In 1977, during a fit of poetry, optimism and metallurgy, some nerds at NASA shot into space a phonograph made from copper, plated with gold and jacketed in an aluminum sleeve. They sent up two copies, to be precise, each affixed to the interior of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, courses set for infinity. The hope of the nerds was that eons from now, aliens might intercept the record, listen to its 27 songs representing the world’s countries and cultures, and know more about us.1
The nerds acknowledged they were dealing with a low and particular form of audio technology, so they embossed pictographic operating instructions on the jacket. They also included a spare cartridge and needle, possibly recognizing that by the time of any interception—no earlier than 1990, when the Voyagers would pass Pluto—that even extraterrestrials would have upgraded to at least eight-track tapes.
Never mind the chance, remotely slim in the vastness of space, that any alien would find this object intact and know what to make of it. Never mind that the inhabitants of Earth, despite widely varying levels of intelligence, invariably assume that life beyond our planet will be an awful lot like us, only sporting pajamas and weirder foreheads. Never mind all that; this was a cool idea, to burn a civilization’s Greatest Hits onto a golden disc.
I’ve been skimming through the book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record2, reading of the wrestling over that 90-minute mix, particularly the pop songs and music from America that were debated for inclusion.
In one instance, the resident conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington called the Smithsonian’s curator of jazz at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, awakening him to ask whether the Miles Davis version of Gershwin’s “Summertime” would be appropriate to send to the stars. It was rejected. So was the whole of country music, offered as an option because the people who built the spaceships listened to it. Further bickering arose over Elvis, Jefferson Starship (who volunteered music for the record), Bob Dylan (“would the music stand if the words were incomprehensible?” asked Carl Sagan, a model of perfect diction) and the Beatles, of whom Sagan writes:
We wanted to send “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles, and all four Beatles gave their approval. But the Beatles did not own the copyright, and the legal status of the piece seemed too murky to risk.
C’mon, Carl; you should’ve sucked it up and sent it out. What did you have to lose? You’re slinging the song into a void billions and billions of miles from Apple Corps and its pugnacious lawyers.
But no contemporary pop made the cut. The four pieces of American music pressed to disc were a Navajo night chant and three songs by African American musicians: Louis Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues,” Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
Other than praising Sagan & Co. for sidestepping Armstrong’s most-popular and least-representative track, the sappy “What a Wonderful World”, I’m impressed by the selection of “Dark Was the Night.”3. It’s just Johnson and his guitar, which he played by sliding his pocketknife over the strings; his hums and moans; and his blindness and loneliness. His stepmother blinded him, throwing lye in his face when he was seven. During most of his life, he played on the streets of Texas, “collecting tips in a cup wired to his guitar neck,” writes blues historian Jas Obrecht. Ailing and rejected by the hospital, Johnson died of pneumonia, sleeping on a waterlogged bed covered with newspaper.
For all the American flags waving in slow motion on Earth and those bolted to the moon, for all the space program’s hopeful rhetoric, not as much talk covers the fact that space is big and we’re little, looking for food, water, a dry place to sleep, and company. That’s just what you get—what you feel—with Johnson and his spooky little space-song, mankind’s most appropriate mix-pick.
Bonus mp3: “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)” by Blind Willie Johnson, recorded on December 3, 1927, the same version pressed to the Voyager disc.
Related: NASA’s page on the Golden Record.
1 Also encoded in the audio spectrum of the record are 117 pictures, greetings in 54 human languages and one from the whales (remember, this was the ’70s) and 19 “sounds of Earth,” but for the purposes of this post, I’m only interested in the music. [back]
2 It’s out of print. Snaps to the Strand for having a copy. [back]
3 In the middle of writing this post, the internet informed me that The West Wing incorporated this song and its involvement in the Voyager mission as a plot point. I missed that episode. But now I kind of want to see it. [back]