One Artist, One Song Series: Blind Willie Johnson - It's Nobody's Fault But Mine (1927)

Blind Willie Johnson: It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine

There is a dense mythological aura around many, if not most, of the pre-war acoustic blues performers — multi­plied ten-fold for those of them who did not have the luck to live past 1945, or, more accurately, until that time when people like Alan Lomax or other enthusiasts started digging them up — as «living fossils» of sorts — and getting them record contracts, e.g. Mississippi John Hurt or Skip James or the Reverend Gary Davis. Even these guys, though they could be seen and heard in the flesh by the starry-eyed baby-boomer blues devotees, were worshipped like demi-gods; what then of those whose only evidence of ever having existed remained in the form of dusty, crackling old records, accompanied sometimes by vague, fuzzy, often self-contradictory memories of their relatively more long-lived contemporaries? Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson — it’s certain that the holy mystique emanating from these guys’ preserved recorded legacy was drastically enhanced by the fact that one was more likely to have heard various legends and apocryphal stories about them rather than actual verifiable biographical facts.

And when it comes to the records themselves, it’s a pretty fair bet that the same «holy mystique» effect made far more impact on boomer kids in the 1960s than it would make on the average person in our day and age — precisely because those same boomer kids, such as Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Rory Gallagher, Jorma Kaukonen, etc., would reintroduce those chords, vibes, and moods to us in an updated, more accessible fashion. When a British, or even a white urban American kid, heard Robert Johnson for the first time in, say, the year 1962, he was most likely discovering a whole new universe of feeling; a couple decades later already, we’d been exposed to so much blues music in so many different styles and fashions — electric, acoustic, hard-rocking, folksified, artsified, etc. — that going back to such antique sources would be more of an instructive lesson in history than an incentive for creative awakening.

Indeed, it is very, very rare that I feel any kind of quasi-religious shiver upon listening to those old recordings — I like them, but my threshold of emotional impressiveness is generally not low enough to let them really seep through. Even Robert Johnson never struck me as someone liable to truly have had all those hellhounds on his trail. My guts accept and digest the sad, subtle beauty of the Rolling Stones’ cover of ‘Love In Vain’, but next to it I cannot get rid of the sensation that Johnson’s original feels like a «raw demo», and not a particularly magical or mystical at that. For me, it takes work to transform formal respect for a recording like that into subconscious adoration, and it is far from every time that that work bears fruit. (Let us not forget, either, that even the greatest acoustic blues performers of the 1920s and the 1930s were more commonly entertainers and craftsmen than conscious «artists» — we often tend to look at them through a revisionist perspective that ascribes a lot more psychological depth and artistic ambition than they could ever dream of, particularly at a time and in a place where a properly bohemian way of existence could hardly even be imagined, let alone lived out).

Which is precisely why, out of all these mythical Delta and circa-Delta figures, Blind Willie Johnson remains the most distinct one for me — somebody whose own personal enigma lies more in the actual music itself than in any narrated circumstances surrounding it, especially given how few of these circumstances are, in fact, narrated about the life and death of the man in question. Allegedly, he did not invent «gospel-blues» as such — certain accounts state that he learned the craft from another blind musician called Madkin Butler, and the roots of it disappear way back into the 19th century — but he is arguably the best, if not the very first, proponent of this style in the 1920s whom we can properly appreciate through recorded legacy; and compared to everybody else I already listed, he’s the downright Epic Boss of ’em all. To the extent that you could probably share a hypothetical drink with Blind Lemon Jefferson or Mississippi John Hurt, but Blind Willie probably works better next to a Dostoyevsky novel.

