The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

***

  The Golden Record includes four pieces of purely, proudly American music. We know about Chuck, we know which Louis Armstrong track was on the ever-shortening list, we know they had a Native American piece in their sights, but there was another American track introduced to the team by Alan Lomax, and it’s arguably the most haunting sound on the record.

  The Anthology of American Folk Music was a six-album compilation released in 1952 by Folkways Records. It comprised 84 folk, blues and country music recordings that were originally issued from 1927 to 1932. It was put together by Harry Smith (largely from his own collection of 78s) and helped spark the American folk-music revival of the 1950s. It also led to many forgotten bluesmen enjoying a renaissance.

  The compilation was divided by Smith into three two-disc volumes – Ballads, Social Music and Songs. The first included legendary recordings by the Carter Family, alongside Mississippi John Hurt and many others. The third volume had the likes of influential banjo player Dock Boggs, Blind Lemon Jefferson and that ever-smiling ‘Dixie Dewdrop’ Uncle Dave Macon. And sandwiched between them was Volume 2 (Social Music), which boasted a 1930 track by a performer known as Blind Willie Johnson.

  Relatively little is known about the life of Blind Willie Johnson. He was born in January 1897 in Pendleton, a small town near Waco, to a sharecropper named George Johnson. His first instrument was a cigar-box guitar. He was not born blind. The story told by various biographers, and repeated by Tim Ferris in Murmurs of Earth, is that he was blinded by his stepmother when aged seven – she accidentally splashed him with lye water during a fight with his father.

  He used a bottleneck-slide guitar technique that would influence generations after him, and he had a powerful, chesty vocal delivery. He was primarily an evangelist, performing religious songs on street corners, a brand of gospel blues, heavily influenced by his Baptist upbringing. His complete discography is about 30 tracks in length, all recorded during five different sessions in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His inclusion on the Harry Smith anthology helped revive interest in his work. And he was championed by folk mover-shaker Reverend Gary Davis, amongst others. One of his songs, ‘Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed’ (also known as ‘In My Time of Dying’), was recorded on 3 December 1927 in Dallas. It would be covered by Bob Dylan in his self-titled debut in 1962 (the liner notes explain that Dylan used a borrowed lipstick holder as a makeshift slide). During the same session, Johnson recorded another track – a self-penned gospel blues number called ‘Dark Was the Night’, based on an old Scottish hymn and featuring penknife slide playing, it is thought, instead of his usual bottleneck.

  The way Ann remembers it, Lomax played ‘Dark Was the Night’ to her and Tim on their first visit to his place in New York. If, back in 1977, you’d been asked to guess which blues tune might be included on Voyager, you might not have opted for Blind Willie Johnson. He wasn’t completely obscure3 but, compared to some of his contemporaries, who during the 1970s were gradually moving from legendary to mythic status – Robert Johnson or Lead Belly perhaps – he was an interesting choice. Rights issues aside, you might also have expected them to opt for a more obvious floor-filler from the likes of B.B. King or Johnny Lee Hooker. However, everything about ‘Dark Was the Night’ clicked. The title resonated with an object bound for the unimaginable blackness of interstellar space. That the rights were held by Folkways, who held the rights to many more songs in the shortlist, was a factor of convenience. And, alongside the song’s spine-tingling atmosphere, the fact that it’s essentially an instrumental, the only ‘lyrics’ being wordless moans, leaving nothing for an alien listener to interpret, helped it over the finish line. Aside from all that, it’s utterly compelling. This isn’t the sound of a human being with the blues. This is the sound of longing, loss, despair. It’s a 3a.m., death-comes-knocking song. And it’s the perfect song to accompany two of the most remote, lonesome, human-made objects on a journey into eternal dark.

  In 1945 Johnson was living at 1440 Forrest Street, in Beaumont, but only just. A fire had destroyed his home and, with nowhere else to go, he slept amid the ruins with his partner Angeline. The bed was open to the elements. He lay in soaking bedclothes, contracted a fever, and as the hospital wouldn’t treat him, died at home in September 1945.

