Bible & Tire: Bruce Watson wants to retread your soul.

“This music, when you listen to it, you can’t help but tap your foot. You can’t help but feel good.”
Bruce Watson

Bruce Watson is the general manager of Mississippi record label, Fat Possum, as well as Big Legal Mess Records. Courtney Marie Andrews, A.A. Bondy, Jimbo Mathus, Alvin Youngblood Hart and Alex Rose are just some of the artists on the labels, as well as legacy recordings by the likes of R.L. Burnside, Fred McDowell and Junior Kimbrough.

A recording engineer and producer, Watson is steeped in roots music and, along with Matthew Johnson, he’s worked at Fat Possum to acquire an impressive back catalogue of music, including material from Al Green, Ann Peebles, and Townes Van Zandt.

In his mid-50s, Bruce Watson is pressing on with a major new project. He wants to introduce an Americana audience to black gospel music. To do so, he’s established a new label, called Bible and Tire, which seeks to promote both older artists and new ones, all the while breathing new life into the genre.

We got chatting to Bruce to find out what it’s all about:

Gary So I wondered if you could maybe just tell us a little bit about Bible and Tire and how it’s different from Fat Possum. What does it aim to do?

Photo: Jim Weber

Bruce Well, I guess it started when I moved to Memphis four or five years ago. We were opening up a vinyl manufacturing plant and I bought a 150-year-old building and put an office and a recording studio in it. And I kind of looked around and thought, what am I going to do here that’s different? Now we’ve done the blues thing. There are plenty people doing kind of a neo-soul kind of thing. And hip hop is really not in my wheelhouse. Modern country, I don’t really care for too much, and the garage rock thing was being done by Goner Records.

So, I just kind of looked around and I started noticing how much talent there was in the gospel community around Memphis. About the same time, I was fortunate enough to buy the masters to the D-Vine Spirituals catalogue. We’d been buying gospel masters was for a while – we had acquired the rights to Designer Records probably about 10 years ago and did a box set on that some years ago. And then we released the Pitch / Gusman recordings from the stuff down in Georgia.  And we did Bishop Manning and the Manning Family, we’ve done Theotis Taylor. So, there was quite a bit of gospel stuff here.

So anyway, I wanted to put together a label that was solely based on gospel. But there’s always confusion, when I say, oh, the name of my record company is Big Legal Mess! So I decided to come up with a label that’s a little more friendly, and with Bible in the name. And I wanted a label that was just solely releasing gospel music.

Gary So, where does the word Tire come in?

Bruce Well, it’s just like a play on words. It’s like something I saw one time on a roadside stop and it was always in the back of my mind. Bible and Tire, yeah, kind of like “retread your soul!”

The first two things I released were Elizabeth King, the reissue records from her D-Vine Spirituals stuff. And then I did the Sensational Barnes Brothers, who are younger guys from Memphis who I’d been using as back-up singers on a lot of stuff I was producing. They were really strong, with a gospel background. Their father was a well-known gospel singer in the city and their mother had been a background singer for Ray Charles, a Raelette.

Gary I’ve listened to their album, which is fantastic.

Bruce Yeah, man, they’re great. It seems like gospel music started changing in the late 70s and it became more modern in a way that it’s really easy to blame it on five string basses and synthesizers. But, you know, it was deeper than that. People were trying to keep up with the times. But the stuff that I record, I really try to take it back. So, if there’s gonna be an organ on it, it’s going to be a Hammond organ. It’s gonna be a Fender P bass. And we try to record it so it sounds like it was recorded in the 60s or 70s.

And sometimes that means me using my own group of studio musicians like we do on the Barnes Brothers. And the Barnes Brothers is all songs from the Designer Records catalogue.

So the next thing I did, which is coming out the end of April, is the Dedicated Men of Zion, from Greenville, North Carolina. They’re amazing. But instead of the Designer catalogue, we use songs from The D-Vine Spirituals catalogue. They came down and made a record with my band in Memphis. So that’s the next release. And we’re also working on a full-length Elizabeth King. Oh, she’s still amazing after all these years. She sounds great. She’s getting close to 80 now and she’s got 13 or 14 kids, 30 or 40 grandkids, but she’s awesome. You know, she just toured France as a replacement with the Como Momas when one of them got sick. And that’s really the first time she’d been out of the United States. Anyway, we have high hopes for her.

