Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground
Encyclopedia
"Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground"Because documentation is scarce in early recordings, the title of the song appears differently in many sources. It is often called "Dark Was the Night" or punctuated as "Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)". is a gospel-blues
song written and performed by American musician Blind Willie Johnson
and recorded in 1927. The song is primarily an instrumental featuring Johnson's self-taught bottleneck slide guitar
and picking style accompanied by his vocalizations of humming and moaning. It has the distinction of being one of 27 samples of music included on the Voyager Golden Record
, launched into space in 1977 to represent the diversity of life on Earth. "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was chosen as the human expression of loneliness. The song has been highly praised and covered by numerous musicians and is featured on the soundtracks of several films.
had a field unit that traveled to smaller towns to record local talent. Johnson recorded about 30 songs in five sessions between 1927 and 1930. Among the first of these was "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground".
that was popular in the nineteenth century American South with fasola singers. “Gethsemane”, written by English clergyman Thomas Haweis
in 1792, begins with the lines “Dark was the night, cold was the ground/on which my Lord was laid.” Music historian Mark Humphrey describes Johnson's composition as an impressionistic rendition of “lining out
”, a call-and-response
style of singing hymns that is common in southern African-American churches.
"Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" is 3 minutes and 21 seconds of Johnson's unique guitar playing in regular tuning in open D
for slide. By most accounts, Johnson substituted a knife or penknife
for the bottleneck. His melancholy, gravel-throated humming of the guitar part creates the impression of "unison moaning", a melodic style common in Baptist churches where, instead of harmonizing, a choir hums or sings the same vocal part, albeit with slight variations among its members. Although Johnson's vocals are indiscernible, several sources indicate the subject of the song is the crucifixion of Christ.
His records were sold by the Columbia
and Vocalion labels with other blues acts like Bessie Smith
, whom Johnson outsold during the Depression years. In 1928, the influential blues critic Edward Abbe Niles championed Johnson in his column for The Bookman
, praising his "violent, tortured, and abysmal shouts and groans, and his inspired guitar playing".
. A highly regarded figure within the burgeoning New York folk scene, Davis gave copies of Johnson's records to young musicians and taught them to play his songs. The Soul Stirrers
, Staples Singers, Buffy Sainte-Marie
and Peter, Paul & Mary all covered Johnson. In 1969, the English folk-rock band Fairport Convention
released the album What We Did on Our Holidays
which included a song inspired by "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" called "The Lord Is in this Place...How Dreadful Is this Place". A compilation album titled Dark Was The Night
was released in 2009 by the Red Hot Organization
, a charity that raises awareness of HIV and AIDS issues through music. The Kronos Quartet
recorded an arrangement of "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" that appears the album.
Singer-guitarist Jack White
of The White Stripes
called "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" "the greatest example of slide guitar ever recorded" and used the song as a standard to measure such iconic rock music that followed in its wake, such as "Whole Lotta Love
" by Led Zeppelin
. In 2003, John Clarke in The Times
wrote that "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was "the most intense and startling blues record ever made". Francis Davis, author of The History of the Blues concurs, writing "In terms of its intensity alone—its spiritual ache—there is nothing else from the period to compare to Johnson's 'Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground', on which his guitar takes the part of a preacher and his wordless voice the part of a rapt congregation."
Johnson's recording of "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was selected by the Library of Congress
as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry
, which selects recordings annually that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
soundtrack
to Pier Paolo Pasolini
's classic film, The Gospel According to St Matthew
, in scenes where Judas Iscariot
laments betraying Christ and a cripple asks to be healed. Ry Cooder
based his soundtrack to the Palme d'Or
-winning film, Paris, Texas
on "Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground", which he has described as "the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music." Wim Wenders
, the director of Paris, Texas, included Blind Willie Johnson's music and life in his 2003 documentary The Soul of a Man, produced for the PBS
series "The Blues".
and a team of researchers were tasked with collecting a representation of Earth and the human experience for sending on the Voyager probe to other life forms in the universe. They collected sounds of frogs, crickets, volcanoes, a human heartbeat, laughter, greetings in 55 languages, and 27 pieces of music on the Voyager Golden Record
. "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was included, according to Sagan, because "Johnson's song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight."
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
song written and performed by American musician Blind Willie Johnson
Blind Willie Johnson
"Blind" Willie Johnson was an American singer and guitarist, whose music straddled the border between blues and spirituals....
and recorded in 1927. The song is primarily an instrumental featuring Johnson's self-taught bottleneck slide guitar
Slide guitar
Slide guitar or bottleneck guitar is a particular method or technique for playing the guitar. The term slide refers to the motion of the slide against the strings, while bottleneck refers to the original material of choice for such slides: the necks of glass bottles...
and picking style accompanied by his vocalizations of humming and moaning. It has the distinction of being one of 27 samples of music included on the Voyager Golden Record
Voyager Golden Record
The Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for...
