While the rapture lasts, these 2 CDs and more than 90 minutes comprising just about everything this great itinerant, indigent Black Moses of the American South ever recorded can seem pretty paltry, stone tablets reduced to a fine dust in which preternatural mineral fires have been banked for all time. If I ride through the new night lights of Deep Ellum, and if I can dodge the men in fluorescent yellow and orange slickers, the majority of them recent African immigrants, who step out into traffic and try to wave in your car-parking dollars, the emo-core kids stumbling out of body art emporiums, the greasy coke and Ecstasy pushers, it blows my mind to think that, a short 80 years ago, Blind Willie was prophesying with his bull-roaring but oddly plangent voice and slide guitar (according to Samuel Charters, probably a pocket knife... a telling detail) against the dumb walls and segregated streets of the city I call home.
It's easy, perhaps even comforting, to listen to Johnson's recordings today and hear the nothing but the "blues" in their harsh syncopations and distortions of pitch and harmonic rudiments, but it is important to remember that these songs, recorded right on the cusp of the Reckoning that was the Great Depression, set those old microphones as to vibrating with holy, if not liturgical, currents. For every down-low, introspective ("Dark Was The Ground -- Cold Was The Night") and confessional ("It's Nobody's Fault But Mine") piece, there are three performances that construct an at-times forbiddingly private eschatology: the chilling reflection on plague, "Jesus Is Coming Soon"; "If I Had My Way I'd Tear The Building Down", a re-telling of the story of Samson and Delilah; "God Moves On The Water". As his faith told him it would, the world Johnson traversed has perished, and the paths he followed have faded utterly, even if his footsteps continue to echo. I'm confident he and his peers would be shocked and awed at the transformations their art has wrought upon both the musical and social infrastructure of today's America. "Trouble soon be over, sorrow will have an end..." Dallas has laid down new "green belts", lined by monumental bronze heifers and ropers smoking thin brown cigarettes, to commemorate where cattle trains may have passed through downtown's banking districts; meanwhile, scholars fear they will never be able to determine exactly in which Dallas building Robert Johnson recorded his great mid-1930's testaments. You can now pay the State a $40 dollar fee for a license plate celebrating Texas music and bearing the likeness, the only known likeness, of Blind Lemon Jefferson. My great Aunt Grace, one of the most soulful singers I've ever heard -- we never had to switch the radio on in her old Impala on those June days when she brought my brothers and sister and I from Omaha to Mt. Pleasant and back again -- has been gone for 10 years, taking with her a way of life my family can never reclaim, no matter how badly a connection to its customs and rhythms are needed (and, these days, they are). Contemporary Christian music has become multi-billion dollar a year entertainment enterprises, messages of love and salvation wrapped in every conceivable stylistic variation -- rare rhythm and blues, well-done country and western, tartare alternative rock -- so as to be palatable to all of God's hungry children. But I fear the world is too much with them all, Lord. The triumph of Johnson's gospel blues is not in their earth-bound poignancy, in how they seem to offer commiseration and strange kindnesses irrespective of what particular failings stain our own souls. Rather, these recordings endure insomuch as they portray a humble man who nonetheless did earn a glimpse of the Great Reward, and not the little bit of broken heaven that floats at the bottom of a bottle, clings to the curves of the female form, tumbles forth in the wake of a roll of dice, or gushes out of wounds inflicted in a thrust of retribution, however righteous. There is moral rectitude, in Johnson's music, but, thank God, there is no abundance of simple goodness.
Oh, man. Milazzo mines the mother lode. I’m not a religious person; never really have been. But there’s something about early gospel music that affects my senses in a manner that most other music can’t. It’s not so much the messages in the lyrics, though these have a way of transcending agnostic blinders. It’s more a conveyance of passion and urgency, a fervent emotionalism that connects on a primal (existential?) level. It’s also true of blues musicians who coupled their secular repertoires with sacred songs. Listening to Fred McDowell, Bukka White or Son House sing/play ‘the blues’ is one thing, but hearing each tear into spirituals is a whole ‘nother matter. Fortunately there are plenty of recorded examples (and even a few visual ones). But none probably compare with the privilege seeing/hearing such performances in person. The latter two figures had migrant busking lives similar to Johnson’s & it makes me wonder how passerby unfamiliar with either man’s music received it. Were they as uniformly floored as so many listeners are today by the sounds? All said Johnson stands apart as far as I’m concerned. His voice, virtually indescribable, fused with a guitar style that complimented his pipes with a gloriously imperfect perfection.
Posted by: derek at February 9, 2004 8:55 AMI just finished reading colson Whitehead's highly recommended THE INTUITIONIST last night, and, among the several things it made me ponder, it may me think again about whether or not Blind Willie Johnson was a transcendentalist.
I would say he was not, and that gives his music tremendous power. But I need to think about the ramifications of this some more...
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at February 12, 2004 9:39 AMJoe, while my knowledge of transcental thought is admittedly limited, I think I agree with you. Much of Johnson’s music speaks to & reaches beyond the empirical, but he seems to see God as ultimately unknowable. Take “God Don’t Never Change” for example. God by the reckoning of the lyrics is absolute and immutable and therefore ultimately apart from humankind. But while ubiquitous ‘he’ still operates outside the realm of human understanding. Or “Soul of a Man”:
"I've traveled in different countries, I've traveled foreign lands
I've found nobody to tell me, what is the soul of a man?
I saw a crowd stand talking, I came up right on time
Were hearing the doctor and the lawyer, say a man ain't nothing but his mind
I read the bible often, I tries to read it right
As far as I can understand, a man is more than his mind
When Christ stood in the temple, the people stood amazed
Was showing the doctors and the lawyers, how to raise a body from the grave.”
Again, the soul, the root of humanity, exists beyond human comprehension. Empirical attempts to quantify it necessarily fail, but it can’t be known by other means either.
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