"When they tell you your music will live forever, you can usually be pretty sure they're exaggerating," famed astronomer Carl Sagan wrote to even more famed rocker Chuck Berry on the latter's 60th birthday in 1986. But in Berry's case, Sagan continued, at least one song is likely to last "a billion years or more."
That's because "Johnny B. Goode" was one of 27 tracks embedded in each of two gold-plated copper records that NASA fastened to the two Voyager spacecraft it launched in 1977. As Mark D. Kaufman writes on the Popular Science website, the "Sounds From Earth" albums also include a Bach concerto, a Navajo night chant and Peruvian panpipes. Besides music, there are recordings of human voices plus some natural sounds, such as thunder, and digital pictures of earthlings going about their daily lives.
To assist any life-forms that Voyager happens to encounter, NASA added a record-playing device, a needle and pictorial instructions.
“Johnny B. Goode” almost didn’t make the playlist. Several members of the culturally learned group that picked the tracks didn’t think rock-and-roll rose to an interplanetary level. One scholar of folk music, Alan Lomax, called it too “adolescent.” Sagan gets credit for getting it in, famously arguing, “There are a lot of adolescents on the planet.”
Berry’s death on March 18 at age 90 elicited tributes from around the world, but nothing quite as enduring as the memorial launched by NASA. After completing the initial mission of sending back information on Saturn and Jupiter, the two Voyager craft have continued separately onward, transmitting data homeward as they travel. Not a bad ride for the boy “who never ever learned to read and write so well, but he could play the guitar just like ringing a bell.”
“The song left our solar system in 2012,” Kaufman writes, “and will pass by its first star, Gliese 445, in 40,000 years.”
Sorry, but you kind of have to say it: Go. Go, Johnny, go. Go.
