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How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made

By Timothy Ferris

We inhabit a small planet orbiting a medium-sized star about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the Milky Way galaxy—around where Track 2 on an LP record might begin. In cosmic terms, we are tiny: were the galaxy the size of a typical LP, the sun and all its planets would fit inside an atom’s width. Yet there is something in us so expansive that, four decades ago, we made a time capsule full of music and photographs from Earth and flung it out into the universe. Indeed, we made two of them.

The time capsules, really a pair of phonograph records, were launched aboard the twin Voyager space probes in August and September of 1977. The craft spent thirteen years reconnoitering the sun’s outer planets, beaming back valuable data and images of incomparable beauty . In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system, sailing through the doldrums where the stream of charged particles from our sun stalls against those of interstellar space. Today, the probes are so distant that their radio signals, travelling at the speed of light, take more than fifteen hours to reach Earth. They arrive with a strength of under a millionth of a billionth of a watt, so weak that the three dish antennas of the Deep Space Network’s interplanetary tracking system (in California, Spain, and Australia) had to be enlarged to stay in touch with them.

If you perched on Voyager 1 now—which would be possible, if uncomfortable; the spidery craft is about the size and mass of a subcompact car—you’d have no sense of motion. The brightest star in sight would be our sun, a glowing point of light below Orion’s foot, with Earth a dim blue dot lost in its glare. Remain patiently onboard for millions of years, and you’d notice that the positions of a few relatively nearby stars were slowly changing, but that would be about it. You’d find, in short, that you were not so much flying to the stars as swimming among them.

The Voyagers’ scientific mission will end when their plutonium-238 thermoelectric power generators fail, around the year 2030. After that, the two craft will drift endlessly among the stars of our galaxy—unless someone or something encounters them someday. With this prospect in mind, each was fitted with a copy of what has come to be called the Golden Record. Etched in copper, plated with gold, and sealed in aluminum cases, the records are expected to remain intelligible for more than a billion years, making them the longest-lasting objects ever crafted by human hands. We don’t know enough about extraterrestrial life, if it even exists, to state with any confidence whether the records will ever be found. They were a gift, proffered without hope of return.

I became friends with Carl Sagan, the astronomer who oversaw the creation of the Golden Record, in 1972. He’d sometimes stop by my place in New York, a high-ceilinged West Side apartment perched up amid Norway maples like a tree house, and we’d listen to records. Lots of great music was being released in those days, and there was something fascinating about LP technology itself. A diamond danced along the undulations of a groove, vibrating an attached crystal, which generated a flow of electricity that was amplified and sent to the speakers. At no point in this process was it possible to say with assurance just how much information the record contained or how accurately a given stereo had translated it. The open-endedness of the medium seemed akin to the process of scientific exploration: there was always more to learn.

In the winter of 1976, Carl was visiting with me and my fiancée at the time, Ann Druyan, and asked whether we’d help him create a plaque or something of the sort for Voyager. We immediately agreed. Soon, he and one of his colleagues at Cornell, Frank Drake, had decided on a record. By the time NASA approved the idea, we had less than six months to put it together, so we had to move fast. Ann began gathering material for a sonic description of Earth’s history. Linda Salzman Sagan, Carl’s wife at the time, went to work recording samples of human voices speaking in many different languages. The space artist Jon Lomberg rounded up photographs, a method having been found to encode them into the record’s grooves. I produced the record, which meant overseeing the technical side of things. We all worked on selecting the music.

I sought to recruit John Lennon, of the Beatles, for the project, but tax considerations obliged him to leave the country. Lennon did help us, though, in two ways. First, he recommended that we use his engineer, Jimmy Iovine, who brought energy and expertise to the studio. (Jimmy later became famous as a rock and hip-hop producer and record-company executive.) Second, Lennon’s trick of etching little messages into the blank spaces between the takeout grooves at the ends of his records inspired me to do the same on Voyager. I wrote a dedication: “To the makers of music—all worlds, all times.”

To our surprise, those nine words created a problem at NASA . An agency compliance officer, charged with making sure each of the probes’ sixty-five thousand parts were up to spec, reported that while everything else checked out—the records’ size, weight, composition, and magnetic properties—there was nothing in the blueprints about an inscription. The records were rejected, and NASA prepared to substitute blank discs in their place. Only after Carl appealed to the NASA administrator, arguing that the inscription would be the sole example of human handwriting aboard, did we get a waiver permitting the records to fly.

In those days, we had to obtain physical copies of every recording we hoped to listen to or include. This wasn’t such a challenge for, say, mainstream American music, but we aimed to cast a wide net, incorporating selections from places as disparate as Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, China, Congo, Japan, the Navajo Nation, Peru, and the Solomon Islands. Ann found an LP containing the Indian raga “Jaat Kahan Ho” in a carton under a card table in the back of an appliance store. At one point, the folklorist Alan Lomax pulled a Russian recording, said to be the sole copy of “Chakrulo” in North America, from a stack of lacquer demos and sailed it across the room to me like a Frisbee. We’d comb through all this music individually, then meet and go over our nominees in long discussions stretching into the night. It was exhausting, involving, utterly delightful work.

“Bhairavi: Jaat Kahan Ho,” by Kesarbai Kerkar

In selecting Western classical music, we sacrificed a measure of diversity to include three compositions by J. S. Bach and two by Ludwig van Beethoven. To understand why we did this, imagine that the record were being studied by extraterrestrials who lacked what we would call hearing, or whose hearing operated in a different frequency range than ours, or who hadn’t any musical tradition at all. Even they could learn from the music by applying mathematics, which really does seem to be the universal language that music is sometimes said to be. They’d look for symmetries—repetitions, inversions, mirror images, and other self-similarities—within or between compositions. We sought to facilitate the process by proffering Bach, whose works are full of symmetry, and Beethoven, who championed Bach’s music and borrowed from it.

I’m often asked whether we quarrelled over the selections. We didn’t, really; it was all quite civil. With a world full of music to choose from, there was little reason to protest if one wonderful track was replaced by another wonderful track. I recall championing Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night,” which, if memory serves, everyone liked from the outset. Ann stumped for Chuck Berry’s “ Johnny B. Goode ,” a somewhat harder sell, in that Carl, at first listening, called it “awful.” But Carl soon came around on that one, going so far as to politely remind Lomax, who derided Berry’s music as “adolescent,” that Earth is home to many adolescents. Rumors to the contrary, we did not strive to include the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” only to be disappointed when we couldn’t clear the rights. It’s not the Beatles’ strongest work, and the witticism of the title, if charming in the short run, seemed unlikely to remain funny for a billion years.