Choosing a single song to illustrate his magnitude is not an easy task, even if the recorded legacy is fairly small: his studio sessions only lasted from 1927 to 1930, and everything that remains amounts to about 90 minutes of music. But it is fairly consistent and there are multiple highlights even after I excluded the songs on which he does not play his trademark slide guitar and those on which his wife, Willie B. Harris, plays an active part as co-vocalist (unfortunately, she had a very shrill, nagging voice which, to my taste, almost defines «annoying» — perhaps not in the Yoko Ono sense of the matter, but the analogy is not entirely out of order). For many people, the quintessential BWJ track would probably be ‘Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground’ — due to its status as an early herald of «American primitivism», bordering on the avantgarde — but while it does indeed stand out in the catalog, I think that talking about Blind Willie as a wholesome artist requires selecting something a bit less challenging and a bit more directly influential, more representative of his usual style rather than illustrating the extreme lengths to which he’d go in his artistry.

Therefore, we’ll go with ‘It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine’, which seems to be his most often covered number — from Nina Simone to Lucinda Williams, everybody seems to have wanted a piece of this over the decades, and Led Zeppelin’s reinterpretation of the song on the Presence album gave it a whole new kind of immortality (though, unfortunately, with Page and Plant’s usual reluctance to leave behind any credit for the old bluesmen, not a lot of fans must have gotten through to Blind Willie’s original from the reinvented cover). It’s downright perfect in all the aspects that matter — vocal, lyrical, instrumental, atmospheric — and if you happen to be an impressionable person, I believe it can impress you every bit as efficiently even today as it did nearly 100 years ago, having been laid down on record in Dallas, Texas, on December 3, 1927.

As with all of Blind Willie’s best numbers, the power of this one grows from two seemingly unrelated aspects/techniques. The more blatantly noticeable one is the vocal power. Blind Willie was one of the first well-remembered «growlers» of the recording age, and it would make sense to remember that, actually, most of his equally well-remembered African-American blues-based contemporaries were not «growlers» at all, but rather nice gentlemen with soft, soothing, occasionally even effeminate tenors — Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie McTell, etc., all the way up to Robert Johnson. Judging by some of his tracks, Blind Willie did have some range, so his preferred vocal style must have been a deliberate choice — at 30 years of age, he had embraced a deep, dark, throaty style of singing that would intentionally make him sound like an Old Testament character. Unlike all those who came later, though — Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart, even Howlin’ Wolf — Blind Willie did not merely sing in an Old Testament kind of voice, he diligently used it to deliver an Old Testament kind of message. You can have a lively philosophical discussion around the question of does Don Van Vliet really have to sing like that?, but there’s no sense in applying that same query to Mr. Johnson, who probably couldn’t sound closer to Prophet Ezekiel even if he sang in pure Biblical Hebrew.

The lyrical message of the song — and we do not seem to have enough information to decide whether Willie wrote the words himself or simply adapted one of those pre-existing «Negro spirituals» — is simple enough ("I have a Bible in my arm, if I don’t read my soul be lost"), but there are at least two non-trivial moments worth mentioning. First, the words strongly advocate for responsibility, individual agency, and free will: in proper old school Protestant fashion, there is no medium between you and God, it is your responsibility and nobody else’s to directly ponder over the Holy Word, and as long as your parents fulfill their duty of giving you the right tools ("Mother she taught me how to read"), you have no right to shirk away from your duty. There may be a touch of hidden irony here, of course, given that not only was Blind Willie himself physically unable to «read» anything since the age of seven, but, according to the most commonly told story, his own (step)mother actually blinded him with lye water during an emotional outburst — but then, this just might be an incentive to understand the song’s message in a more symbolic manner than anything. In any case, the song is not just an abstract lament: it is a call to action, and if you, perhaps a bit forcefully, expand the implication that the Good Book is the only book worth reading in the first place, you could argue that ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ is prime-level propaganda of literacy, which would give it much social value back in 1927, both for struggling African-American and low-class white communities.

