August 2004
Grace Notes
A New Anthology Captures Gospel’s Rich Heritage and Legacy
by Larry Kelp
Rock band Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy said in a recent Rolling Stone that, “What’s missing in most bands I hear today is a belief that what they’re doing matters.” That’s where the unprecedented box set Goodbye, Babylon comes in. Every song is filled with the performer’s conviction. And that’s a lot of conviction: 135 songs and 25 sermons spread over six CDs in the most comprehensive compilation of America’s greatest and most obscure early Christian recordings, black and white, predominantly Protestant, Southern and rural, solo and group.
There have been other gospel and spiritual anthologies, but none as extensive. Presented in a 10-by-12-inch cedar box, topped with a slide-out wood cover adorned by a drawing of the Tower of Babel, the discs and book are nestled between wood slats and cotton for that” fresh out of the fields” look. The first five discs encompass songs recorded between 1902 and 1960, with a sixth disc of sermons from 1926 to 1941. The 192-page book includes illustrations, song lyrics and artists’ biographies. It retails for around $100.
Goodbye, Babylon is the creation of Dust to Digital (www.dust-digital.com), the tiny Atlanta company responsible for the sound restoration and art direction for two multiple-Grammy Award-winning l box sets, Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues (Charley Patton and his world) and the influential Anthology of American Folk Music (a/k/a the Harry Smith Anthology).
Goodbye, Babylon is packed with Bible tales, proverbs, songs and amazing stories of people in the grips of temptation and others on the road to redemption where the New Testament love of Jesus means that you’ll never walk alone. Gospel was pressed onto records almost from the day recording was invented. The set’s oldest selection, “Down on the Old Camp Ground,” was recorded in 1902 by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet. RCA just issued another 1902 song by the quartet on Sacred Roots of the Blues (vol. 11 in the Secret History of Rock & Roll CD series).
Gospel Currents
The combination of African and European styles in this box charts the foundation of what has come since: R&B, rock & roll, and rap. Just listen to the rhythms and rhymes of the preachers on the sermon disc; all you need is a drum machine and a bit of scratching and you’ve got a hip-hop hit. Stylistically Goodbye, Babylon ranges through solo blues singers, a cappella church choirs, to string bands, brass bands, bluegrass and Hank Williams’ country. There’s even Bahamian calypso and the raw voices of the Georgia Sea Islands.
The record companies that originally recorded and issued these 78s sold them to segregated buyers, but on Goodbye, Babylon the black and white artists perform side by side, and one can hear that — stylistically and thematically — they are cut from the same cloth. These songs sound alive today in ways many contemporary recordings don’t. This is music that matters to its performers, music that is timeless in its subject matter. And the musicians, regardless of race, draw on diverse stylistic roots: the call and response of field hollers, blues chords, European Protestant hymn singing, barbershop harmony, early string band, and jazz, all intermingled. In a racist society, it was easier for record companies to sell black artists on “race records” while promoting white acts on their regular labels.
On Goodbye, Babylon blues legend Skip James (whose “I’m So Glad” was a hit for Cream) with just a guitar and high, plaintive voice, sings “Jesus Is a Mighty Good Leader” in 1931. In 1994, pop musician Beck recorded the song. Eddie Head and His Family’s 1930 recording of “Down on Me” would, some 36 years later, be covered by Big Brother & the Holding Company. There is Blind Willie Johnson’s “I Can’t Keep from Crying” (modified decades later by the Blues Project’s Al Kooper), the Carter Family’s “Keep on the Sunny Side” (redone for the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?), as well as Mahalia Jackson’s 1947 recording of “Amazing Grace” (a staple of both black and white churches) that helped propel the song and her into the American mainstream.
For blues singer Georgia Tom’s first recording of a gospel song “How About You” (1932), the booklet’s photo shows a sleepy-eyed, street-wise singer with stylish cap, lighting the cigarette dangling from his lips, seemingly the role model for rap star Snoop Dogg. Yet he is the man who would, under his full name Thomas A. Dorsey, become one of gospel’s greatest composers.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
With pianist Sammy Price’s jazz-blues combo backing her, the amazing guitarist and singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (whose transcendent 30-second appearance in the French film Amelie helped bring her a new audience 30 years after her death) sings “Strange Things Happening Every Day.” Singers such as Tharpe sang both secular and sacred music with the same style and intensity. Only the lyrics changed. She recorded solo, with jazz and blues bands, full church choirs. Tharpe teamed up with boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons to star in John Hammond’s breakthrough 1938 “Spirituals to Swing” concert, the first time black and white performers shared the stage at Carnegie Hall. That same year, Tharpe’s “Rock Me” became gospel’s first best-selling record.
