Dark Was The Night--Cold Was The Ground by Blind Willie Johnson
September 15, 2005 4:12 AM Subscribe
Ry Cooder once said
Dark Was The Night--Cold Was The Ground was
the most soulful, transcendent piece of American music recorded in the 20th Century.
Unearthly and
music of the spheres were common descriptions long before both became fact when it was included on a golden record was affixed to the star bound
Voyager space probe. My first encounter with
Dark Was The Night was while watching, and then listening to the soundtrack album of, Piero Paulo Pasolini’s
The Gospel According To St. Matthew--or as it is known in Sicily kickin' Bootsville,
Il Vangelo de Matteo--which is, in my humble opinion, the Greatest. Jesus. Movie. Evar. Ironically, coincidentally and serendipitously, it was an apt choice by Pasolini, as the
hymn from which
Blind Willie Johnson's wordless moan derives is a song about Christ’s passion—his suffering and crucifixion. (Continued with much more within)
posted by y2karl (67 comments total)
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Now, as to clips of the song, the patient can find a number of versions of the song---and the rest of Johnson's recorded output---under Blind Willie Johnson at Weenie Juke Radio. Stefan Grossman has the song entire in his Blind Willie Johnson program at Country Blues Guitar - A Series of 17 Radio Broadcasts --it's about 9 minutes into the 13 minute program. Which provides ample evidence why Grossman is not known as a vocalist. Here is the partial Authentic History Project clip.
There is a clip of a version of Dark Was The Night with words sung by another black sanctified singer from Folkway's page for Music from the South, Vol. 7: Elder Songsters, sung by John and Lovie Griffins, the melody of which sounds similar to what Johnson's moan: the song is a slow drawn out dirge sung in an intertwining call and response is between Griffins and his wife--not unlike how Johnson sang with Willie B. Harris and Angeline Johnson, respectively, at his two sessions for Columbia Records.
Johnson's version of the song is unlike anything else he recorded. He usually sang in an unbelievably loud and incredibly raspy forced falso bravo false bass to a woman singing a high voiced response while he played a pile drivingly rhythmic guitar laced with bottleneck ostinatos.
For comparison, from the Encyclopedia Titanica comes Johnson's God Moves on the Water while an mp3 of Blind Willie Johnson Praise God I'm Satisfied can be found here and here is some of his John The Revelator.
Dark was another thing entirely: slow, surging with his high E--now D as in Open D tuning--slide notes singing the woman's line and apart from an Ah well here and Oh, Lord there, there are no words. He sings with passion and intensity but intensely and passionately what ?
The wordlessness itself is part of the song's power but the wordlessness is ours. The song was a hymn of the Passion of Christ. Consider the second verse:
"Father, remove this bitter cup,
If such Thy sacred will;
If not, content to drink it up
Thy pleasure I fulfill."
The song recalls Christ at his weakest, most dark and doubting moment and then recounts his suffering. It comes as no surprise then, that the song would resonate with those born into slavery. Consider what Ludwig Feuerbach wrote about the Passion:
The Passion of Christ, however, represents not only moral, voluntary suffering, the suffering of love, the power of sacrificing self for the good of others; it represents also suffering as such, suffering in so far as it is an expression of possibility in general. The Christian religion is so little superhuman that it even sanctions human weakness. The heathen philosopher, on hearing tidings of the death of his child exclaims: 'I knew that he was mortal.' Christ, on the contrary--at least in the Bible,--sheds tears over the death of Lazarus, a death which he nevertheless knew to be only an apparent one. While Socrates empties the cup of poison with unshaken soul, Christ exclaims, 'If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.' Christ is in this respect the self-confession of human sensibility. In opposition to the heathen, and in particular the stoical principle, with its rigorous energy of will and self-sustainedness, the Christian involves the consciousness of his own sensitiveness and susceptibility in the consciousness of God; he finds it, if only it be no sinful weakness, not denied, not condemned in God.
Harry Lewman , who himself has recorded his own version for twelve string guitar--there have been a bluegrass and jazz versions of it as well--has a part of the puzzle:
Thomas Haweis was an English physician and clergyman who wrote this song and hundreds of other hymns. Its original title was "Gethsemane" and was published in a book of hymns dated 1792. It is among the many hymns that were taught to American Negro slaves in the 1800's by British missionaries.