The other important aspect is that, although the words "nobody’s fault but mine" can be technically taken as merely a sinister warning ("it shall be nobody’s fault but mine if..."), the overall atmosphere of the song feels as if the worst that could have come to pass has already happened, and that the entire composition is an emotional outburst of a hardened sinner — or, perhaps, somebody on his way to become a hardened sinner, making one last desperate effort to hold on to the straight and narrow before his passion leads him to murdering someone or worse. There is no explicit darkness or tragedy in the words themselves, but the agitated manner of singing brings it on implicitly, with the protagonist feeling more like a troubled Shakesperian hero than than a confident, self-righteous preacher. (Which is relatively in line with the Old Testament prophets, who, as a rule, never shy away from admitting their own shortcomings and weaknesses).

This, by the way, is why Led Zeppelin’s reworked version of the song works so well — although Page and Plant completely rewrote the lyrics, they preserved and enhanced this aspect, throwing in such explicit lines as "trying to save my soul to light", "devil he told me how to roll", and, of course, the reference to "monkey on my back". It’s hardly any wonder that back in 1976, when both Jimmy’s and Robert’s fortunes were at an all-time low (drug use, family catastrophes, personal accidents, etc.), they suddenly felt them­selves specifically drawn to this Blind Willie Johnson classic. He does not sing one word about actually committing any deadly sins, yet it is clear as day that the singer has just done or is on the verge of doing something terrible. Imagine somehow hearing this record, say, in the early days of merry, careless 1928, and then remembering its message right after the Black Thursdays and Mondays of October 1929 — wouldn’t if I don’t read, my soul be lost (in this case, amended to if I don’t read, my money be lost, probably) automatically turn Blind Willie Johnson into Blind Tiresias?

That said, if the song only got by on the sheer strength of its gravelly vocal and Biblical message, neither Led Zeppelin nor any other musical act would have probably paid it as much attention as is warranted by the fact that it is also an incredible show of peerless musicianship. The vocals, after all, take a decidedly auxiliary place here next to the song’s slide guitar melody, played by Willie in his trademark manner — with a pen-knife taken to the strings, so it is usually assumed, rather than the more commonly used bottle neck. Let us not forget that slide playing back in the 1920s was still a relatively fresh and novel technique — and a more common type of slide playing, overall, was the kind promoted by Tampa Red, which, as a rule, was fairly modest, more influenced by the original «relaxed» Hawaiian style, and meant strictly as entertainment.

By contrast, Blind Willie’s playing style is the epitome of wildness, as he milks the new technique for all it’s worth — think of the difference between him and Tampa Red as, say, the difference between Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix in exploring the full power of electric guitar feedback. "Probably the finest slide guitar playing you’ll ever hear", says Eric Clapton specifically about the performance on ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’, and he is hardly exaggerating; at the very least, these three minutes of slide playing from faraway 1927 are every bit as impressive as any acoustic or electric slide techniques you might hear from any of your favorite rock musicians.

Willie’s slide is not merely sliding: it is actively talking throughout the song, so much so that occasionally he simply lets it finish the vocal melody for him (sometimes he spells out the title, sometimes he lets his instrument carry the payload instead). His technique is particularly outstanding in that he’s playing solo, and has to divide his attention between thumb-picking the bass rhythm and handling the sliding melody — something that rock era musicians like Brian Jones or Rory Gallagher would no longer have the need to do within the context of a full band. But the achievement is not just a matter of flashy technique, because the melody itself is alive, closely aligned with the vocal performance which it not so much follows as expands, adding details and flourishes that make the whole thing more vibrant and attention-attracting.

During the main solo break Willie actually makes the guitar speak in two distinct voices, first playing the main melody in a darker mode on the lower strings, then climbing back up to the shriller, whinier high-pitched octaves. This versatility, along with his ability to sustain and bend each note to the exact time and pitch he desires, suggests full mastery of the style and, indeed, a startling level of accomplishment for an instrumental technique that not a lot of people were probably even aware of at the time. But it’s actually catchy! and hummable! listen to it a few iterations in a row and you’ll find yourself whistling Willie’s little jumping pattern in the shower in no time at all.