“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” by Blind Willie Johnson

Ann’s sequence of natural sounds was organized chronologically, as an audio history of our planet, and compressed logarithmically so that the human story wouldn’t be limited to a little beep at the end. We mixed it on a thirty-two-track analog tape recorder the size of a steamer trunk, a process so involved that Jimmy jokingly accused me of being “one of those guys who has to use every piece of equipment in the studio.” With computerized boards still in the offing, the sequence’s dozens of tracks had to be mixed manually. Four of us huddled over the board like battlefield surgeons, struggling to keep our arms from getting tangled as we rode the faders by hand and got it done on the fly.

The sequence begins with an audio realization of the “music of the spheres,” in which the constantly changing orbital velocities of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter are translated into sound, using equations derived by the astronomer Johannes Kepler in the sixteenth century. We then hear the volcanoes, earthquakes, thunderstorms, and bubbling mud of the early Earth. Wind, rain, and surf announce the advent of oceans, followed by living creatures—crickets, frogs, birds, chimpanzees, wolves—and the footsteps, heartbeats, and laughter of early humans. Sounds of fire, speech, tools, and the calls of wild dogs mark important steps in our species’ advancement, and Morse code announces the dawn of modern communications. (The message being transmitted is Ad astra per aspera , “To the stars through hard work.”) A brief sequence on modes of transportation runs from ships to jet airplanes to the launch of a Saturn V rocket. The final sounds begin with a kiss, then a mother and child, then an EEG recording of (Ann’s) brainwaves, and, finally, a pulsar—a rapidly spinning neutron star giving off radio noise—in a tip of the hat to the pulsar map etched into the records’ protective cases.

“The Sounds of Earth”

Ann had obtained beautiful recordings of whale songs, made with trailing hydrophones by the biologist Roger Payne, which didn’t fit into our rather anthropocentric sounds sequence. We also had a collection of loquacious greetings from United Nations representatives, edited down and cross-faded to make them more listenable. Rather than pass up the whales, I mixed them in with the diplomats. I’ll leave it to the extraterrestrials to decide which species they prefer.

“United Nations Greetings/Whale Songs”

Those of us who were involved in making the Golden Record assumed that it would soon be commercially released, but that didn’t happen. Carl repeatedly tried to get labels interested in the project, only to run afoul of what he termed, in a letter to me dated September 6, 1990, “internecine warfare in the record industry.” As a result, nobody heard the thing properly for nearly four decades. (Much of what was heard, on Internet snippets and in a short-lived commercial CD release made in 1992 without my participation, came from a set of analog tape dubs that I’d distributed to our team as keepsakes.) Then, in 2016, a former student of mine, David Pescovitz, and one of his colleagues, Tim Daly, approached me about putting together a reissue. They secured funding on Kickstarter , raising more than a million dollars in less than a month, and by that December we were back in the studio, ready to press play on the master tape for the first time since 1977.

Pescovitz and Daly took the trouble to contact artists who were represented on the record and send them what amounted to letters of authenticity—something we never had time to accomplish with the original project. (We disbanded soon after I delivered the metal master to Los Angeles, making ours a proud example of a federal project that evaporated once its mission was accomplished.) They also identified and corrected errors and omissions in the information that was provided to us by recordists and record companies. Track 3, for instance, which was listed by Lomax as “Senegal Percussion,” turns out instead to have been recorded in Benin and titled “Cengunmé”; and Track 24, the Navajo night chant, now carries the performers’ names. Forty years after launch, the Golden Record is finally being made available here on Earth. Were Carl alive today—he died in 1996 at the age of sixty-two—I think he’d be delighted.

This essay was adapted from the liner notes for the new edition of the Voyager Golden Record, recently released as a vinyl boxed set by Ozma Records .

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Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground by Blind Willie Johnson

Songfacts®:

• This song of wordless sorrow is embedded in the marrow of American history. It's also floating through outer space (literally). Unlike some other "blind" bluesmen, Blind Willie Johnson actually was blind in the literal sense - his mother threw lye in his face when he was seven years old, lashing out against his father's infidelities. Johnson was blind from that day forward, but he kept strong to his conviction that he was meant to be a preacher and to sing gospel blues, vocations he'd already decided upon. Later, Johnson made money by busking on the streets of Marlin, Texas. His remarkable talent may have never been preserved if not for Columbia Records setting out across the nation with mobile field units to record American folk and blues musicians. Johnson was paid $25-$30 for each song between 1927 and 1930. One of those was "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground," which is considered his masterpiece.
• "Dark Was The Night" borrows its structure from "Gethsemane," an English hymn from the 18th century. Gethsemane was the garden where Jesus prayed on the eve of his Crucifixion, and the song tells that story with lyrics: Dark was the night, and cold the ground On which the Lord was laid His sweat like drops of blood ran down In agony he prayed "Gethsemane" was eventually printed in American hymn books in the 1800s. That's probably how Johnson found it. A popular method of congregational singing at the time was called "unison moaning," which had the pastor and each member of the congregation performing a hymn with wordless vocal sounds. Historians assume Johnson was using this method when he performed "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground" with no discernable lyrics. The song is a series of hums, moans, and pained cries transcending language. Whether Johnson was aiming for it or whether he was simply practicing a type of "unison moaning," the result is an immortal piece of art that speaks across all times and peoples. Musician and producer Ry Cooder called the song "the most transcendent piece in all American music."
• In addition to the sorrowful vocals, the song's power also comes from Johnson's innovative guitar style. He played bottleneck slide guitar in open D tuning on the recording. Reportedly, he used a knife for the bottleneck. Jack White called this song "the greatest example of slide guitar ever recorded."
• Johnson's music saw a rebirth in the 1960s, largely thanks to blues guitarist Reverend Gary Davis. Davis gave copies of Johnson's records to folks like Peter, Paul & Mary, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and The Staple Singers.
• In 1977, this song was one of 27 included on the Voyager Golden Record , which was launched into space as a representation of Earth life. Science writer Timothy Ferris, who selected the songs, explained: "Johnson's song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight." The song was also added to the National Recording Registry in 2010 for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
• In his song " Georgia Lee ," Tom Waits opens the lyric with the title of this song: Cold was the night and hard was the ground They found her in a small grove of trees
• More songs from Blind Willie Johnson
• More songs inspired by folk songs
• More instrumental songs
• More songs about loneliness or isolation
• More songs from 1927

