Feb. 26--Blind Willie Johnson left behind a mere 30 songs and a towering legacy that empowered disciples ranging from Pops Staples and Bob Dylan to Led Zeppelin and Ry Cooder. Yet he is an often overlooked figure who merged gospel and blues into music of transcendent depth and feeling. He died in 1945, 15 years after his final recording. Homeless after a fire destroyed his house in southeast Texas, Johnson came down with an illness (variously described as malaria or pneumonia), only to be refused admission to a hospital on account of his blindness (or, more likely, his skin color).
"God Don't Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson" (Alligator) pays tribute to the slide-guitar master by reaffirming the durability of his songs. An array of contemporary artists -- from Tom Waits to Lucinda Williams -- work in largely stripped-down arrangements that mirror the starkness of Johnson's original recordings. An understandable reverence prevails over most of these primarily straight-forward interpretations, but a handful dig a level deeper.
Waits and his family -- son Casey on drums, wife Kathleen Brennan on eerie backing vocals -- capture Johnson's haunted essence in "The Soul of a Man," and he summons ghosts on "John the Revelator." Susan Tedeschi's burlap-and-silk vocal textures and Derek Trucks' slide-guitar punctuations suit a back-porch arrangement of "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning." The Cowboy Junkies give "Jesus is Coming Soon" a psychedelic afterglow, and Sinead O'Connor finds the uneasy middle ground between a declaration of faith and a desperate plea for deliverance on "Trouble Will Soon Be Over."
It's an ambivalence that hung over every note Johnson recorded: a belief that God's love can sustain even the most wretched of human beings, shadowed by the possibility that sometimes even a sacred bond may not be enough.
Greg Kot is a Tribune Newspapers critic.
greg@gregkot.com
'God Don't Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson'
Various artists
3 stars