We’re releasing a JCR Records compilation. JCR Records was the catalogue where Pastor Shipp said, well, if you’re not good enough to be on Divine Spiritual, I’m gonna put you on JCR. This is my favourite stuff. It’s really raw, it’s not right, it’s totally messed up. I love that kind of stuff. We’re calling it the “first shall be last and the last shall be first!”

So that’s coming out probably June, July. And then we have a D-Vine Spirituals boxset and documentary that is coming out hopefully in the Fall. It’ll all depend on how fast I can get the documentary finished. There’s a lot of things going on! I just got back from North Carolina and we set up a mobile recording studio in a small town called Fountain, and recorded eleven gospel groups in eight days. So, we’re doing a North Carolina Sacred Soul record compilation, and a documentary that goes along with that as well. And this stuff is so raw. It wasn’t recorded in a studio, it was recorded in a 100-year-old building. We just put some blankets up on the wall. But this stuff is amazing. There’s so much talent in that part of North Carolina, it’s ridiculous. So, we got a lot going on!

Gary Yeah, you sure have.  And what is the audience that you think you are appealing to here, Bruce?

Bruce You know, that is the big question. I’d obviously like to appeal to a younger audience. What’s going to have to happen is these guys are going to have to get out on tour. We’re going to have to get this out of the church and into the rock clubs and into the theatres. You know, when we did Fat Possum in the early days, blues was pretty much stuck in the blues club. And we took guys like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough out on tour with Iggy Pop and Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion, the Beastie Boys. And that opened those guys up to an entirely new audience. So, with this stuff, too – take it out of church. And we’ve already started that. There’s a good quote in the recent Vice magazine article about us that said that gospel music is so deeply entwined with black music that there’s no reason that the same audience that goes for hip hop and rap and country can’t embrace this.

You see it on a much larger level with, you know, Kanye’s gospel records, regardless of what my opinion might be of that. I’m not crazy about it, but I’m glad.

Gary I mean there’s so many genres and subgenres of what you might call Americana these days, you got to think that if you can get the music out there, there’s going to be an audience for it.

Bruce That’s kind of what I’m hedging my bets on. Of course, the music’s got to be good. That’s a big right part of it. But I think we’re on the right track as far as that goes.

Gary So what would you say is the power of gospel music? Why has it got the potential of appealing to a wider audience beyond the church?

Bruce Well, man, I’m not particularly religious, let’s say that. But this music, when you listen to it, you can’t help but tap your foot. You can’t help but feel good. And I’ve always tried to work in music that moves me. There’s not a whole lot out there now that moves me. But this actually moves me. I’m really kind of doing something based on emotion. I always just follow the music. It moves me and I hope that will move other people.

Gary That’s a very refreshing thing to say, Bruce, in these days of spreadsheets and numbers and all of that.

Bruce Well, we’ve been fortunate to have been in business for 30 years, so we can kind of branch out and try to experiment. So it’s nice when we have the luxury to do that.

Gary When you talk about gospel music, you’re looking at a sort of 60s, 70s sound, but for for some of the artists you’ve talked about, for them, the Christian content, the lyrical content is very important. So how does that play out when you take it out of the church into the clubs and concert halls?

Bruce Honestly, so far we’ve only done two or three shows. But it’s been amazing, really. Because it’s something different. It’s not like your typical indie rock thing you can see almost every single night. It’s something different. And people will come out for that, especially if it’s raw and emotional. I just think it really hits a nerve.

Gary That’s very interesting. And I understand you have a collaborator in Pastor Juan Shipp. I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about him.

Bruce Pastor Shipp is Memphis born and bred. He was a postal employee, but he was also a part-time deejay and he saw the need for a Memphis gospel label. The honest truth is, he wasn’t very happy with the production aesthetic of Style Wooten who owned Designer Records. So Pastor Shipp started D-Vine Spirituals as a reaction to that. He founded a recording studio called Temple Recording Studio that was owned by a guy named Clyde Leopard, who was a Sun Studio artist and engineer, in downtown Memphis. It’s a studio you don’t hear much about, but all the D-Vine Spirituals stuff was recorded there.