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Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground - Blind Willie Johnson

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Dark Was the Night: Blind Willie Johnson’s Journey to the Stars by By Gary Golio. Illustrated by E. B. Lewis

• Mixed Media,
• Sonya VanderVeen Feddema

Born in Texas in 1897, Willie Johnson grew up to love singing. When his father recognized Willie’s passion, he made his son a cigar box guitar, and Willie learned to play it. A few years later, darkness, metaphorical and literal, descended on Willie’s life—his mother died and, soon after at the age of 7 or 8, Willie became blind.

Author Gary Golio asks, “So how does a blind boy get along? How does he make his way in the world?” The answer: being blind didn’t stop Willie from singing gospel songs in churches and using his voice on street corners. Willie developed a unique way of playing his guitar: he ran the blade of his pocket knife along the steel strings of his instrument, a technique called slide . When he sang, Willie was “back in the light.”

In the following years, Willie traveled by train throughout Texas singing on street corners and in churches in numerous towns. News of his skill spread. One day, a man from a music company encountered Willie, and he was invited to make a record. His voice, Golio poignantly writes, “was the sound of one human being reaching out to all the others, telling them not to be afraid of the dark. After all, if a blind man could see the light….”

In 1977, decades after Willie’s death in 1945, one of Willie’s songs, Dark Was the Night , was chosen to “represent humanity” on the Golden Record, along with music by Bach, Beethoven, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, and others that was carried into space by Voyager I .

Renowned illustrator E. B. Lewis has once again created an incredibly sensitive work of art for young children to complement Gary Golio’s compassionate, stirring narrative. (Nancy Paulsen Books)

About the Author

Sonya VanderVeen Feddema is a freelance writer and a member of Covenant CRC in St. Catharines, Ontario.

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golden record

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What are the contents of the Golden Record?

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, et. al. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.

"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space."

Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form.

The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings , beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth , there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music , including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music. Once the Voyager spacecraft leave the solar system (by 1990, both will be beyond the orbit of Pluto), they will find themselves in empty space. It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl Sagan has noted, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

The definitive work about the Voyager record is "Murmurs of Earth" by Executive Director, Carl Sagan, Technical Director, Frank Drake, Creative Director, Ann Druyan, Producer, Timothy Ferris, Designer, Jon Lomberg, and Greetings Organizer, Linda Salzman. Basically, this book is the story behind the creation of the record, and includes a full list of everything on the record. "Murmurs of Earth", originally published in 1978, was reissued in 1992 by Warner News Media with a CD-ROM that replicates the Voyager record. Unfortunately, this book is now out of print, but it is worth the effort to try and find a used copy or browse through a library copy.

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Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, and brilliant is that song drifting through space

‘Johnson’s song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight.’ Carl Sagan, on including Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (1927) on the Voyager Golden Records

The US gospel blues musician and evangelist ‘Blind’ Willie Johnson was born to a sharecropping family in the small town of Pendleton, Texas in 1897. After learning to play a cigar-box guitar, he performed as a popular street musician throughout Texas, eventually recording 30 songs for Columbia Records between 1927 and 1930. Little notice was taken of his death in 1945, and much of his biography remains a mystery. What is certain, however, is that today his legendary low-register howl and slide guitar persists, both on our planet and in interstellar space. Here on Earth, his music influenced the likes of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and Howlin’ Wolf. And just beyond the reaches of our solar system, his recording of his song Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (1927) is one of 27 pieces of music selected for the Voyager spacecraft’s famed ‘Golden Records’, intended to capture the range of musical expression. This instalment from the US animator Drew Christie’s series Drawn & Recorded combines biography and mythology to recount how Johnson’s music made the unlikely journey from the streets of rural Texas to the stars.

Director: Drew Christie

Writers: Drew Christie, Bill Flanagan

Narrator: T Bone Burnett

Producers: T Bone Burnett, Bill Flanagan, Van Toffler

Website: Gunpowder & Sky

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Dark was the night, our correspondents.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

On the Voyager Mission.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Stage set for Mozart’s Magic Flute , 1815.

This summer, we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Up this week is Alison Kinney, whose column, Songs to the Moon, is a series on fandom and how the music, art, and artifacts of opera transform cultures and desires. — Ed.

If the inhabitants of other stars should spot the Voyager 1 interstellar probe zooming past—if they capture it and assemble its onboard audio player—and if they have ears to hear, they might puzzle over this message from the Queen of the Night (translated here from German):

The vengeance of hell boils in my heart, Death and despair blaze around me!

Perhaps these German-speaking aliens will visit Earth to eradicate the threat posed by Mozart’s 1791 aria. Or maybe they’ll thrill to the prospect of subscribing to the Bavarian State Opera, only to discover that the soprano Edda Moser , who performed the recording they’d heard, had retired five billion years earlier, in 1999. 

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to depart our solar system, bearing the Voyager Interstellar Message (better known as the Golden Record ), a gold-plated disk containing music, pictures, and greetings in fifty-five languages. One project consultant said, “There is only an infinitesimal chance that the plaque will ever be seen by a single extraterrestrial, but it will certainly be seen by billions of terrestrials. Its real function, therefore, is to appeal to and expand the human spirit.”

In making their selections, the Interstellar Message team tried to accentuate the positive—but art and culture, even NASA -approved art and culture, tend toward revelations in excess of their creators’ intentions. Though the team opted not to mention the nuclear arms race, Auschwitz, the Khmer Rouge, transatlantic enslavement, and the genocide of Native peoples, it was clear, as the team’s creative director, Ann Druyan, said, “how much of what we tried to hide was more obvious than we realized.… The lies we tell have a very short shelf life.” One of the greeters, for example—UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim—was later accused of Nazi war crimes.