For those artists who worked in both blues and gospel styles, life was often a rocky road. Tharpe’s career, like those of many singers in this collection, was a tightrope act, trying to balance her love of both blues and sacred music in an era when church congregations vilified any musician who sang “the devil’s music.” More than one of the singers on Goodbye, Babylon recorded secular songs under a different name.
Tharpe, who toured America and Europe, was one of the most successful artists to take church gospel into the secular world. Over the course of the Goodbye, Babylon recordings, various fellow artists also took the Word to the masses, through revivals, tent meetings, and even regular concerts. The preachers on the sixth disc mixed music and shouting, but with the rise of Sunday morning radio church broadcasts in the 1950s, the recorded sermons faded. With a very few exceptions (the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1959, Edwin Hawkins’ “Oh, Happy Day” in 1970), gospel and church songs in recent decades have been relegated to religious radio; there have been few crossovers.
However, gospel singers have crossed over in droves, from Sam Cooke (who continued to record gospel groups for his S.A.R. label while he stuck to pop songs in the early ‘60s) to Al Green (whose own hits stopped when he switched to strictly religious lyrics, although his sacred recordings are stylistically identical to his secular music). Even the queen of soul, Aretha Franklin, has kept her gospel recordings separate from her pop music. In every case, it was the record companies, not the artists, who dictated the gospel/pop segregation. In recent years, such Hawkins-inspired young artists as Kirk Franklin and Fred Hammond have sold out arenas and scored platinum records mixing hip-hop styles and staging with the gospel, outraging more traditional gospel supporters, while attracting a young audience to the Word.
How the Circle Was Unbroken
As segregated as American society was, musicians always borrow inspirations from each other, unbound by color bars. Elvis Presley launched rock & roll when he combined black R&B with white hillbilly music, then tossed in the gospel quartet harmonies he so loved, provided by the Jordanaires on both his hits and religious recordings. In 1964, Pete Seeger teamed up with the Freedom Singers on what became the theme song of the Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome,” the American folk tradition meeting African-American church music. One of those teenage Freedom Singers, Bernice Johnson (Reagon), then launched the a cappella women’s quintet Sweet Honey in the Rock, singing original political and religious songs based on the oldest of African-American vocal styles. In the ‘90s, Linda Tillery (who as a teenager sang with the Loading Zone in the Fillmore and other psychedelic rock halls) started her own a cappella women’s group, Cultural Heritage Choir.
One has only to look at the local record store’s New Releases shelf to see that Goodbye, Babylon‘s roots are alive and evolving in today’s secular artists. Last winter’s five-CD Cash Unearthed box of Johnny Cash’s unreleased recordings for Rick Rubin’s American Records included one disc of all-religious songs, which has just been issued separately as My Mother’s Hymn Book. “You asked me to pick my favorite album I’ve ever made,” Cash wrote of the CD, “and this is it...On that album, I nailed it. That was me.”
New Orleans’ Dirty Dozen Brass Band just issued “Funeral for a Friend” (on the ropeadope label) with its versions of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Amazing Grace” and “John the Revelator.”
Three folk singers known for their blues and gospel roots — Eric Bibb, Rory Block and Maria Muldaur — teamed up for Brothers & Sisters (on Telarc), harmonizing on spiritual and uplifting songs including Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody,” Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Rock Daniel,” and Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me.” The album title is taken from Psalm 133: “Behold, how good and how pleasant for brothers and sisters to dwell together in Unity.”
In August, Mavis Staples (who duets with Bob Dylan on last year’s Dylan Gospel tribute CD) issues her first full album in too many years, “Have a Little Faith” (on Chicago blues label Alligator). Also due in August is “The Unbroken Circle” (on Dualtone), featuring Carter Family songs and spirituals done by the likes of John Prine, George Jones, Johnny and June Carter Cash and Emmylou Harris (with O Brother, Where Art Thou‘s child group, the Peasall Sisters).
The circle clearly is unbroken, and the beauty of Goodbye, Babylon is that while the music is taken from dusty 78s, the power and commitment of the artists is timeless. One can hear the connection that links Johnny Cash, Eric Bibb and Rory Block to the Carter Family, Blind Willie Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe: regardless of era, they are artists making music that matters.
Down Home Music’s Larry Kelp hosts KPFA’s Sing Out! Wednesdays at 10pm. He teaches and writes frequently about American music.
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