Ultimately, though, the mystery of the performance lies at the intersection of the two discussed aspects, and not with either of them individually. Most accounts of the song I came across either praised the singing or, more often, the guitar playing, or sometimes both, but somehow they very rarely, if ever, tried to make a connection between them, which, to me, feels like the most interesting and important part of the whole story. How exactly, might one ask, does Blind Willie Johnson’s complete mastery of the art of the slide guitar relate to his fire-and-brimstone message of salvation through the exercise of one’s free will, and to the threatening Old Testament vibe-cum Shakesperian tragedy expressed in his terrifying singing? Is this merely an efficient exercise in melding together two different artistic techniques on a see-what-happens basis, or do they complement each other in some carefully premeditated and naturally organic manner?

I don’t really think I have an answer to that question — probably no one really does, which is why it is not so often asked in the first place — but it would seem a little offensive to me, I guess, if we tried to reconstruct Blind Willie’s thought pattern as something like «well, I’d sure like to spread God’s word around and all, but sure I’d need some sleight of hand to make all them sinners take heed, so why don’t I just roll this knife along the strings to see where it goes? might throw a couple more bucks my way, too...». Not that this would be a thoroughly impossible reconstruction, mind you, but it does not quite tie in with the observation that many a religious, gospel-drenched performer in those days also happened to be a major innovator and craftsperson when it came to playing the six-string — just think of Reverend Gary Davis or Sister Rosetta Thorpe, for that matter. No, this is perhaps best thought of in the same perspective as medieval church music — just as, say, the art of polyphonic singing was supposed to go beyond mere technique, bringing the listener closer to the underlying rapture of paradise, so does Blind Willie’s playing attempt to concoct a mystical, rapturous atmosphere of its own, if, perhaps, on a more humble scale than the good old Gregorian chant.

I mean, when it comes to slide guitar, we probably associate it first and foremost with one of two things — Hawaii, or the Delta. Hawaii, where slide guitar playing originated, mainly gives us the sensual / enchanting / paradisiac side of the sound, which goes well with blue ocean waves, grass skirts, hulas, and coconuts. Delta musicians, however, borrowed the technique for something completely different — making the slide guitar sound dangerous, sleazy, suggestive, anything but heavenly in nature; even when you’re listening to something like Elmore James’ ‘Hawaiian Boogie’, whose very title kind of seems to acknowledge the debt his instrument owes to Polynesian tradition, there’s definitely something dirty and wicked about the playing. In the same way, Blind Willie uses his slide neither to just show off his dazzling technique nor to revel in the delicate beauty of the sliding note — to him, the slide sound might probably serve to replicate the mystical movement of the spirit itself, be it good or evil. Like his voice, the sound of his guitar needs to awe you, scare you, intimidate you into changing your wicked ways (for a slightly less musically challenging, but every bit as harrowing experience, check ‘God Moves On The Water’ — Prophet Johnson’s reimagination of the Titanic catastrophe as imminent retribution for the sins of this world, in which his sinuous slide pretty much draws out the trajectory of God moving on the water, no less).

Whether this effect still persists in 2025 the same way it did in that innocent age when manufactured guitar slides were as much of a commodity as an Iphone... well, that’s up to you to decide, as usual. I can only speak for myself: as I said, I know for sure that I do not grovel at the altar of old-timey acoustic blues just because it is old-timey — but every now and then, there is an awesome vibe out there in the distant past which finds no equivalent whatsoever in the future, and those are the most precious ones. It’s not that nobody in the whole wide world can reach the same level of technical virtuosity as Blind Willie Johnson — many people formally do — it’s just that this entire combination of guitar, vocal, accessories, playing technique, production, and, of course, the feel, a voice of eerie warning among the starry-eyed decadence of the Roaring Twenties, cannot and will not be replicated, not ever again. It can sure still be used as an influence, though, and heck, anybody who wants to adopt if I don’t read, my soul be lost as his personal slogan in our new age of trendy obscurantism is a good friend of mine. These days, it feels sometimes that we need to resuscitate every herald of the Apocalypse we can lay our hands on, and Blind Willie Johnson might just be the first in line.