April 2005 | Journeys
Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground
by Marc Silber
A few months ago, I got a phone call from my friend and fellow-musician David Grisman. He was preparing to record Living with the Blues, a new album [See CG, September 2004] with fiddler Vassar Clements and wanted to know if I would be part of it. I happily accepted. When I walked into Grisman’s Dawg Studios, he and co-producer Norton Buffalo were listening to some old blues tracks in preparation for the recording session. Grisman looked up with a deeply serious face and asked if I had ever heard the song that was playing. He said it was possibly the “greatest tune ever recorded.” I already knew this recording. It was Blind Willie Johnson’s rendition of “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.”
During my university days in Ann Arbor, I spent endless nights listening to Johnson’s music with my friend, writer and poet Al Young. “Dark Was the Night” was included in the music sent into deep space on the Voyager probe — along with recordings by Chuck Berry, the Beatles, and Beethoven. It also resurfaced as the instrumental theme played by Ry Cooder on slide guitar during the Mick Jagger film, Performance. Cooder (of Buena Vista Social Club fame) once called it “the most transcendent piece of American music.”
Having been involved in “roots” or traditional folk music for many years, as both a performer and teacher, I have come to appreciate that there are many more hues to the African-American musical spectrum than blues. Blind Willie Johnson represents one of them. Born in the South, he lived during the period that saw the birth and evolution of the blues. He played the guitar, the preferred blues instrument. But Johnson did not sing the blues. He was a religious man who recorded spiritual and religious music. “Dark Was the Night” is a “moan.” A moan is simply a style of wordless singing. And since it is a lament without words, we are left to wonder about the singer’s personal story, experiencing only his pain. Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night” moan is both gorgeous and eerie at the same time as the sliding notes on the guitar strings chase and match the singer’s haunting, wordless vocals.
In this recording, Johnson does not employ his famous “falso-basso” voice (a technique also used by Louis Armstrong that emphasizes the bottom sounds of the vocal register). This rattling sound carries an echo from Africa itself and still can be heard throughout African-American vocal traditions, in the voices of preachers and in the booming cries of outdoor marketplaces.
Listen to Johnson attack the strings with his metal slide. He can be so pure, and then he can make the sound “rattle” using his slide. Johnson is said to have used a jackknife, which he slid across the metal guitar strings to get that wailing, shiny effect. Nowadays, blues guitarists use glass, brass, or metal-plated tubes for slides.
A sliding object on the top of the guitar strings that avoids depressing the fretted fingerboard takes us into the musical realm of what I call “Two Trains Running.” Frets are designed to produce the familiar 12 tones of the European harmonic system. While it provided a workable system for the likes of J.S. Bach, much of the world’s music relies instead on linear or drone systems — used independently and in combination.
When Johnson’s blade slides across his strings, he is able to rise literally above the confines of the European harmonic system and choose any tones within each octave (in the European system, this is known as “micro-tonal” music).
There is a recording of “Jesus Coming Soon” where Willie Johnson plays and sings while his wife adds a higher vocal part. This singing in octaves creates a drone effect over the microtonal cry of the slide guitar. In addition to his false-basso technique, Johnson often used a two-beat (“boom/chuck”) rhythm — a rarity in blues music. Add Johnson’s soul and artistry into the mix, and you have a grand example of American music that journeys from ancient African influences to the music of our modern era.
What else is there to enjoy and admire? Take the gorgeous timbre of Johnson’s voice — a mixture of Eastern and Western sounds, woven from the ancient vocal tapestry of Jewish, Arabic, Berber, Turkish, Spanish tongues and infused with African musical strains from Egypt, Ethiopia and the sub-Sahara. Reverberating with all these musical roots, Johnson’s voice transports us to a place in which time no longer exists.
One of my mentors, Texas bluesman Mance Lipscomb, once told me about the day he heard the song “Motherless Children” performed by two men standing on a corner in Navasota, Texas. In his velvety, crooning voice, Lipscomb said one of them was “coffee-colored, blind, and used a jackknife for a slide.” The description gave me a chill because I was sure that it must have been Blind Willie Johnson himself whom he had heard so many years ago. (Mance also used a knife when he played slide guitar, and you can hear his knife rattle along the edge of the frets as it slides over the strings.)
Like most roots music, Johnson’s artistry grew directly from the rich soil of his life. But the world that he, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly and Mance Lipscomb came from no longer exists. Our generation of musicians must resort to using our imaginations to “put the frame around the picture.” Our contemporary roots have never tasted the rich and harrowing culture from which the blues and other traditional music emerged and matured. As I work on my own music, I only hope that it will represent the things I feel and believe with the same depth and honesty that characterized these old-time roots musicians. This is why the value of these departed musicians — and the recordings that forever captured their artistry on more than 100 years of wax, wire, vinyl, and magnetic tape — only grows with the passing of time.
Songster Marc Silber teaches and performs in the Bay Area and is widely regarded as a contemporary master of traditional country blues. An accomplished luthier, his instruments have won Acoustic Guitar’s Player’s Choice Award. His most recent CD is available from www.marcsilbermusic.com . Recordings of Blind Willie Johnson are available from Columbia Records and the Yazoo label.
Recommend this page to a friend
Top Ten pages recommended to friends:
