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THE ARTS
Golio, Gary

Dark Was the Night

32 pp. | Penguin/Paulsen | August, 2020 | Trade ISBN 978-1-5247-3888-4 $17.99 | Ebook ISBN 978-1-5247-3889-1 $10.99
(2) K-3 Illustrated by E. B. Lewis. Little is known about the childhood and early life of Willie Johnson, the legendary bluesman known as Blind Willie whose recording of his song "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was included on the Golden Record on NASA's 1977 Voyager 1 space probe. Lewis's watercolors provide the perfect complement to Golio's spare second-person prose: "In a dark, quiet room, your voice poured into a microphone, slid down some wires, and scratched itself into a wax disc." The contrast between the bright yellows of Johnson's Texas birthplace and the star-filled vistas of deep space parallel Johnson's loss of vision as a young boy. In a series of double-page spreads, Golio and Lewis trace the path of Johnson's musical career: his first cigar box guitar, singing in church, learning to play slide with the edge of his pocket knife--all leading to the day Johnson lays down his first recordings. Back matter reveals the challenges of writing a biography of someone about whose early life little is known, and also gives more detailed information about NASA's Golden Record and the Voyager 1 space probe.
Reviewer: Eric Carpenter | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2020

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