Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, and brilliant is that song
drifting through space
‘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.’
Carl Sagan, on including Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night,
Cold Was the Ground (1927) on the Voyager Golden Records
The US gospel blues
musician and evangelist ‘Blind’ Willie Johnson was born to a sharecropping
family in the small town of Pendleton, Texas in 1897. After learning to play a cigar-box
guitar, he performed as a popular street musician throughout Texas, eventually
recording 30 songs for Columbia Records between 1927 and 1930. Little notice
was taken of his death in 1945, and much of his biography remains a mystery.
What is certain, however, is that today his legendary low-register howl and
slide guitar persists, both on our planet and in interstellar space. Here on
Earth, his music influenced the likes of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and Howlin’
Wolf. And just beyond the reaches of our solar system, his recording of his
song Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (1927) is one of
27 pieces of music selected for the Voyager spacecraft’s famed ‘Golden
Records’, intended to capture the range of musical expression. This instalment
from the US animator Drew Christie’s series Drawn & Recorded combines
biography and mythology to recount how Johnson’s music made the unlikely
journey from the streets of rural Texas to the stars.
Director: Drew Christie
Writers: Drew Christie, Bill Flanagan
Narrator: T Bone Burnett
Producers: T Bone Burnett, Bill Flanagan, Van Toffler
Website: Gunpowder & Sky
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