I'd always heard a line from “John the Revelator,” a song recorded by Blind Willie Johnson and others, as “Who's that ridin',” but I guess it's really “Who's that writin'.”
I was checking out God Don't Never Change, a Blind Willie Johnson tribute album. I'd heard “It's Nobody's Fault But Mine” before, notably in a Page and Plant version from the nineties. But what struck me this time, in a Lucinda Williams rendition, was the idea of a bibliophilia so deep that the fate of one's soul—the singer is certain of it—depends on reading a book. A certain book, of course. Whether the song has roots in an affinity for the book in a larger sense, the written word as such, is a question to which I don't know the answer. And those roots—it's a traditional song; how deep they go, or where, I don't know and I don't know that anyone can know. Certainly present-day Biblical literalists or fundamentalists, not to mention Koranic literalists, have no conspicuous affinity for the book in that larger sense, for the realms of learning, literary imagination or science. (The disconnect between the religious landscape of 2022 and the quality of some of the minds that came out of the Abrahamic religions in centuries past is striking—I don't think Maimonides, Aquinas or Averroes would think well of either Daesh or Ken Ham. How did we get here? Maybe something you could call a regressive dialectic.) But, again, one thinks of roots—what might be the roots of the impulse to locate universal, metaphysical truth in a specific, physical text? One could speak of both sacramentalism and a fetishism here—some people no doubt want to perceive the divine—spiritual, invisible—in a physical, visible object. But why a book? And how widespread is the impulse to find it there? Is it something pre-literate cultures seize on when they become literate, awed by the discovery of writing?
And why, when Lucinda Williams sings the title track—not so much on “Nobody's Fault”--does she sound as if she's drunk or something? I mean, I've dug her ever since Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, but damn, she needs to get her enunciation back. Happy Thanksgiving.