Rev. J Shipp (Photo: Jim Weber)

Anyway, Clyde and Pastor Shipp became really good friends. And basically, Clyde taught Pastor Shipp how to record, so Pastor Shipp started the label. That was around 1968 until about 1977 or 78 and he released around 150 singles during that time. He eventually shut down the label in the late 70s and went on with his life.

Clyde Leopard had the master tapes. I found out about Pastor Shipp and D-Vine Spirituals from a friend of mine named Mike Hurtt who’s a collector and a writer. He wrote the liner notes to The Soul of Designer Records boxset for me. Mike found Pastor Shipp about seven or eight years ago and asked him about the masters. Well, Clyde Leopard had passed away and the bank was in the process of foreclosing on his house, but Mike and Pastor Shipp managed to get the master tapes and save them within 24 hours of the house being in the hands of the bank! Anyway, eventually after some years, I was given the tapes and I called Pastor Shipp and introduced myself.

We met, hit it off and worked out a deal, where I would be partners in D-Vine Spirituals and JCR. So then we started transferring all the tapes. We’d take two days a week and transfer a hundred fifty tapes. And the stuff is amazing. D-Vine Spirituals is one of those labels that you don’t really hear much about, only hardened gospel people know about it. But it really has some of the best stuff I’ve heard as far as black gospel is concerned from that period.

So you would listen to this stuff and go, oh, my goodness, I can’t believe no one’s ever done anything with this stuff! So anyway, Pastor Shipp and I became business partners. We put on a big show at Crosstown Concourse in Memphis, a night of Memphis soul gospel. And it was very successful, with about five or six hundred people turning up. People going crazy! We had the Barnes Brothers; we had four or five of the old D-Vine Spirituals artists who are still around. There was Elder Ward. Elizabeth King, the D-Vine Spiritualettes, and Reverend John Wilkins. It was a big night.

Gary John’s the son of Robert Wilkins, right?

Bruce He is. I made a record of him probably about ten or twelve years ago and he’s really good. It’s been a great partnership. He’s co-producing the new Elizabeth King record. And they go back for years, and he’s kind of acting as a manager for her right now.

Gary Now just to clarify, Bruce, obviously, there’s a whole genre of the blues that you might call gospel blues from Willie Johnson through to Robert Wilkins and, you know, right on through to potentially Kelly Joe Phelps today. Is that something that comes onto your radar with Bible and Tire or are you really just looking more at the 60s, 70s sort of gospel stuff?

Bruce I’m totally open. I haven’t found any good gospel blues that interest me. But I’m not limiting things. And if I find a great white gospel singer, I’m going to do that. To me, I always follow the music, But if it’s on Bible and Tire, it’s going to be gospel. If it’s good and I feel like I want to do it, I don’t really care what gospel genre.

Gary Very good. So tell me this then, Bruce, how do you manage to be the general manager of Fat Possum and then have the energy and the time to get a venture like this up and going? It sounds like quite an enterprise.

Bruce I’m still at Fat Possum. But as far as some of the day to day management, I’m not having to deal with that. I don’t have as many irons in the fire as I used to and my focus is really on this right now.

 Gary Excellent. That’s fantastic, Bruce. I wish you all the best with it.

Slide guitar maestro, Bryn Haworth, tells his remarkable story

Bryn Haworth is an outstanding slide guitarist and songwriter from the UK who has been making records and performing for the past 50 years. He’s appeared on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test and the John Peel show, was a major figure in the explosion of Jesus Rock in the 1970s and ’80s, and been the guest guitarist on many albums by rock and folk artists.

During the 1970s I nearly wore out my turntable needle playing his Sunny Side of the Street and Grand Arrival albums, and to my delight, I recently discovered a 2006 album called Keep the Faith, which I’ve been playing almost non-stop.

So, it was a particular pleasure to chat to Bryn about the blues, his remarkable journey into faith when he was a successful musician in California in the ‘70s, the important work he’s been doing in prisons over many years and how we need to care for the environment.

I asked him first of all how he would describe the sort of music he makes.

