 21 7PM-10PM
Hosted by Art Crimes
Blind Willie Johnson was born in Texas in 1897. Blinded as a child, allegedly through a violent act by his stepmother, he had dreams of becoming a preacher. He made his first guitar from a cigar box. In 1927, he started recording for Columbia - a total of 30 songs, most of them with religious themes. He sang in the streets for spare change and later ran a church, the House of Prayer in Beaumont, TX. His home burned down in 1945 and he spent the rest of his days living in the ruins until illness resulted his death. His actual gravesite is unknown to this day. Yet his small catalog of songs were rediscovered and performed by artists ranging from other bluesmen like Son House, to folk revisionists like Ry Cooder and John Fahey, and to the blues-based explorations of the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, and Nick Cave. Johnson's song "Dark Was the Night" was selected to travel into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft as a sample of the sounds of Earth, along with such distinguished company as Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky. We'll hear a wide variety of interpretations from Johnson's catalog of visionary gospel, as well as the original Columbia recordings.