I said I wanted to make records again but was nervous because it had been almost ten years since I’d been in the studio. How does one make a good record? ‘Make a bad record,’ he said, and laughed. ‘I do it all the time.’
Putting aside the humble nature of Sakamoto’s response above, his simple advice to “make a bad record” as a creative tactic to circumvent the anti-creative judgmental power of the ego, is concise and masterful – if you’re worried about the quality of what you create, just make bad things. They likely won’t be bad for long.
The short profile of a music maestro from which this quote is pulled, peppered with first-hand conversations with the maestro himself, is a cracking little introduction to his work.
The life of a blues musician in 1920’s America was notoriously wrought with hardship and poverty. Blind Willie Johnson however may just have had it harder than the rest.
Willie Johnson wasn’t born blind but as his moniker suggests, by the time that he started writing music he had lost his sight in a horrific ordeal. As the story goes, his stepmother was beaten by Willie’s father one night after being caught with another man. She then reacted by throwing lye into Willie’s face leaving him permanently blind.
Not much is known about the life of Blind Willie but we can be fairly sure that he remained poor for most of it, regularly busking in order to collect enough money to survive. In the early 20th century, America was still extremely hostile to black people and Willie turned to the church to find solace from the hardships of daily Texan life. This can be heard in many of his surviving songs which contain a deeply spiritual tone. The songs that Willie recorded during the 20’s and 30’s are extremely haunting but they also have a strangely uplifting quality to them.
In 1945, tragedy struck Blind Willie Johnson’s life for the final time when his house burnt to the ground and having nowhere else to go, he took to sleeping on a pile of damp newspapers in the ruins. This led to him contracting Malaria in the hot Texan weather and dying within weeks. At the time of his death, Willie would have no idea that his music would go on to shape the Blues genre and therefore indirectly influence much of the music produced in the last 50 years. Perhaps his greatest legacy is the inclusion of the above track onboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 as an example to Alien lifeforms of Human achievement. By now, Voyager 1 will have exited the solar system over 18 billion kilometres from Earth and therefore acts as the perfect metaphor for the infinite reach of Blind Willie’s music.
Blind Willie Johnson is just one of a number of truly brilliant Blues musicians and Blues as a genre is just one small piece in the rich tapestry of staggering musical achievement, but there is something truly special about Blind Willie’s music. Some timeless, powerful force that speaks through the ages about the pain and suffering of mankind and as long as talented musicians continue to be influenced by his incredible music, as long as Voyager 1 continues through space carrying “Dark Was the Night…”, Blind Willie Johnson will live on.
Fractalis - An ongoing journal 