In 1945, a blind and gravely ill man shivered in the charred ruins of his burned house in Beaumont, Texas, reportedly turned away from a local hospital, and died within days in poverty. Thirty-two years later, his voice was etched onto the Voyager Golden Record and launched toward interstellar space as one of humanity's chosen representatives. This episode explores the life of Blind Willie Johnson, the Texas gospel blues evangelist whose recording Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground was selected by Carl Sagan's committee to speak for the human experience.

We trace his story from Pendleton, Texas, where his sharecropper father gave him a cigar box guitar at age five, through the domestic violence that blinded him at seven when his stepmother threw lye water in his eyes, to his years busking with a tin cup tied to the neck of his Stella g ...