Bryn Well the word I’d use is eclectic really. Because it’s because I was brought up in a house back in the ’50s where all kind of music was played and loved. My mum was the one who bought the records, these old 78 records, and she would buy Elvis, Elgar, Little Richard. She’d buy the Kingston Trio. And it was a big thing when we got a gramophone in the front room. It would be a big deal when you bought a new record, you’d sit down and play it and you’d have your fish and chips and stuff in the room, listening to these records and appreciating them and just enjoying them. So, for me all styles of music are good and to be enjoyed, and I just carried on like that in my writing and playing. So…eclectic, I like all kinds of music. It may not be commercial but I enjoy the freedom!

Gary But a lot of your music has always sounded a bit bluesy to me and you’ve got that lovely slide guitar work. So tell me how you feel about blues music.

Bryn Blues music to me is honest music. It’s people expressing their sorrow, their pain, their loneliness, their disconnectedness, their questions or anger about things we all feel. So you know for me it’s natural to express these things. It’s honest…honest to God music, really. I mean life is hard isn’t it? You know we’ve all been hurt, we’ve all been damaged, or we all hurt others knowingly or unknowingly. And there’s just this whole thing of, you know, unanswered questions – in our hearts this feeling – Where do I belong? Where’s home?  And that’s all in the DNA of every one of us. And so, it’s great when music is expressed like that in a simple fashion. So that’s how I feel about blues.

And then look at how many musicians there are in the Bible, like Jeremiah and Habakkuk and David and Job, and you start to see the blues in what they’re saying. There’s so much blues in there. You know in Job 30. 31, it says “my harp is tuned to mourning, my flute to the sound of wailing.” The Message translation says “my fiddle plays nothing but the blues and my mouth harp is wailing.” Job was a musician. And then you got David – “Why is this happening? How long? Where are you God? You know, just real people interacting with a real God, real full on honest to God stuff. Psalm 69 – I love that one: “I’m up to my neck in trouble.” And then Psalm 88 – the last verse “darkness is my closest friend.” And that’s the end of the song.

Gary Although it’s quite interesting, Bryn, when you look at a lot of the Psalms, they’re quite like some of the blue songs, in that they start off really, really dark. You know “Why have you forsaken me” and then by the end of the song, the Psalmist has sort of worked himself through the blues and he’s in a better place. And actually a lot of the blues songs are a bit like that – I think of that old standard Trouble in Mind – I’m gonna lay down my head on some railroad iron and then by the end of the song, it’s you know, the sun’s gonna shine on my back yard some day. Things are gonna get better and there’s a kind of a parallel to the way some of the Psalms work.

Bryn Yeah, yeah, There’s one song of mine from the Rebel Man album called Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do, and it’s really just reading the Prophets where God says, why don’t you love me like you used to, and now you’ve gone off and stuff like that. So that’s a classic blues theme, isn’t it? The reality is that God feels the pain of rejection. God grieves and feels pain – Genesis 6 says the Lord was grieved that he’d made man and his heart was filled with pain, and then you see Jesus, he was rejected and despised. I mean, blues? Is that not blues?

Gary Absolutely right. It’s right there.

And looking back, who are the artists that have influenced you, that have meant something to you along the way, blues or otherwise?

Bryn Well in the blues I like the Johnsons – Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson. I like Elmore James because of the slide. I’m always fascinated by how these guys play. It’s just stunning. And I like the finger-pickers, I like Mississippi John Hurt – I hear a lot of Mississippi John Hurt in Eric Bibb. I just love listening to John Hurt you know, because his spirit is really gentle. He’s not aggressive.

And I also like harmonica players. Little Walter. Because harmonica players like Little Walter are great to copy for slide players. You know, if you’re a slide player and you want to play blues, then you get a lot of your basic blues shapes and patterns from listening to, and trying to emulate and copy, good blues harmonica players. They work within a tight range of notes.  So, I’ve always been attracted to them and my ear pricks up to play like that.

And it’s the same with sax players. There are some really good players like King Curtis, black R&B sax player, who played on a lot of the old Arista Records. Like Respect and a lot of the old Motown stuff. And then there’s Junior Walker and the Allstars. If you’re a slide player, they’re great players to just try and copy because they come at it from a different point of view than your Ry Cooders and your Duane Allmans and people like that. You’re really into a different thing and it’s really interesting to learn from them. And there’s a guy called Darrell Mansfield that I really like, a Californian harmonica player. We toured together in Europe quite a bit. I liked him and of course Paul Jones is a great harmonica player.