And the approved music carries its own messages about conflict. The design director Jon Lomberg , a fan of Mozart, Rossini, and baroque opera and oratorio, told me he ranks Mozart’s music “with sex, sunsets, and sushi as among life’s greatest pleasures.” Lomberg gave Carl Sagan a tape of an aria from Mozart’s ethereal, antic fantasy The Magic Flute . (“A wish-list project is to design a stage production of Magic Flute ,” he told me. “I could do some interesting things visually with the Queen of the Night!”)

Druyan wasn’t an opera fan, but she was “absolutely thrilled” by the recording; she extolled the mastery and emotional range of Moser’s voice. “It’s like a little mechanism for touching all the parts of you, when you hear it. It’s so exciting, and of course, that wonderful passage where she seems to defy gravity, and she goes higher and higher and higher … She’s the Queen of the Night, and you imagine these two Voyagers, moving around forty thousand miles per hour through the night, for all the nights of a thousand million years,” Druyan said. “The idea that she retains her dominance of the night, from Mozart’s brain to the cosmos, is the closest thing we get to eternity.”

The Sounds of Earth  record cover.

But the Queen’s dominance isn’t just artistic. The Voyager aria, “Der Hölle Rache,” is about assassination, violent coercion, and parental abuse. As Lomberg said, Mozart is “the genius of musical contradiction and reconciliation of opposites.” The crystalline, stratospheric perfection of Moser’s voice rings with power: both murderous political absolutism and virtuosic mastery. Sometimes the loveliest music exhorts you to kill. Among the disk’s other songs about violence, the Bulgarian folk song “Izlel ye Delyo Haydutin,” performed by Valya Balkanska, stars a rebel warrior, warning the authorities not to convert his aunts to Islam—or else.

The team might have confined themselves to wedding songs, nonverbal music, or the whale’s song, but Druyan said she saw the recording as both a conceptual artwork and an act of atonement. The disk also includes a recording of her brain waves, during which, she said, “I was trying to be honest in my meditation about the real state of the world, the history of the world … as well as the plight that we found ourselves in, in 1977—fifty to sixty thousand nuclear weapons, and at least one-fifth of the whole population of Earth couldn’t find potable water, get enough to eat, find shelter. So I tried to be honest about our worst.” The reckoning with violence, war, and responsibility, indivisible from beauty, is Voyager’s most profound message to the universe.

There’s no reason to expect an extraterrestrial to understand. Musicologists debunk the supposedly universal communicative potential of music even among different peoples of our own planet. When not everybody understands German—when happy and sad songs don’t cross cultures—when even a bel-canto fan might profess not to get Verdi, much less Schönberg—no aria can universally connote beauty, much less understanding, self-revelation, or ethical standards. But the Voyager message also suggests, tacitly, the desire not to be wholly understood, by either extraterrestrials or future earthlings. If our music and chatter turn out to be unintelligible to them, than we might earnestly hope that murder, genocide, and deprivation will be, too.

We can still marvel that this fragment of opera, and the Navajo “ Night Chant ,” and Blind Willie Johnson’s “ Dark Was the Night ,” hurtle through the vast nighttime of space. We can also fantasize that one of Lomberg’s alternate musical suggestions might have gone aboard Voyager: the tender, charming “ Voi che sapete ” from Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, a youth’s amazement at the mysteries of love. May all opera fans’ minds be blown by the concept of Cherubino in space! May we all sing of love, of nothing making sense to us, and of yearning to understand the world a little bit better.

This series, like Voyager, essays the starry void. It bears a message about music, creativity, and the unruly passions opera fans can’t help but flaunt to the universe, in hopes of interception and understanding. Everybody needs a playlist for the cosmos!

Alison Kinney is the author of Hood (Bloomsbury, 2016). Her writing has appeared online at  The Paris Review Daily , Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable , The Atlantic , Hyperallergic,  New Republic , The New Inquiry , The Mantle , VAN Magazine , and the  New York Times . @Alison_Kinney

• Exhibitions
• British Blues
• Acknowledgments

Essays – Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground

Dark was the night, cold was the ground, by terry messman.

Dark was the night and cold was the ground on which Blind Willie Johnson was laid. Yet after his death, his music would streak to the stars on the Voyager and become part of the “music of the spheres.”

The Voyager Golden Record was sent into space in 1977, carrying greetings in 60 languages, sounds of nature and the music of Beethoven, Bach and Blind Willie Johnson. Carl Sagan likened it to throwing a bottle into the cosmic ocean.  

This beautiful portrait of Blind Willie Johnson by renowned artist R. Crumb was published in “R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country,” along with dozens of other iconic portraits. Crumb’s portraits of blues musicians also appear on “Heroes of the Blues” T-shirts.

“Looked around all day for a job, and I looked almost every place.

It’s hard to come home and find hunger on your children’s face.”

— Juke Boy Bonner

Those heartrending words are not merely song lyrics. They are the real-life testimony of a bluesman — the single father of three young children — who is singing his sorrow about what it feels like to come home from a fruitless search for work and see hunger and deprivation on the faces of the children he loves above all else.

The verses composed by Weldon “Juke Boy” Bonner, a gifted poet and blues musician who grew up as a sharecropper in Texas and lived in poverty in Houston for most of his adult life, provide an important clue into the mystery of why so many blues artists sing with such passion about poverty, injustice and homelessness.

Many of the finest blues musicians in history grew up in poverty — and some of them died still poor. Especially in the first few decades of the blues, many great artists made very little money despite their prodigious talent, and were forced to take menial jobs to make ends meet. Yet, that sometimes gave them the insight to create highly meaningful songs about lives broken down by economic hardships, hunger, evictions, and despair.

We can get a glimpse into this hidden dimension of the blues by taking a closer look at the lives and music of two brilliant Texas musicians: Weldon “Juke Boy” Bonner and Blind Willie Johnson.

The Ghetto Poet

Although almost forgotten today even in blues circles, Juke Boy Bonner was a remarkable poet and a gifted blues guitarist and singer. He sometimes performed as a one-man band, singing his poetic songs while accompanying himself on guitar, harmonica and percussion.

Some of Bonner’s lyrics are poetry in the true sense. Even when he is near despair, his songs are beautiful and uplifting in the way they speak to the human condition. His song, “It Don’t Take Too Much,” offers a melancholy account of a beautiful loser, a man with a heart full of soul, crushed by the weight of the world.

