The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson.

Because O’Connor smokes, but doesn’t do so in the house, she’d taken refuge in a cabin in her back yard, not far from some train tracks. There were frequent interruptions that day from her four children—minor injuries, concerns about schoolwork—but also, O’Connor remembered, “every fifteen minutes you’d have to stop because of the trains.”

Interruptions aside, the trio recorded a gospel-blues song, “Trouble Will Soon Be Over,” one of eleven tracks on the just-released “God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson.” It’s an effort to revive the long-dead Texas musician, and O’Connor isn’t the only one so haunted by his work that she wanted to cover it; others on the album include Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, and the Blind Boys of Alabama.

Johnson was born in Pendleton, a small Texas town, in 1897. It’s said that Johnson was only five when he told his father that he wanted to be a preacher. As a teen-ager, Johnson sang in the streets. And, at the end of his life, when he had little money, he did it again and became a street-corner evangelist. Indeed, according to the journalist Michael Corcoran, who has extensively researched Johnson, the city directory for Beaumont, Texas, has him listed as a preacher in 1945. He died that year, of—depending on whom you believe—pneumonia or malarial fever. Seven-plus decades after his death, there are large gaps in the Blind Willie fossil record. No complete biography of him has been written, and there are periods of his life about which little is known. It’s not even certain how he went blind. One story goes that, when Johnson was seven, his father found his wife—Willie’s stepmother—cheating on him. She, in turn, threw lye in the boy’s face.