Blind Willie shines bright in ‘Dark Was the Night’
Nearly 10 years ago, Gary Golio wrote his first children’s book about a musician. He started with a guitarist who made a strong impression on him: Jimi Hendrix. Since then, Golio has returned to musicians, penning children’s books about John Coltrane, Carlos Santana and Woody Guthrie.
His latest is about a gospel and blues legend who has been dead 75 years, yet the story feels well suited for our difficult times. “Dark Was the Night” finds Golio writing about Blind Willie Johnson, a musician who enjoyed some success in his career, offset by ample struggle. He died years before his music would be admired and covered by Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and Jack White. Johnson’s last days remain mysterious, and his headstone in Beaumont may or may not be above his grave.
“Dark Was the Night” is a story of loneliness and a search for light during dark times. In writing about the Texas music legend, Golio saw a tale with an ageless spirit.
“With a children’s book, you don’t have a lot of space,” Golio says. “So you really have to get to the essence of a person’s life. For Willie, despite many hardships, it’s about the magic and mystery of life on Earth.”
With that in mind, Golio and his illustrator, E.B. Lewis, open in 1977, more than three decades after Johnson’s death. That year the Golden Record was launched into space on the Voyager satellite. Carl Sagan was the project manager who put together nearly 30 recordings, including sounds from nature, greetings in various languages and music. Among the pieces of music from the United States was one by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven and “Dark Was the Night — Cold Was the Ground,” which Johnson recorded in Dallas in 1927. Johnson’s inclusion clearly bears the stamp of folklorist Alan Lomax, who was part of Sagan’s team.
That specific song and its message of resilience became the driving force of Golio’s book, much in the way collaboration was the crux of his book about Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and protest music informed his book on Billie Holiday. Little definitive biography about Johnson exists: Folklorist Samuel Charters chased Johnson’s ghost in the 1950s from Dallas down to Houston and over to East Texas, where he found Johnson’s widow. First-hand accounts by people who knew him did little to put Johnson’s life into focus. His birth, his blindness, his career and his death were opaquely documented.
All of this gave Golio and Lewis room to create a reverent and impressionistic story about Johnson and his music. Their story touches on themes of lightness and darkness as well as Johnson’s spirited approach to spiritual music. He often gets filed under blues because of his low growl of a voice and his novel approach to playing slide guitar. But Johnson’s catalog — represented by just a few sessions between 1927 and 1930 — was an unwavering documentation of his faith.
“Just listen to ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine,’ ” Golio says. “On one hand, it’s terrifying, this kind of fire-and-brimstone music. On the other, it’s tender and goes to the heart of being a mortal human being on this planet.”
The song that lends its title to the book is among the best known of Johnson’s recordings. Recorded in Dallas in December 1927, “Dark Was the Night — Cold Was the Ground” remains a striking piece of music: Void of lyrics, it features just Johnson moaning and humming over his guitar. Guitarist Ry Cooder called it “the most transcendent piece in all American music.”
“Dark Was the Night,” the music, carries the weight of the story Golio tells. Rather than dwell upon the cause of Johnson’s blindness — lore attributes it to lye thrown in his face as a child by his stepmother — or his peripatetic life that included time in Dallas, Houston and Beaumont, or his death, possibly of syphilis or pneumonia, the author and the artist focus on the music Johnson left behind.
“There’s always a process about what to keep and what to leave out,” Golio says. “What is meaningful. You don’t want a page that reads, ‘Hey, kids, he found out his stepmother was cheating on his father, and she threw lye in his face.’ So instead I found myself thinking more about darkness: the darkness of space, his inability to see …”
Golio wrote the text in second person, an approach that he says “deepened the mystery a little. As if I was talking to his ghost.”
Johnson died in 1945 at age 48. His death certificate stated that he was buried in Blanchette Cemetery in Beaumont, which was an abandoned graveyard for decades. The specific site of his grave isn’t known, but a marker that bears Johnson’s name and dates was placed in the cemetery about a decade ago.
That stone is among the few physical pieces of evidence that testify to Johnson’s existence — along with the 30 sides he made for Columbia during his short but successful recording career.
So “Dark Was the Night,” the book, opens and closes with Lewis’ paintings of a starlit sky, where Johnson’s music rests with pieces by Bach, Beethoven and Chuck Berry.
“I really resist more and more that idea that you can measure a person’s value by how many things you know about them,” Golio says. “The fact that years after he died, Eric Clapton or Lucinda Williams would record his songs, I think that’s a wonderful testament to the effect a life can have on other people.”