“It don’t take too much to make you think you were born to lose.

You got to keep on pushing at that mountain, and it never seems to move.”

The two sides of Bonner’s identity as an artist are expressed by the titles of two of his finest records, produced by Chris Strachwitz on Arhoolie. His dark-blue, despairing side is captured by “Life Gave Me a Dirty Deal,” and his identity as a poet from the poor side of town is expressed as “Juke Boy Bonner — Ghetto Poet.”

In “It Don’t Take Too Much,” Bonner reveals how the blues can strike on an economic level — when you can’t find a job — and simultaneously strike at an emotional level — when your wife leaves you. The inequities of a world that’s “doing you wrong” cause the downcast blues by breaking up your home.

“It don’t take too much to make you feel the world is doing you wrong,

Especially when you can’t find no job,

You can’t take care of your wife and your home.”

This poet laureate of the blues, as Brett Bonner (no relation) of Living Blues magazine once described Juke Boy, was also one of the strongest political voices in the blues, speaking out against the economic inequality of U.S. society.

In describing his own tough existence in Houston’s poor neighbourhoods, this lone bluesman also became the voice for countless poor people who have found that the “upper-class people” don’t give a single, solitary damn about the survival of the poor.

“It don’t take too much after you gave all that you can give.

Look like upper-class people don’t care how the lower class of people live.”

In Living Blues magazine, Brett Bonner described Juke Boy Bonner as one of the most important poets in the blues.

He wrote, “If you had to choose a poet laureate of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s blues scene, you would be hard pressed to find someone more qualified than Juke Boy Bonner. Bonner’s songs speak beautifully and forcefully of the struggle of African Americans. While many blues songwriters focus attention on themselves and their place in the world, Bonner’s songs display a social consciousness that stretched far beyond himself.”

After Bonner’s marriage at a young age resulted in three children, his wife unexpectedly left him, leaving him solely responsible for his children’s upbringing, a burden made heavier by his own poor health and economic struggles.

In the liner notes to Bonner’s album, “Life Gave Me a Dirty Deal,” Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records, explained how the burden was also a blessing. “Perhaps the most unhappy period in Weldon Bonner’s life was his marriage. His wife left him after giving him what he considers the greatest gift in his life, his three children…. Weldon lavished attention, education, responsibilities, and affection on his family. They are all wonderful, lively, intelligent young people.”

Yet his years as a single parent were also full of hardships. Even though Bonner was a genuine poet and a gifted musician, he often was unable to support his family with his music at low-paying blues venues.

In “What Will I Tell the Children,” he sings the hard-working, low-paying, single-parent blues, returning home feeling empty inside after failing to find a job.

“You know it’s so hard when you’re trying to make it,

you’re living from day to day.

You go down and apply for a job and the people turn you away.

What shall I tell my children, oh Lord, when I get home? Tell them,

‘Maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow all our troubles will be gone.’”

He sings the words “maybe tomorrow” so forlornly, as if he’s grasping at a slender thread of hope. What if tomorrow doesn’t deliver on those hopes?

In another song on “Ghetto Poet,” Bonner sings, “All the lonely days just seem to fade away.” Then the days turn into endless years of broken dreams: “All the lonely years just seem to disappear.”

As we will see, Bonner was not only enduring economic deprivation, loneliness, the pressures of single fatherhood, and disillusionment that his brilliant music never seemed to find a large audience, but was also enduring scary health issues.

Yet when a sensitive poet undergoes that level of suffering, even his despairing words can still be striking and memorable, as in his song, “It’s Enough.”

“Look like I’m waiting for a tomorrow that will never come,

Seems days and days have passed, yet I never see the sun.

It’s enough to make you wish you were never born.

Sometimes I wonder where I get the power and the strength to carry on.”  

Juke Boy Bonner’s song, “I’m a Bluesman,” can be found on this CD, “The Sonet Blues Story: Juke Boy Boonner.”

“I’m a Bluesman”

“My father passed on when I was two years old,

Didn’t leave me a thing but a whole lot of soul.

You can see I’m a bluesman.”

Those lonely and forsaken lines are from Bonner’s self-revealing song, “I’m a Bluesman.” Being a bluesman was at the very heart of his identity, and this song reveals the major events of his life as reflected in the mirror of the blues.

Weldon Bonner was born on a farm near Bellville, Texas, where his father, Manuel Bonner, was a sharecropper. His very first years seemed to foreshadow all the bad luck that stalked him all his life. He was born in 1932 just as the rural economy was collapsing during the Depression.

He was the youngest of nine children born into a poor family, and just as he sang in “I’m a Bluesman,” his father died when he was only two. Then, Bonner’s mother died when he was only eight.

“My mother passed on when I was just about eight,

I started learning I was growing up in a world of hate.

That made me a bluesman.”

In his 1975 book, The Legacy of the Blues, the pioneering blues author and record producer Samuel Charters described the one-on-one correlation between Juke Boy Bonner’s life and his autobiographical song, “I’m a Bluesman.”

After losing both parents, Bonner went to live with an older sister in Bellville. Instead of going to school, he was working in the Texas cotton fields when he was only 13, just as he sang so movingly.

“I go to work in the fields when I was just thirteen.

Didn’t get a chance to know what education means.”

In 1963, at the age of 30, Bonner was hospitalized for chronic ulcers and 45 percent of his stomach was removed. During his long recovery, he began writing poetry and had countless poems published in Forward Times, the African-American newspaper of Houston.

Bonner turned many of these poems into beautiful songs and became a fine singer, guitarist, and harmonica player. His music was championed, first by Mike Leadbitter, a leading blues researcher and writer for Blues Unlimited in England, and later by Chris Strachwitz, the founder of Arhoolie Records in El Cerrito, who released his finest records.

Yet for all the brilliance of his artistry, Juke Boy Bonner would never become a star.

At the end of “I’m a Bluesman,” Bonner sings the desolate and downhearted words that, in my mind, make him one of the most important and prophetic voices of the homeless condition in America. All the hard knocks he endured gave him the knowledge and sensitivity to capture the frightening insecurity of life on the streets.