The main influence I think when I first started playing electric guitar was when I got Soul Dressing by Booker T and the MGs.  And I just thought Steve Cropper was the bee’s knees! I thought he was incredible and I learned every solo of his on that album. I just wanted that sound you know. I didn’t really know what he was playing, but in the 60s I thought I’d like to be a psychedelic version of Steve Cropper! But then you see you had Eric Clapton and then you got Hendrix, and I love George Harrison. Willie Nelson, I love. I love his guitar playing, I love Lonnie Mack’s playing. I do like guitar players and I like the ones that are brave.

Gary So looking back over your career, Bryn, you have been described as a pioneer of Jesus music and you were part of the explosion of Christian music in the 70s and 80s. And your Christian faith has continued to be a major emphasis in your work over the years. How do you do you see your music: as Christian music, or do you see it as having a wider appeal?

Bryn Well, you know, I’ve never really gone for a label because first of all I’m a musician. I see myself as a musician who has discovered that there is a God and that he loves me. And I found that great news. And it’s that because I’ve found this for myself, I found a new way of living and a new way of loving and being loved. And Jesus has made all this possible. So yes, I want to communicate this – by the way that I live, and also my work and in writing and communicating. I mean, the thing is, that everybody wants to communicate. And everybody is communicating something. And when you find life like this you just get energized by it and you get captivated by it, and you want to let other people know that He’s real and that His love for them is tangible.

And some of the music and the songs I play like this resonate with a wider audience and that’s just fantastic. But not all my songs are about Jesus, about my faith – I write generally about the whole of life. So, I wouldn’t consider myself just as a Christian musician doing one thing, because I do like to try to write about, and play about, many other things. And hopefully in the future I’ll be get better at it in expressing where people are at, and identifying with them on that basis.

Gary So would you tell us about how you came to faith and why has it continued to be important to you.

Bryn For me it was quite dramatic. There’s a great verse in Isaiah 65 verse one where God says, “I reveal myself to those who did not ask for me and I was found by those who did not seek me” – and this was really me, because I was not interested in, not looking for God. I didn’t know anybody who knew anything about God. It just wasn’t on my radar. I was in a really good band in California and I was making good money and we had a good life. Smoking dope, you know, no crisis, no interest in anything!

And then one night I go to bed and have this really long dream, a very powerful dream where a lot of my old painful memories surfaced. And a lot of hurt and fear and anger came, and all I knew is when I woke up was that I had to come back to England and get right with my dad. I didn’t like him, he didn’t like me and we didn’t talk. I hadn’t thought about him for years. Anyway, that week I got a ticket and went home and ended up living in North Wales. It was the early seventies and if you were kind of a hippie, that’s where you went – North Wales. You got a cottage and chilled. So I came out of that life in California and I had a time out. I had time to look at my life and asking questions like, why do I drink so much, why do I do so many drugs, why am I so angry and fearful, and why am I so driven and insecure?  I would never have thought about myself or looked at my own life when I was in California, but when you’re on your own, you’ve got time to think – about your direction and what’s happening to you.

And that’s when I started asking questions about who am I, what am I doing here, and is there a God?  I’d never thought about that before and I just started going out for long walks and asking, “God are you there? If you are, then you got to let me know.” That’s how the whole thing started. It wasn’t something that I had been seeking or searching.

So I was kind of woken up by that dream, and I started to examine my life. And then about three years later, we went out for a drive one day. And in the corner of this field was a circus tent. Now for the first time I had started painting, and during that week I had painted a circus tent with red and white stripes. So, in the corner of this field that week was this circus tent, so I said “Hey let’s go to see the circus.” We drove in and it was a gospel meeting. I’d never been to anything like that in my life, and so we stood at the back so we had a quick escape if we didn’t like it. But I was kind of riveted by the whole thing. I didn’t understand what the preacher was talking about – the language he was using was alien to me, but there was this banner over the front of the stage with some of Jesus’s words on it: “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” And I thought, “Well, I’ve lived my way for 26 years and it ain’t working.” All my questions hadn’t been answered, but I was thinking, if God is ever going to be real to me I’m going to have to take a step of faith tonight and so, that’s what I did.