Here are two more clues:
During the post-Civil War period and later, some congregation conducted services without hymnbooks. A deacon (or precentor) set the pitch and reminded the words in half-singing half-chanting stentorian tones. The people called their songs 'long-meter hymns' (because the tempo was very low) or 'Dr Watts', even if they have not been written by this gentleman. The particular feature of this kind of singing was its surging, melismatic melody, punctuated after each praise by the leader’s intoning of the next line of the hymn. The male voices doubled the female voices an octave below and with the thirds and the fifths occurring when individuals left the melody to sing in a more comfortable range. The quality of the singing was distinctive for its hard, full-throated and/or nasal tones with frequent exploitation of falsetto, growling, and moaning.
The tunes and the beats, before 1865
Lining-out is a hymn-singing tradition that arose out of necessity. There was a lack of hymn books and an abundance of people who could not read; therefore, one person was designated to 'pitch' the song for the whole congregation. Both African and Anglo Americans practice this tradition in different performance styles. In the Anglo tradition the congregation sings almost the exact melody and rhythms of the leader, with some variation from individual singers; in the African-American tradition, the lead voice and congregation overlap melodically and rhythmically and decorate the hymn tunes with various vocal embellishments and moans. This produces an extraordinary effect sometimes called surge singing. In many churches this style is still performed a cappella.
"Like a River Flowing with Living Water": Worshiping in the Mississippi Delta
Considering Johnson's slide guitar, this excerpt regarding Muddy Water's playing from Preaching The Blues: The Mississippi Delta of Muddy Waters is pertinent:
... Steel-string bottleneck playing incorporated the Muslim-influenced wavering, or melismatic effect, that combined with an open or drone string that gave some West African-derived music a single tonal center. This melismatic style also lent itself to call and response patterns that West Africans carried far into African American culture.
Here are tabs of Johnson's Dark was The Night and here is one of Ry Cooder's Dark Is The Night courtesy of Kay-Uwe Graw's Sliding Zone. Cooder, in the same interview from which his quote above comes, allowed that to even come close to the neighborhood of Johnson's playing took him a half hour's warming up. This has been my experience as well--albeit at a much greater distance from the original at my best. I will say this, however--trying to learn the song will open up your playing.
Now, while almost all the biographies refer to Johnson playing slide in his lap with a jack knife, one will notice upon close examination of the one photograph of Blind Willie Johnson--scroll down and click on the thumbnail of it at this Imperial Crowns page for a bigger picture--otherwise. Johnson is holding his guitar in the standard position and has what looks like a sawed off wine bottle neck on his pinkie. So much for the jack knife.
Here's a tip for the playa's: get a glass slide. My newly informed guess about the recording is that Johnson is playing a glass slide on new strings. A glass slide brings out those squeaky counter point ghost notes far more than a metal one--especially on a newly restrung guitar.
And as a bonus for fellow fans of Pasolini's Rebel Jesus, here is the Gospel According to St. Matthew page at Hollywood Jesus, replete with many stills and some very bad RealVideo clips of the English dubbed version-- the original Italian version is considered by far the better film to watch. Nonetheless they give you the flava--and you can hear Dark Was The Night faintly in the background in the scene where Judas hangs himself after betraying Jesus. Here is a review from Flickering regarding the film and here is a recent meditation by Roger Ebert comparing the Pasolin's film with Mel Gibson's The Passion Of Christ. I did not know until now that Gibson filmed his Passion in the same location where Pasolini filmed his Gospel. Here is a link rich discussion of the Gospel, wherein I found that the then nineteen year old Basque student Pasolini chose to play Jesus is now an economist and a professor of literature... also an expert in information technology and artificial intelligence and an organizer and referee of computer chess tournaments who once played chess against the likes of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. To quote Jim Nabors as Gomer Pyle, Gol-l-l-l-l-lee! Who'd a-thunk ?
And now for dessert, click on Dark Was The Night in this list of songs from Voyager's golden record and click all the way through another decent biography of Blind Willie Johnson for the song. Here is the intro for all that--a sort of animated riff on the Voyager images. Now is that cool or what ?
posted by y2karl at 4:15 AM on September 15, 2005 [9 favorites]