“When at night you don’t know where you’re going to sleep,

or where you’ll get your next meal to eat

That makes you a bluesman, a bluesman.

I want the world to know how come I’m a bluesman.”

In “I’m in the Big City,” Bonner writes of his disillusionment in moving from the hard, bare existence of a sharecropper’s life on a Texas cotton farm to Houston, only to find that poverty had followed him to the big city. “Here I am in the big city and I’m just about to starve to death.”

“I’m a Bluesman” appeared on “The Sonet Blues Story: Juke Boy Bonner,” and his other songs appeared on “Life Gave Me a Dirty Deal” and “Ghetto Poet.” Strachwitz produced all these intensely moving records by a talented musician and poet, and Charter was the creative force behind the Sonet Blues series.

Without his work being championed by Chris Strachwitz, Samuel Charter and Mike Leadbitter, Juke Boy Bonner might have lived and died almost completely unknown.

A Hero of the Blues

Although Bonner never became a big star, he was a voice of his people, a wonderful poet and a courageous bluesman who kept playing even after half of his stomach was removed.

He gave concerts and performed at blues festivals all over the country and travelled to Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival. But somehow, he never had a breakthrough moment in his career.

The life-stories of great artists in America are supposed to follow a rags-to-riches story arc. When a sensitive young man is born into an impoverished family of sharecroppers on a Texas farm just as the Depression ruins the economy, and then loses both parents, we are primed to expect that his years of hard work and brilliant artistry will be rewarded someday.

Yet, if the first chapters of Bonner’s life were harsh and cruel, the last chapter was outright heartbreaking.

Even though he had written and published hundreds of poems, and had recorded blues albums of unquestionable worth and beauty, in Bonner’s last years he held down “a dreadful minimum wage job” in Houston, as Strachwitz explained in the notes to “Life Gave Me a Dirty Deal.”

“The last time I visited Juke Boy in Houston,” Strachwitz wrote, “he was working at a chicken processing plant, depressing work for anyone but especially demoralizing for a sensitive poet like Weldon Bonner.” Strachwitz later wrote that he would never forget the bad shape Juke Boy was in while working that job.

Then, when he was only 46 years old, Bonner died on June 28, 1978, in “the small rented room where he lived” in Houston. The last verses of Bonner’s overpowering song, “It Don’t Take Too Much” express the essential truth of this poet’s lifelong struggle with the blues.

“It don’t take too much to make you think you was born to lose

That’s why I lay down worrying and I wake up with the blues.”

Despite his lack of public recognition, Juke Boy Bonner lived and died a great poet — and a hero of the blues. As I write these words, I realize I am wearing a T-shirt with an iconic portrait of Blind Willie Johnson by the artist R. Crumb and the blazing inscription: “Heroes of the Blues.”

For one forlorn moment, I find myself wishing that Juke Boy Bonner had also been consecrated as a hero of the blues, and that during his lifetime he had enjoyed some of the success lavished on so many lesser musicians.

From past experience, I know where these wishes will soon lead. I’ll begin wishing for a world where the genuine blues artists like Juke Boy Bonner and Blind Willie Johnson are far more celebrated than the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and all the others who have grown rich while exploiting the blues. As long as I’m wishing for the impossible, why not wish for eyesight for the blind? In fact, why not wish for eyesight for Blind Willie Johnson?

Even though justice is too often delayed, it may still show up on some unexpected day. After all, one of the greatest musicians in our nation’s history, Blind Willie Johnson, spent the last 17 years of his life in nearly total obscurity, playing his breathtaking music for strangers on small-town street corners, and then died a lonely death. Yet now, his music sails among the stars.

Blind Willie Johnson and the Music of the Spheres

In the opening frames of “The Soul of a Man,” a film by director Wim Wenders in the film series “Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues,” NASA technicians are seen loading a golden record on board the Voyager as it is about to blast off to explore the outer reaches of our solar system and then continue on into deep space.

The Voyager Golden Record carried the “Sounds of Earth” — the diverse languages, music and natural sounds of surf, thunder, birds and whales. Carl Sagan likened it to launching a message in a bottle into the “cosmic ocean.” The Voyager Golden Record selected the music of Bach, Beethoven and Blind Willie Johnson to carry on this voyage into the solar system, past Pluto and to the stars beyond.

It is amazing to contemplate this starry destiny for Blind Willie’s music, since during his life he seemed the most earthbound of men. He was born into poverty in Texas, blinded as a very young child, and later died in obscurity.

Johnson lost his mother at an early age. He would later sing a deeply moving rendition of “Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone.” During his youth, Willie Johnson walked down many lonely roads in darkness. He would die in much the same way, after sleeping on a soaked mattress when his house burned down.

Yet Johnson is now immortalized as one of the most brilliant slide guitarists in the history of gospel and blues music, and his haunting rendition of “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” is now soaring into space. His music truly has become part of the “music of the spheres.”

Many musicians win gold records for reaching one million dollars in sales (or by later standards, 500,000 units). Blind Willie Johnson’s music is on the ultimate gold record, shining among the stars.

Johnson was a stunning original. Samuel Charters wrote that no one during his time sounded like Blind Willie Johnson as a singer or guitarist. But Johnson would soon influence everyone else. Musicians to this day are still devoting years of their lives in an attempt to figure out his incredibly beautiful and complex slide guitar playing.

In the liner notes to “The Complete Blind Willie Johnson” on Columbia, Charters wrote: “He was one of the most brilliant slide guitarists who ever recorded, and he used the upper strings for haunting melodic phrases that finished the lines he was singing in the text.”

Sandblasted Vocal Cords

Blind Willie Johnson didn’t sing the blues, however. Every song he recorded between the years of 1927 to 1930 was a gospel song, yet his slide guitar playing sounded like the very essence of the blues, and he sang loud enough to wake the dead in a rasping growl that sounded like his vocal cords had been sandblasted.

His beautifully expressive, yet deep and raw vocals remade gospel music so it sounded like the primal blues of the Mississippi Delta, as if the harsh, gravel-voiced singing of Son House had mingled with the intense, passionate vocals of Howlin’ Wolf. Yet Blind Willie Johnson grew up in rural Texas, not Mississippi, and his music preceded most of the blues artists. Where did it come from?