  ***

  The music team were busy tracking down and listening to some of Robert Brown’s suggestions. Armed with the 9 May letter to Carl, with its attached playlist and handy LP catalogue numbers, they had gone in search of the ‘Pygmy Honey Gathering Song’, chosen as a fine example of ‘singing antiphonally’. The song in question came from the 1958 Ethnic Folkways record Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, recorded by anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Colin Turnbull,4 who lived with and recorded the Mbuti in the Democratic Republic of Congo for many years. In the end, they found ‘Pygmy Girls’ Initiation Song’ or ‘Alima Song’, a track also recorded by Turnbull which appeared on Music of the Ituri Forest (Ethnic Folkways Library, FW04483).

  This is indeed an initiation song, performed during a ceremony to mark a girl’s first menstruation. The Mbuti didn’t tend to play instruments, they sang, sometimes in groups, each person in the circle given a single note, or in more conventional rounds and chants. Communal singing is part of the group’s social glue. And the track in question is really good. You can certainly understand how its sophisticated yet unencumbered harmonies charmed the Voyager team. Its round structure means it feels like there’s no beginning or end, just a stream of joyous consciousness that the listener is dipping into. It’s an affirming sound, the sound of community, of celebration, of moving towards maturity and the creation of new life.

  Brown also put forward a piece played on a shakuhachi – a Japanese bamboo flute. He suggested ‘Shika no Tone’, performed by Haruhiko Notomi and Tatsuya Araki, and included on UNESCO’s Musical Anthology of the Orient. He wrote about how it would communicate ‘varieties of tone colour’. In the end a shakuhachi piece called ‘Sokaku-Reibo’ (‘Depicting the Cranes in Their Nest’, although ‘depicting’ is often omitted from the title), in this case performed by Goro Yamaguchi, was chosen. It was recorded in New York City, circa 1967, and originally appeared on the wonderfully named LP A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky (which Rolling Stone gave a ringing review in 1969).

  ‘Depicting the Cranes in Their Nest’ may put Roger Moore fans in mind of the creepy ‘they’re heading for the hill’ guy from Live and Let Die. And if you fancy a laugh, I recommend popping onto NASA’s YouTube channel to canvass opinion. One enlightened user commented: ‘Honestly, what a waste. Five minutes of nonsense flute.’ Another felt it needed ‘more cowbell’. A third countered that it ‘perfectly matches the mood of floating through deep space’.

  Brown also proposed a piece he had recorded, an example of Javanese gamelan, a kind of orchestral arrangement of percussive instruments with pentatonic tuning, and choral and solo singing. The specific track is known as ‘Kinds of Flowers’5 and was performed by the Pura Paku Alaman Palace Orchestra in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, on 10 January 1971. You can predominantly hear bells and gongs, backed by loud human voices – according to Brown the different voices within the cacophony represent two of the nine sorts of flowers that represent states of Hindu philosophy.

  Raga (sometimes raaga) is a word that comes from Indian classical music. According to most standard definitions, it is unique to Indian classical music (or at least has no direct correlation to Western classical traditions). If you imagine a band of musicians as a bunch of kids in a playground, a raga is like a jungle gym or climbing frame, over which they can climb, hang, scamper. It’s a musical structure, on which they can improvise. And each group of notes, each raga, creates its own unique atmosphere or mood.

  Alan Lomax didn’t have much to say in terms of Indian pieces for Voyager. India and China were not his areas. However, Robert Brown had been very insistent from the beginning about an Indian raga named ‘Jaat Kahan Ho’, performed by Kesarbai Kerkar. As far as Brown was concerned, it was t
he beginning and end of the Indian question; it was the only record they need consider.

  Kesarbai Kerkar, born in 1892 in North Goa, was a classical protégé, one of the best-known khayal singers of the latter half of the 20th century. She was particular about her work, however. So particular that, while she was celebrated as a live performer, her recorded output is fairly thin on the ground. You will often see her name written with the prefix ‘Surashri’, a title bestowed on her in 1948. It is literally translated as ‘excellent voice’.

