Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground

During a field recording trip to Dallas, Columbia Records captured a 30-year-old blind street preacher performing an instrumental that defied simple categorization. Blind Willie Johnson played his guitar using a pocketknife for a slide, matching the instrument's weeping microtones with wordless, agonizing vocal moans. The performance evokes the profound suffering of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, tapping into a well of grief so universally human that in 1977, Carl Sagan selected it for the Voyager Golden Record. It is currently drifting through interstellar space, representing human sorrow to the cosmos.