Many of the finest guitarists in the world are in awe of Blind Willie Johnson. Some have spent half their lives trying to replicate what he could do on a slide guitar. How did a blind young man who played in small towns in an isolated area of rural Texas become one of the most masterful guitarists of all?

Ry Cooder, a virtuoso slide guitarist himself, described what Blind Willie Johnson’s playing meant to him. “Of course, I’ve tried all my life — worked very hard and every day of my life, practically — to play in that style. He’s so good. I mean, he’s just so good! Beyond a guitar player. I think the guy is one of these interplanetary world musicians.”

He’s exactly right about the “interplanetary” part. Blind Willie Johnson’s performance of “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” an instrumental version of a gospel song about the crucifixion of Jesus, was sent into space on the Voyager as “the human expression of loneliness.” The song’s full title is, “Dark was the night and cold was the ground, on which the Lord was laid.”

Samuel Charters wrote that Blind Willie Johnson had created a “shattering mood” with this song. “What Willie did in the studio was to create this mood, this haunted response to Christ’s crucifixion,” Charters wrote, adding that Johnson created an “achingly” expressive melody with just his slide guitar. Instead of singing the words of the hymn, Johnson cast aside the lyrics and went for pure emotion, humming along wordlessly in a meditative mood.

“It was a moment that was as moving as it was unforgettable,” Charters wrote. “It was the only piece he played like this, and nothing else similar to it was ever recorded. It remains one of the unique masterpieces of American music.”

Ry Cooder said that Johnson’s performance was “the most transcendent piece in all American music.”

Blind Willie Johnson’s entire life prepared him to have the emotional depth and sensitivity to create such a deeply felt response to the crucifixion of a Biblical figure who was born homeless.

Motherless Children Have a Hard Time

Johnson’s mother died when he was an infant. One of his most moving songs was sung with all the depth and heartache that a motherless son could find deep within himself. It is now a classic of American music.

His singing sends chills through my soul. It is a darkly unsettling experience, yet his otherworldly voice offers pure compassion to the motherless and fatherless children of the world. I lost my own father too early. And I love this song.

Children who have lost their parents at a very young age may be lost on some deep level for a very long time. And they may become lost in another sense as well — they may become homeless or spend their childhood days in poverty.

Every time I hear Blind Willie Johnson sing the last verse of this song, images arise of all the motherless and fatherless children who are homeless in modern America, and all the throwaway kids who are released from the foster care system with nowhere to go.

The most haunting image that arises is a picture of Willie Johnson himself, sightless and motherless, trying to make his way in the world by singing these words on street corners to unseen strangers.

“Motherless children have a hard time when mother is dead, Lord.

Motherless children have a hard time — mother’s dead.

They don’t have anywhere to go, wandering around from door to door.

Have a hard time.”

His father sent this sightless, motherless youth out with a tin cup to sing on street corners in small towns in Texas. Johnson recorded for only three years, from 1927 to 1930, yet during that time he is said to have outsold Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues.

The Homeless Stranger

He sang hymns and gospel songs, yet as Charter wrote, these songs “have been so completely changed in his hands that they become his own personal expression, building on the great Biblical figures.” Above all, Charters added, his songs reflected “the loneliness of the motherless child or the homeless stranger.”

One of my favourite songs of all expresses the lonely life of the homeless stranger. Willie Johnson walked in darkness all his life and he must have known many lonesome days when all he met were strangers who looked upon him as a blind beggar, a homeless stranger. They had no way of knowing that they were meeting one of the most remarkable musicians in American history.

But whether we have encountered a homeless stranger, or a world-class musician, Johnson’s song, “Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right,” is the voice of the conscience.

“Well, all of us down here are strangers, none of us have no home,

Don’t never hurt, oh, your brother and cause him to live alone.

Everybody ought to treat a stranger right long ways from home.”

His song goes beyond a simple appeal for compassion. With his spiritual vision, he reminds us that another Stranger once was born homeless, because there was no room at the inn.

“Well, Christ came down a stranger. He didn’t have no home,

Well, he was cradled in a manger and oxen kept him warm.”

This song is a reminder to a nation which just officially reported a record number of more than one million homeless children enrolled in the public schools that the lives of all of those homeless strangers are sacred. Every single one.

Dark Was The Night

Even though Blind Willie Johnson’s records had been selling well, and would soon become deeply influential to other musicians, the Depression ended the recording careers of many great blues artists, including Blind Willie. In 1930, Johnson recorded his last song. Yet, he kept playing music on the streets and in church gatherings in Beaumont, Texas, all through the 1930s and up until his death on September 18, 1945.

After his death, his music would streak on its heroic journey towards the stars in deep space. But during his life, this masterful musician suffered the crucifixion of poverty. It must be said: Dark was the night and cold was the ground on which Blind Willie Johnson was laid.

In August 1945, the shack where he lived with his wife Angeline burned down. With nowhere else to go, they lived in the fire-gutted ruins of their home and slept on wet newspapers on top of their soaked mattress. Johnson soon died of pneumonia or, alternately, malarial fever.

There are so many haunting deaths among homeless people on the streets, premature deaths caused by untreated illnesses among extremely poor people with inadequate medical care. And there are so many haunting deaths in the blues.

One immediately thinks of the terrible death of Robert Johnson, slowly and torturously dying in 1938 after being poisoned, and Charley Patton dying on a Mississippi plantation shortly after singing “Oh Death” at his last recording session for Vocalion in 1934.

Blind Lemon Jefferson died alone in a snowstorm on a wintry night in Chicago in December 1929, and Bessie Smith died in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1937 following a deadly car accident while traveling on Highway 61 from Memphis into Clarksdale. Elmore James died from a massive heart attack in 1963 when he was only 45 and should have had many more years to play his brilliant slide guitar.

Sonny Boy (John Lee) Williamson I, a fine singer and groundbreaking blues harpist, was murdered at the age of 34 during a robbery in Chicago in 1948. His last words reportedly were, “Lord, have mercy.” Another great vocalist and, in many people’s view, the most brilliant musician ever to play the blues harmonica, Little Walter, died at the age of 37 in 1968 as a result of injuries suffered during a fight in Chicago.