, launched into space in 1977 to represent the diversity of life on Earth. "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was chosen as the human expression of loneliness. The song has been highly praised and covered by numerous musicians and is featured on the soundtracks of several films.
Background
Born in 1897, Johnson taught himself how to play guitar and dedicated his life to blues and gospel music, playing for people on street corners. Columbia RecordsColumbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...
had a field unit that traveled to smaller towns to record local talent. Johnson recorded about 30 songs in five sessions between 1927 and 1930. Among the first of these was "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground".
Composition and recording
The song's title is borrowed from a hymnHymn
A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification...
that was popular in the nineteenth century American South with fasola singers. “Gethsemane”, written by English clergyman Thomas Haweis
Thomas Haweis
Thomas Haweis was born in Redruth, Cornwall, on 1 January 1734, where he was baptised on 20 February 1734...
in 1792, begins with the lines “Dark was the night, cold was the ground/on which my Lord was laid.” Music historian Mark Humphrey describes Johnson's composition as an impressionistic rendition of “lining out
Lining out
Lining out is a form of a cappella hymn-singing or hymnody in which a leader, often called the clerk or precentor, gives each line of a hymn tune as it is to be sung, usually in a chanted form giving or suggesting the tune...
”, a call-and-response
Call and response (music)
In music, a call and response is a succession of two distinct phrases usually played by different musicians, where the second phrase is heard as a direct commentary on or response to the first...
style of singing hymns that is common in southern African-American churches.
"Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" is 3 minutes and 21 seconds of Johnson's unique guitar playing in regular tuning in open D
Open D tuning
Open D tuning is an open tuning for the acoustic or electric guitar. The open string notes in this tuning are: D A D F♯ A D. It uses the three notes that form the triad of a D major chord: D, the root note; A, the perfect fifth; and F♯, the major third...
for slide. By most accounts, Johnson substituted a knife or penknife
Penknife
A penknife, or pen knife, is a small folding pocket knife, originally used for cutting or sharpening a quill to make a pen nib. Originally, penknives did not necessarily have folding blades, but resembled a scalpel or wood knife by having a short, fixed blade at the end of a long handle...
for the bottleneck. His melancholy, gravel-throated humming of the guitar part creates the impression of "unison moaning", a melodic style common in Baptist churches where, instead of harmonizing, a choir hums or sings the same vocal part, albeit with slight variations among its members. Although Johnson's vocals are indiscernible, several sources indicate the subject of the song is the crucifixion of Christ.
His records were sold by the Columbia
Columbia Records
Columbia Records is an American record label, owned by Japan's Sony Music Entertainment, operating under the Columbia Music Group with Aware Records. It was founded in 1888, evolving from an earlier enterprise, the American Graphophone Company — successor to the Volta Graphophone Company...
and Vocalion labels with other blues acts like Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith was an American blues singer.Sometimes referred to as The Empress of the Blues, Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s...
, whom Johnson outsold during the Depression years. In 1928, the influential blues critic Edward Abbe Niles championed Johnson in his column for The Bookman
The Bookman (New York)
The Bookman was a literary journal established in 1895 by Dodd, Mead and Company. It drew its name from the phrase, "I am a Bookman," by James Russell Lowell; the phrase regularly appeared on the cover and title page of the bound edition. It was purchased in 1918 by the George H. Doran Company. In...
, praising his "violent, tortured, and abysmal shouts and groans, and his inspired guitar playing".
Music
Johnson's music experienced a revival in the 1960s thanks in large part to the efforts of blues guitarist Reverend Gary DavisReverend Gary Davis
Reverend Gary Davis, also Blind Gary Davis, was an American blues and gospel singer and guitarist, who was also proficient on the banjo and harmonica...
. A highly regarded figure within the burgeoning New York folk scene, Davis gave copies of Johnson's records to young musicians and taught them to play his songs. The Soul Stirrers
The Soul Stirrers
One of the most popular and influential gospel groups of the 20th century, the Soul Stirrers were pioneers in the development of the quartet style of gospel and, without intending it, in the creation of soul music, doo wop, and motown sound, some of the secular music that owed much to gospel.The...