  ‘Jaat Kahan Ho’ was out of print. With Robert being so vociferous about it, the track had been on the shopping list for some time. For two weeks in May Ann had visited a number of record stores to track down a copy, but without success. By now, with time running short, she telephoned Brown, asking him for an alternative raga. He refused point blank. This wasn’t one of his mere ‘oh, this is quite a good one’ recommendations. This, as far as Brown was concerned, was definitive – the finest example of Indian classical music ever committed to vinyl. That was all very well, but they had a flight to catch, and when Ann rang him they had three days left to complete the playlist. Ann pleaded with him, explaining that they might not find it, and if they didn’t find it, Indian music would be missing from the record. But Brown held firm, urging her not to give up. The next day – with now just two days to go – Ann phoned him again. She had been working the phones, trying various other sources, contacting librarians, all to no avail. She promised Brown that she’d keep looking, but she begged him for a second option, anything that they could have in their back pocket. Again, Brown said there wasn’t anything.

  Eventually Ann’s persistence paid off. She visited an Indian family-owned appliance store on Lexington Avenue, New York. There, in a brown box under a card table, she found three unopened copies of ‘Jaat Kahan Ho’. She bought all three.

  Go listen to it. Find a good copy and put it on. It’s about three and a half minutes of hair-raising beauty. The mood is sombre, yet hopeful. The vocals yearning, yet powerful and defiant. It rules. Ann called Brown, thanking him repeatedly.

  In the spring of 1977, around the time Ann was repeatedly thanking Brown, Kesarbai Kerkar had been retired from public singing for more than a decade. She died at the age of 85 on 16 September 1977, just 11 days after Voyager 1 left our atmosphere.

  ***

  The remaining pictures were all about human beings – how we look, what we wear, the environments we occupy, the jobs we do, the things we make, the way we work and socialise. Drake would tell the local press around launch time how they chose images that were both informative and gave a ‘balanced picture’ of terrestrial civilisation, how they chose people from across the globe, rich and poor, and tried to include roughly equal numbers of men and women.6

  We have a gorgeous smiling man from Guatemala brandishing a machete (or at least a very large knife), a dancer from Bali, and a group of Andean girls in distinctive dress. There’s a pair of craftsmen carving elephants in one picture, followed by a human riding an elephant shifting logs in another. There’s an old man from Turkey, wearing glasses and smoking a cigarette. There’s another old man walking through a field, with a small dog wandering alongside him.7 There’s a mountain climber on a needle of Alpine rock, a stroboscopic picture of a gymnast on a balance beam, a group of Olympic sprinters, and a school room.

  Meanwhile every shot, before it could be stamped into the final sequence, had to be cleared with photographer and publisher. ‘Most vividly, I recall calling Gaston Rebuffat in France,’ says Wendy, ‘whose photo was of a mountain climber on a narrow rock in the Alps. This was late in the timeline and we were desperate to get a hold of him.’ Indeed, according to an interview with Drake in the Cornell Chronicle in August 1977, they finally located Rebuffat by phone somewhere in France at 2a.m. in the morning.

  Many pioneering photographers made it aboard Voyager. Phillip Leonian’s career spanned from the 1950s to the ’80s, often appearing in titles such as Look and Sports Illustrated, and included the famous portrait of Muhammed Ali in a red-velvet robe and crown. Leonian specialised in capturing motion within a single still, and his stroboscopic photo of gymnast Cathy Rigby would become picture #71. He even sent Wendy another version from the same shoot, which she has kept to this day.

  Next came the man-made world, starting with the Great Wall of China photographed by H. Edward Kim for National Geographic, its turreted back snaking up and along the brow of a distant hill, with human figures giving scale and perspective. This is followed by a UN photo showing a group of men in Africa building a wall from bricks, an Amish barn raising, then a simple hut, followed by a typical American house complete with white picket fence, and then a more modern-looking dwelling. This final domestic building was in fact the New Mexico home of British-American radio astronomer John V. Evans, taken by Frank. Next comes the Taj Mahal – chosen out of a long list of the world’s most recognisable buildings and landmarks that included a Mayan pyramid and the Eiffel Tower – then city shots including Oxford, Boston, before the UN building by day and by night, and Sydney Opera House (still under construction).8

  There are humans at work – a close-up picture of a man using a drill, a colour picture showing the inside of a factory (sent in colour to show the electric glow of the machinery), a woman using a microscope. Then come traffic and transportation: a street scene from Pakistan; rush hour in India; an Eckelmann original of Route 13 in Ithaca, with about four vehicles; another Ansel Adams picture, this time showing Golden Gate Bridge, with its spanning distance added above (1,280 metres); a plane taking off from Syracuse airport (another taken by Frank Drake); a train on the Boston–Washington line; an aerial view of Toronto International Airport, where Carl and Jon had their first meeting.