Sonny Boy Williamson II died in 1965, a short time after playing in a juke joint with Robbie Robertson and the Hawks (later of The Band). During the set, Williamson was constantly spitting what Robertson thought was tobacco juice into a can, until he finally realized that Sonny Boy actually had been spitting his blood into the can all night, then returning to play harmonica.

Even in light of all these tragic deaths, there is something in the brilliant artistry and the forsaken death of Blind Willie Johnson that is deeply touching. He lived and died a genuine, gospel-drenched hero of the blues — not just when he was recording his immortal music, but in my mind, maybe even more during the 15 years from 1930 to 1945 when the sightless street musician continued to play to small numbers of strangers on obscure street corners.

How We Treat the Stranger

In remembering his death, an unwelcome thought arises: This is how we treat the homeless stranger. We have created a society where an unknown blind man is turned away from a hospital and dies in a fire-gutted home, not just in Johnson’s era in rural Texas, but here and now, and in every state of the union.

Even today, we scarcely notice when a slum hotel in the inner city burns to the ground, or when homeless people die years before their time due to untreated illnesses and exposure, or that the safety net has been shredded so blind and disabled people are less able to survive.

Johnson sang, “Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right,” to warn us that the messiah may appear in the anonymous guise of a nameless, faceless stranger, and that the life of each unsheltered, needy stranger has sacred worth.

Then, he demonstrated the full significance of those lyrics by dying the unnoticed death of the unknown stranger, even though, in this case, he was one of the finest musicians of all time.

T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Rock,” echoes with the same message about the stranger.

When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city?

Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”

What will you answer? “We all dwell together

To make money from each other?” or “This is a community?”

On his recording of “Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right,” Blind Willie Johnson asked us that same question, a question that will never go away.

Terry Messman Editor, Street Spirit November 2014 ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

My thanks to Terry Messman for granting permission to publish this article.  – Alan White, www.earlyblues.com

If you would like to send any comments about the article, please email me at [email protected]

Article © Copyright 2014 Terry Messman. All rights reserved. Photographs and artwork individually credited or © Copyright 2014 Terry Messman. All rights reserved.

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Voyager 1 is back to life in interstellar space, but for how long?

NASA engineers have succeeded in breathing new life into Voyager 1 after the spacecraft, launched in 1977, went silent seven months ago.

NASA engineers have succeeded in breathing new life into Voyager 1 , the spacecraft launched in 1977 and once again communicating after it went silent seven months ago. But now comes another challenge: Keeping Voyager 1 scientifically useful for as long as possible as it probes a realm where no spacecraft has gone before .

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2 , are treasured at NASA not only because they have sent home astonishing images of the outer planets, but also because in their dotage, they are still doing science that can’t be readily duplicated.

They are now in interstellar space, far beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles from Earth and Voyager 2 nearly 13 billion miles. Both have passed the heliopause , where the “solar wind” of particles streaming from the sun terminates.

“They’re going someplace where we have nothing, we have no information,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said. “We don’t know anything about the interstellar medium. Is it a highly charged environment? Are there a lot of dust particles out there?”

Even as the Voyagers continue their journeys, engineers and scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. are mourning the loss of Ed Stone, the scientist who guided the mission from 1972 until his retirement in 2022. Stone, a former director of JPL, died June 9 at the age of 88.

“It’s great. This is exploration. This is wonderful,” Stone told The Washington Post in 2013 when he and his colleagues determined that Voyager 1 had reached interstellar space.

Voyager 1 has four scientific instruments still operational in this extended phase of its mission, but it suddenly ceased sending intelligible data on Nov. 14. A “tiger team” of engineers at JPL spent the ensuing months identifying the problem — a malfunctioning computer chip — and restoring communication.

That laborious process is nearly complete. Data is coming from all four instruments, project scientist Linda Spilker said, though engineers are still checking to see whether data from two of the instruments is fully usable.

What no one can change, though, is the mortality of a spacecraft with a limited power supply. Voyager 1 is running on fumes, or, more precisely, on the dwindling power from the radioactive decay of plutonium.

The Voyagers have traveled so far from the sun they can’t rely on solar power and instead use a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. But an RTG doesn’t last forever. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will eventually go silent as they continue to cruise the galaxy. NASA scientists and engineers are hoping Voyager 1 can keep sending data until at least Sept. 5, 2027, the 50th anniversary of its launch.

“At some point, we’ll have to start turning off the science instruments one by one,” Spilker said. “Once we’re out of power, then we can no longer keep the spacecraft pointed at the Earth. And so [the Voyagers] will then continue on as what I like to think of as our silent ambassadors.”

In a sense, this is all a bonus because the primary mission for the two Voyagers was the exploration of the outer planets. Both visited Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 went on to Uranus and Neptune in what was known as the “Grand Tour” of the outer solar system, enabled by a rare orbital arrangement of the planets. The Voyagers delivered spectacular close-up images of the outer planets, and the mission ranks among NASA’s greatest achievements.

The gravitational slingshot from the planetary encounters sent Voyager 1 out of the elliptical plane of the solar system and did the same to Voyager 2 in a different direction.

About four years ago, Voyager 1 encountered something unexpected — a phenomenon scientists have dubbed a pressure front. Jamie Rankin, deputy project scientist, said the instruments on the spacecraft picked up a sudden change in the magnetic field of the interstellar environment, as well as a sudden increase in the density of particles.

What exactly caused this change remains unknown. But NASA scientists are eager to get all the data flowing normally again to see whether the pressure front is still detectable.

“Is the pressure front still there; what is happening with it?” Melroy said.

Voyager 1 is heading toward the constellation Ophiuchus, according to NASA, and in about 38,000 years, it will come within 1.7 light-years of an unremarkable star near the Little Dipper. But although it will have long gone silent, it does carry the equivalent of a message in a bottle: the “Golden Record.”

The record was curated by a committee led by astronomer Carl Sagan and includes greetings in 55 languages, sounds of surf, wind and thunderstorms, a whale song and music ranging from Beethoven to Chuck Berry to a Navajo chant. The Golden Record is accompanied by instructions for playing it, should the spacecraft someday come into the hands of an intelligent species interested in finding out about life on Earth.

“The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space,” Sagan said.

But that advanced spacefaring civilization might not be an alien one, NASA scientists point out. It’s conceivable that the cosmic message in a bottle could be picked up someday by a human deep-space mission eager to examine a vintage spaceship.