Long before his haunting, gravelly voice was etched into the grooves of a record—and long before his music was launched into the cosmos on the Voyager 1 spacecraft—Blind Willie Johnson was a young boy in rural Texas, finding his footing in a world that would become both his struggle and his sanctuary.

Daniel Boone is often remembered as a larger-than-life frontiersman, but his story starts in a far simpler setting: a rural community in colonial Pennsylvania. Boone was born on November 2, 1734, in a Quaker household where hard work, independence, and a love of nature were prized. [1]