, Staples Singers, Buffy Sainte-Marie
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Buffy Sainte-Marie, OC is a Canadian Cree singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist, and social activist. Throughout her career in all of these areas, her work has focused on issues of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her singing and writing repertoire includes...
and Peter, Paul & Mary all covered Johnson. In 1969, the English folk-rock band Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention are an English folk rock and later electric folk band, formed in 1967 who are still recording and touring today. They are widely regarded as the most important single group in the English folk rock movement...
released the album What We Did on Our Holidays
What We Did on Our Holidays
- Personnel :* Sandy Denny - vocals, acoustic & 12-string acoustic guitars, organ, piano, harpsichord* Iain Matthews - vocals, congas* Richard Thompson - electric, acoustic & 12-string acoustic guitars, piano accordion, vocals...
which included a song inspired by "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" called "The Lord Is in this Place...How Dreadful Is this Place". A compilation album titled Dark Was The Night
Dark Was the Night
Dark Was the Night is the twentieth compilation release benefiting the Red Hot Organization, an international charity dedicated to raising funds and awareness for HIV and AIDS...
was released in 2009 by the Red Hot Organization
Red Hot Organization
Red Hot Organization is a not-for-profit, 501 3, international organization dedicated to fighting AIDS through pop culture.Since its inception in 1989, over 400 artists, producers and directors have contributed to over 15 compilation albums, related television programs and media events to raise...
, a charity that raises awareness of HIV and AIDS issues through music. The Kronos Quartet
Kronos Quartet
Kronos Quartet is a string quartet founded by violinist David Harrington in 1973 in Seattle, Washington. Since 1978, the quartet has been based in San Francisco, California. The longest-running combination of performers had Harrington and John Sherba on violin, Hank Dutt on viola, and Joan...
recorded an arrangement of "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" that appears the album.
Singer-guitarist Jack White
Jack White (musician)
Jack White , often credited as Jack White III, is an American musician, songwriter, record producer and occasional actor...
of The White Stripes
The White Stripes
The White Stripes was an American rock band, formed in 1997 in Detroit, Michigan. The group consisted of the songwriter Jack White and drummer Meg White . Jack and Meg White were previously married to each other, but are now divorced...
called "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" "the greatest example of slide guitar ever recorded" and used the song as a standard to measure such iconic rock music that followed in its wake, such as "Whole Lotta Love
Whole Lotta Love
"Whole Lotta Love" is a song by English rock band Led Zeppelin. It is featured as the opening track on the band's second album, Led Zeppelin II, and was released in the United States and Japan as a single. The US release became their first hit single, it was certified Gold on 13 April 1970, when it...
" by Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin were an English rock band, active in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Formed in 1968, they consisted of guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant, bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham...
. In 2003, John Clarke in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
wrote that "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was "the most intense and startling blues record ever made". Francis Davis, author of The History of the Blues concurs, writing "In terms of its intensity alone—its spiritual ache—there is nothing else from the period to compare to Johnson's 'Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground', on which his guitar takes the part of a preacher and his wordless voice the part of a rapt congregation."
Johnson's recording of "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was selected by the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry
National Recording Registry
The National Recording Registry is a list of sound recordings that "are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States." The registry was established by the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000, which created the National Recording...
, which selects recordings annually that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Film
“Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground” was used on the Oscar-nominatedAcademy Award for Best Original Score
The Academy Award for Original Score is presented to the best substantial body of music in the form of dramatic underscoring written specifically for the film by the submitting composer.-Superlatives:...
soundtrack
Soundtrack
A soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, book, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the...
to Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer, and intellectual. Pasolini distinguished himself as a poet, journalist, philosopher, linguist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, newspaper and magazine columnist, actor, painter and political figure...
's classic film, The Gospel According to St Matthew
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (film)
The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a 1964 Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is a retelling of the story of Jesus Christ, from the Nativity through the Resurrection....
, in scenes where Judas Iscariot
Judas Iscariot
Judas Iscariot was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. He is best known for his betrayal of Jesus to the hands of the chief priests for 30 pieces of silver.-Etymology:...
laments betraying Christ and a cripple asks to be healed. Ry Cooder
Ry Cooder
Ryland Peter "Ry" Cooder is an American guitarist, singer and composer. He is known for his slide guitar work, his interest in roots music from the United States, and, more recently, his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.His solo work has been eclectic, encompassing...
based his soundtrack to the Palme d'Or
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...
-winning film, Paris, Texas
Paris, Texas (film)
Paris, Texas is a 1984 drama film directed by Wim Wenders. The screenplay is by L.M. Kit Carson and playwright Sam Shepard, and the distinctive musical score was composed by Ry Cooder. The cinematography is by Robby Müller....
on "Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground", which he has described as "the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music." Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German film director, playwright, author, photographer and producer.-Early life:Wenders was born in Düsseldorf. He graduated from high school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine and philosophy in Freiburg and Düsseldorf...
, the director of Paris, Texas, included Blind Willie Johnson's music and life in his 2003 documentary The Soul of a Man, produced for the PBS
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
series "The Blues".
Voyager Golden Record
In 1977 Carl SaganCarl Sagan
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books...
and a team of researchers were tasked with collecting a representation of Earth and the human experience for sending on the Voyager probe to other life forms in the universe. They collected sounds of frogs, crickets, volcanoes, a human heartbeat, laughter, greetings in 55 languages, and 27 pieces of music on the Voyager Golden Record
Voyager Golden Record
The Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for...
. "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was included, according to Sagan, because "Johnson's song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight."