The Soul of Blind Willie Johnson

Retracing the life of the Texas music icon

By Michael Corcoran
Austin American-Statesman

When Jack White of the red-hot White Stripes announced

The first songs he recorded, on a single day in 1927, are more familiar. "Nobody's Fault But Mine" was
covered by Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton did "Motherless Children," Bob Dylan turned Johnson's "Jesus
Make Up My Dying Bed" into "In My Time of Dying" on his 1962 debut LP and "If I Had My Way I'd Tear
the Building Down" has been appropriated by everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Staple Singers.

Johnson's haunting masterpiece "Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)" was chosen for an album
placed aboard Voyager 1 in 1977 on its journey to the ends of the universe. Foreseeing an
extraterrestrial intercept, astronomer Carl Sagan and his staff put together "Sounds of Earth" -- including
ancient chants, the falling rain, a beating heart, Beethoven, Bach and Blind Willie.

Should aliens happen upon the spacecraft and, with the record player provided, listen to that eerie,
moaning, steel-sliding memorial to the Crucifixion, they will know almost as much about the mysterious
Blind Willie Johnson as we do.

On Monday, Martin Scorsese will introduce Johnson to Americans in the second episode of his seven-
part PBS series, "The Blues." The installment, directed by Wim Wenders, is named for Johnson's "Soul of
a Man," a song that links a trio of protagonists -- Johnson, Skip James and J.B. Lenoir -- as artists driven
to create amid abject hardships. With wife Willie B. Harris' soprano sweetening Johnson's coarse bass
falsetto on the 1930 recording, the duo demands an answer to the unanswerable: "I want somebody to
tell me/Just what is the soul of a man."

An instinctive virtuoso

Beyond five recording dates from 1927-1930 that yielded 30 tracks, the singer remains a biographical
question mark. Only one picture of him, seated at a piano holding a guitar with a tin cup for tips on its
neck, has ever been found. A search on the Internet or a browse through the music section of libraries
and bookstores reveals the slightest information on this musical pioneer, and almost all of it is wrong.

Months on the trail of the man whose music rang with an intensity previously unrecorded turn up a
living daughter and a death certificate -- and little else. Finding witnesses who knew Johnson is about as
easy as interviewing folks who lived through World War I. Many are dead or too old to remember.

Or, like Sam Faye Johnson Kelly, the only child of Blind Willie and Willie B. Harris, they're too young to
realize what was going on six, seven decades ago. "I remember him singing here in the kitchen and
reciting from the Bible," said Kelly, 72. "But I was just a little girl when he went away."

And while the death certificate corrects some previously accepted misinformation (he was born in 1897
near Brenham, not 1902 in Marlin, and died in 1945, not 1949, in Beaumont), the document doesn't tell
you how he lived from 1930, when his recording career ended, until his death. It doesn't tell you how
many times he was married and how many kids he fathered. It doesn't tell you how he learned to play
such a wicked bottleneck guitar or which Pentecostal preachers he modeled his singing voice after. It
doesn't verify the widespread legend that Willie was blinded when a stepmother threw lye in his face at
age 7 to avenge a beating from his father. The certificate reports the cause of death as malarial fever,
with syphilis as a contributing factor. But when it also lists blindness as a contributor, the coroner's
thoroughness becomes suspect.

Unquestioned is the opinion that Johnson is one of the most influential guitarists in music history.
"Anybody who's ever played the bottleneck guitar with some degree of accomplishment is quoting Blind
Willie to this day," said Austin slide guitarist Steve James. "He's the apogee." An instinctive virtuoso,
Johnson made his guitar moan, slur and sing, often finishing lyrics for him, and throughout the years,
Clapton, Jimmy Page, Ry Cooder, Duane Allman and many more have expressed a debt to the sightless
visionary.

And yet, the 1993 double-disc "Complete Blind Willie Johnson" has sold only about 15,000 copies on
Sony/Legacy. It's safe to say that more than half of those sales were to guitar players.

1930s Mississippi Delta blues man Robert Johnson grew into a full-blown rock icon in part because of
the mysteries of his life and death, but Willie Johnson has not benefited from his enigmatic existence.
Even though his guitar-playing inspired a host of Delta blues men, from Johnson and Son House to
Muddy Waters, Blind Willie refused to sing the blues, that style of pre-war music preferred by collectors
and historians. He sang only religious songs, which explains a big part of his relative obscurity. His gruff
evangelical bellow and otherworldly guitar were designed to draw in milling mulling masses on street
corners, not to charm casual roots rock fans decades later.

Not a single penny

When word got out late last year through the community of music historians and record collectors that
Blind Willie had a daughter who was still living in Marlin, 28 miles east of Waco, there was a collective
gasp of hope that new information would surface. Maybe there was a box with pictures, letters or
gospel programs that would fill in the huge gaps. Maybe Willie B. Harris had told her daughter details
about her father, like how he lost his sight and where he learned his songs.

The discovery of an heir also stirred the interest of musical estate managers, such as Steve LaVere of
Mississippi's Delta Haze company, who visited Kelly in November. In his role managing the estate of
Robert Johnson, LaVere has aggressively collected back royalties from Columbia Records and such
performers as the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. "It's all about getting the pennies to roll in your
direction -- we're talking about eight cents a record (in songwriter royalties)," LaVere said. "Eventually,
the pennies turn into dollars."

But when LaVere left Marlin to return to his offices in Greenwood, Miss., he didn't have a signed
contract that would give him the right to represent the estate of Blind Willie Johnson. "I was a little
miffed," he said. "I thought we had laid out the groundwork on the phone and would be able to sign a
deal, but some people just don't know what they have, what it's worth, and they'd rather do nothing
than feel like they might get cheated."

Kelly said she just didn't want to rush into anything. "You know, old people don't like to sign stuff right
away," she said as she maneuvered her wheelchair through the cramped quarters of 817 Hunter St.,
where Blind Willie lived with Kelly's mother in the early '30s. It's a four-room box with a sagging roof and
walls warped by the heat.

Kelly said that she's never received a penny from her father's music.

But first she has to fly the flag, said noted New York attorney William Krasilovsky, who wrote "This
Business of Music," the industry bible. "You say, 'Here we are. We represent the heirs of Blind Willie
Johnson.' " Until an estate is established, there's no place to send whatever royalties may be due.

"I guess I should hire someone to see about getting some money for the family," Kelly said. "I need to
make a move here."

Occupation: musician

"Z'rontre!" Kelly called out to her great-grandson, her voice cutting through the loud cartoons watched
in the living room by two kids laying on the floor. "Come here and get Mama that box of papers." A little
boy bounded in from the bedroom and climbed up on a chair to reach a rectangular plastic box. "This
boy's only three years old and he can do everything for me, even fetch me some water," said Kelly,
who's stricken with arthritis and other ailments. "He's my legs."

She pulled out a few fragile documents, including a birth certificate which says that she was born June
23, 1931, to Willie Johnson, occupation listed as "musician," and a mother whose maiden name was
Willie B. Hays.

Kelly said she remembers her father staying with her mother until she was about seven or eight years
old. That would put him in Marlin until at least 1938. But two years after Kelly's birth, her mother had a
daughter Dorothy with a man named Joe Henry, according to Kelly. Six years later came Earline, from
another father. Kelly recalls that her parents had remained married even as Willie B. Harris was having
kids with other men and Blind Willie was drifting from street corner to church to train station for
months at a time.

"We was working people, see," said Kelly. "My mother understood that my father had to leave Marlin to
make money. She worked seven days a week as a nurse. I'd say, 'Mama, please stay home today' and
she'd say, 'But I gotta work' and I'd understand."

During the era in which Blind Willie recorded, artists didn't expect royalties. They took whatever the
labels paid them, usually around $25 to $50 per record, and the music they recorded was considered
work for hire. The labels claimed all rights. "They had just made a record," Columbia field recorder Frank
Walker, who helmed Johnson's remarkably fruitful Dec. 3, 1927, session, said in an interview in the '60s.
"To them that was the next best thing to being president of the United States."