  Finally the pictures return to astronomy and space: a radio telescope (specifically the Westerbork Interferometer in the north-eastern Netherlands, with cyclists in the foreground); the Arecibo Observatory with its 305m diameter noted on the image; a page from a book by Isaac Newton; the Titan Centaur launch (launching a Viking probe to Mars in 1975); an astronaut conducting a spacewalk; and the final transition to the music – a photograph of a quartet, a musical score and a violin.

  Towards the end – image #114, to be precise – they included a second photograph by David Harvey. Harvey was born in San Francisco and raised in Virginia, discovering photography aged 11 after buying a used Leica with money saved from his paper round. He was already a veteran of more than 40 photo essays for National Geographic by the time Voyager came knocking, and in just a few months’ time he would be named 1978’s Magazine Photographer of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association. According to Jon, Harvey’s image #114 is one of the only shots chosen solely because it showed our planet looking rather nice. It was the last shot in colour, showing a reddening sky and a perfect silhouette of a line of 12 geese in flight with a few more on the water below. After this photograph, there were only two more images to come – the music transition – so this was a farewell image of Earth, the final shot aliens might see of our planet’s surface and environment. When our planet boils to nothing in a few million years, this will be a final record of how a setting sun appeared to us.

  These colour photographs caused problems as they took up three times the space of black-and-white images on the record, so they had to be worth it. The team only wanted to use colour images when it served the story of Earth they were telling.

  The first colour image was that spectrum, followed by two of the Earth – one showing the entire planet (#12), the second showing the surface of Earth a little closer (#13). Picture #23 was recorded in colour too – a mid-1950s illustration of human anatomy taken from the World Book Encyclopedia rendered in colour so as to show the clear blues and reds that differentiated the veins and arteries. The next colour picture to appear in the sequence was the UN library image of a woman in a floral dress breastfeeding (#34), then came a beautiful picture taken by David Harvey of a man smiling up
at a young naked child he’s holding delicately in his arms (#35) – probably the most life-affirming shot in the whole collection, taken in Malaysia while he was there on assignment for National Geographic in 1976, and originally printed in the magazine in May 1977.

  Image #36 is an interesting one, which I pick out at this stage as it illustrates the thought processes of the image team. It’s not a bad photo, but it’s not that interesting either. Unlike perhaps Stephen’s flying insect, or the baby in its first seconds of life outside the womb, this image would not stop you in your tracks. Jon explains that, right at the start when they thought they would only have space for a mere handful of images, someone had suggested they have one image that showed a number of humans of different racial backgrounds doing something together. Three photographs that made the final cut all trace their inclusion back to this thought. One is the picture of Olympic sprinters, which includes a white man, two black men and an Asian man. Two others picked to illustrate race were taken at the UN International School in New York City: black-and-white image #74 shows a group of children gathered around a globe;9 the other (#36) is full colour and shows a group of children, of various racial backgrounds, seated on the floor. Not only does it show a number of different types of earthling, but it also shows these beings seated in a number of different ways, showing more about the way our bodies work. There’s a boy on his knees, a girl sat cross-legged and upright, a girl sitting with her legs splayed out to one side, and it shows hands held in various positions. Plus, as they’re gathered in a circle, it shows us humans from all angles. So that’s why a perfectly pleasant but otherwise forgettable image taken by Ruby Mera, a photographer working for UNICEF, made it aboard the Golden Record.

  One of the last photographs in the transportation sequence shows a dramatic moment in Vivian Fuchs’s Trans-Antarctic expedition of 1958. This overland crossing of Antarctica included Edmund Hillary in the team, who became the first person to reach the Pole since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so using a motor vehicle – specifically snowcats. The expedition is also notable for the scientific data that was collected, including the first accurate measurements of the thickness of ice and establishing the existence of a solid land mass beneath.