I just said, “Jesus if you’re are the way to life I choose to believe you.” And I went forward and I was prayed for. I came out of that tent and I felt like I was home, that I belonged and that God was real. And that was really the beginning of the whole journey of finding out who God really is, rather than how I imagined him. And so that’s how it all happened.

Gary That’s a remarkable story.

Bryn It really it is. There have been lots of other kinds of interventions along the way, things you can’t really explain but you just get the sense that God is drawing us to him through the circumstances of our lives, that through the pain and the difficulties, the damage and the suffering that we struggle with every day, that he’s drawing us to himself and he wants us to call out to him. And that’s all I did. I just called out to him. And that’s how it all started.

And I just found that he wants this friendship. He wants a relationship; he wants to restore and heal and make us new. And I didn’t know anything about that until I made that step of faith in that tent.

Gary Well that’s fantastic. And Bryn, when you’re talking there about people being broken and hard times and so on, that’s something that you have come face to face with in the work that you’ve done over the years in prisons. Would you like to tell us a little bit about that?

Bryn Along with my wife I’ve been involved in prison work for 30 years now. And again, it wasn’t something that I sought to do.  I would say that I was called to do it – I was just reading through the gospels and God really spoke to me, and I was eventually given an opportunity to go into prison and I took it. I was kind of cornered, because for about three years I’d be going, Oh I’d love to do that, to go into prison, but I thought, well what would I do? I’m just a musician and I don’t know anybody in prison, and how do you get into prison and so I talked myself out of it. And then suddenly someone said to me, can you do this? So we went in to Wandsworth Prison and the chaplain there – out of all the prisons, he was the only chaplain who said, “Yeah you can come in” – David Cairns was his name – and he let us see what happened in prisons. They have Chaplain’s Hour meetings and then as we were coming out again, he turned round to me and said, “Right, you do it next week!” So that’s how it started.

I was in a church called the Vineyard at that time, a Californian church – the first church plant they did was in Putney where we were in South London. I was on staff at that time. And so I took in a few members of that team and we did an hour long meeting and we’ve been going on like that, and it’s been wonderful. My wife and I love going into prisons. We’ve seen some wonderful things happen. God’s done some wonderful things – we’ve seen people’s lives turned around, changed from the inside out. We’ve seen dramatic physical healings, we’ve seen people emotionally healed. It’s a prisoner’s right to have an hour a week of a religious service. And so, we go in on that basis in the morning, say, and do an hour’s service. I’ll do some worship songs, some of my own songs, I do a short talk from part of the Bible and some prayers, and pray for them at the end. Or in some prisons we do a concert. I’ll go in and do an afternoon concert for the whole prison. And that’s really good.

But generally, when I go in. I always feel out of my depth – even now. I always think this could have been me, because I’ve done things in my life, but the only difference is I just didn’t get caught. It could have been me!

But it is a very creative environment for songwriting as well, because you’ll be standing there in front of these guys and you go, “I need a song that says this,” and I haven’t got one. And so, you go away and write something. And it’s also very creative because different styles of music are really helpful – if you can play reggae, rock, pop, blues, country. Because you’re reaching all different tastes in music. And so it stretches you to see if you can write something that will appeal to them and draw them. But I know from my own experience that people can be transformed and learn to live differently and be a blessing to the earth.

Gary Well that’s fantastic. And is that something that you’re still doing Bryn?

Bryn Yes. I would say the majority of the year I do it. I still do concert work as well. But we do it because we love doing it. Funny enough, we just feel quite at home in prison! It’s not everybody’s cup of tea.  But for us, we love it.

Gary Now, you released a song earlier this year called Enough is Enough. Can you tell us about that?