Johnson's first 78 rpm -- "If I Had My Way" backed with "Mother's Children Have a Hard Time" (titled
"Motherless Children" by Clapton) -- sold a remarkable 15,000 copies, even more than Bessie Smith's
recordings of the day. By 1930, however, the Depression dried up demand for gritty country
blues/gospel, and Blind Willie's recording career was history. But as was his nature, Johnson kept on the
move, playing "from Maine to the Mobile Bay," according to what his touring mate Blind Willie McTell
told Alan Lomax in a 1940s interview.

"People recalled hearing him at times over KTEM in Temple and on a Sunday-morning church service
broadcast by KPLC in Lake Charles," said Houston-based music historian Mack McCormick. "He left
memories in Corpus Christi during WWII when there was a fear about Nazi submarines prowling the Gulf
of Mexico. Someone must have told him submarines often listened to radio stations to triangulate their
position. He went on the air with new verses to one of his songs, probably 'God Moves on the Water'
about the Titanic, offering grace to his audience, then followed with a dire warning to the crew of any
listening U-boat with 'Can't Nobody Hide from God.' "

Blind Willie's music was revealed to a new generation of country blues enthusiasts (including Bob Dylan)
with the 1952 release of the Harry Smith anthology "American Folk Music," which included Johnson's
"John the Revelator." The "Blind Willie Johnson" album came out on Folkways in 1957, with a key detail
wrong. Second wife Angeline Johnson, who was tracked down by music historian Samuel Charters in
1953, was credited with the backing vocals performed by first wife Harris.

This error was uncorrected until the mid-'70s, when a Dallas music collector named Dan Williams drove
down to Marlin to see if he could find anyone who knew Blind Willie. "I approached a group of elderly
black people near the town square and one of them said he was related to Blind Willie's ex-wife, the one
who sang on his records, and I thought I was going to meet Angeline Johnson," Williams recalls. "Nobody
knew anything about a Willie B. Harris."

After hearing Harris sing along to the Blind Willie records and talk about certain details of the recording
sessions that only those present would know, Williams ascertained that she was, indeed, the
background singer. "She talked about meeting Blind Willie McTell at the last session in Atlanta (April 20,
1930) and I did some research and found out that, sure enough, McTell recorded at the same studio the
same day."

Charters made the correction, crediting Harris, in his notes to the 1993 boxed set, but repeated Angeline
Johnson's contention that she married Blind Willie in Dallas in 1927. There is no record of such a
marriage in Dallas County or in the county clerks offices of Falls, McLennan, Bell, Milam, Jefferson or
Robertson counties. But then, neither is there evidence, besides Kelly's birth certificate listing her as
legitimate, that Blind Willie and Willie B. were ever married.

Floating in space

Researching history about long dead blues men is fueled by random payoffs, much like slot machines
and singles bars. You run your fingers down the pages of big, dusty books for hours and then you find a
bit of information, a bit of new evidence, and it all becomes worth it.

But dozens of hours in search of details on the life of Blind Willie Johnson resulted in almost zero
positive reinforcements. A five-hour drive to Beaumont yielded the slightest new info; a city directory
shows that in 1944, a Rev. W.J. Johnson, undoubtedly Blind Willie, operated the House of Prayer at 1440
Forest St. That's the address listed on Blind Willie's death certificate as his last residence.
Besides the entry on the death certificate, there is no evidence that Blind Willie Johnson is buried in
Beaumont's "colored" Blanchette Cemetery, a seemingly untended field littered with broken
tombstones and overrun with weeds and brush. If Johnson had a headstone, it's gone now. When the
cemetery floods, a man who lives across the street said, sometimes wooden coffins can be seen floating
away among the debris. There is no peaceful rest, no solitude for the ages, for the migrant musician.

His music, meanwhile, continues its journey to the galaxy's back yard.

Ry Cooder, who based his desolate soundtrack to "Paris, Texas" on "Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the
Ground)," described it as "The most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music." On that Voyager
1 disc is hard evidence that we are a spiritual people, that we hurt and we heal, that we do indeed have
souls that live long after we're buried.

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