Bryn Well where we live, developers want to cut this 200, 300 year old wood behind the houses where we live. They want to come into the wood and knock all these trees down and build eleven new city style houses. It’s pretty brutal what it will do to the street and to the neighbourhood. So my wife and I found ourselves default leaders of a campaign to stop it, because people can be quite apathetic and they don’t know how to fight. But you got to fight these things, you can’t let people roll over you. And you know this kind of thing is happening all over the country, the indiscriminate felling of trees to build roads and houses and railway lines and stuff like that. But we’re losing so much, so many of the mature trees in this country and we’re the least forested place in Europe. And the trees are our lungs. We need them. And so, I got up one morning and I was just so upset about this whole thing I sat down and wrote this song. Enough is Enough came in about 20 or 30 minutes. I just got the whole thing. And I thought, Fantastic, we can use this as part of our campaign. So I recorded it really quickly. And then I had a friend who works for the BBC and does National Geographic magazine, he said “Oh I love this song, can I will make a make a video of it?” He did it for free and we got a really good video out of it. So, it all came together very quickly and so we’re trying to get that used and played on the radio and on TV. But that’s the story behind it. It’s a protest song!

Gary So is getting involved in that sort of thing, Bryn, integral to your Christian faith?

Bryn Well, you obviously don’t have to be a Christian to feel upset about your planet going down. But, as a Christian, as a believer, I look in Genesis 2 and our original job description when we were put here was to look after this place. To let it grow, let it develop – we were put here as caretakers, or gardeners. So I think that we still have that remit, just to be looking after what God has made and make sure that the next generation when we’re dead and gone has got something to look at, you know.

I like Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi. “They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum and charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em.”

Gary Yeah, that just about sums it up, doesn’t it?

Bryn Yeah it does. But you know, we have been given responsibility for the care of this planet and particularly your own locality. And you can do it. You can actually do something about this. We were put here to look after it the planet look after and help it to flourish.

Gary Very good. Well let me ask you this, Bryn. Recently I’ve spoken to a few musicians who are in and around the 70 years of age mark. Chris Smither and Rory Block were a couple of them. They’re both going strong, performing, recording. Chris Smither seemed to be definitely thinking about the aging process. But when I talked to Rory Block, she said she felt like she was just getting started! She was fantastic, really refreshing actually. What about you? Do you still feel inspired to keep going? What’s the motivation at this stage of your life?

Bryn The big one – you’ve only got so much time left. You better get on with it. [laughs]. I guess that’s the one you think about. But I can still stand up to play! The one good thing about playing blues is you can sit down to play and still look cool! When your legs don’t work anymore you can do a B.B. King! So, you’ve got a long career if you can play blues!  But yeah, I think it’s the wear and tear. I think if you travel like we’ve done – that’s the hard thing now, the actual travel to gigs and being tired because the roads are so much worse. It seems to take a longer time to get here. There’s also the physical side – your finger joints – I’m 70 – and they suffer from wear and tear. Repetitive strain, basically on your fingers and the joints. There’s one finger that doesn’t work properly anymore, it doesn’t close so you’ve got to figure out different ways of playing chords. But then you see Django Reinhardt with two fingers, so you think, well it must be possible! There are physical things that happen to a lot of guitar players’ hands from just playing so much, especially if you’re an acoustic guitar player.

But I think for me it’s that everybody wants to communicate. You still want to communicate when you have something that’s this good, and you want to communicate life to people and blessing. You want them to know that they’re loved and they’re not alone, that they belong and that they’re connected. You have incredible amounts of energy to keep going out and doing that and seeing these things. And it’s interesting, as you get older, you’re more relaxed, there’s nothing to prove. You just have to keep working hard at what you do and trying to make it sound good, and just keep your standards up.

Gary So from what you were saying earlier, you’re still you’re still performing and you’ve got a performance schedule for the rest of the year.

Bryn I haven’t really gone after gigs really for a long time. I’ve more tended to let them come in and so I don’t do that many. Because the prison work is quite absorbing and interesting. But I still like doing concerts because of the variety of music as compared to a prison. And it’s great if you can get a whole evening – having a first half and a second half to play to people. It’s quite a luxury now to be able to do that. And it’s a good test of whether your chops are still up to it and you can still play and communicate.

Gary So have you plans for a new album at some stage do you think?

Bryn Well I got a title which is good! So, I’m trying to gather ideas around that. I think that’s about as much as I got really. I’m a writer, and you have put your hat on as a writer – roadwork takes a lot of time, so I need to take time off to do it.

Gary Well, we’ll look out for that. Bryn. We’d look forward to doing a review at Down at the Crossroads when that project is completed. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. It’s been great.

Texas musical pioneers: The Legacy of Blind Willie Johnson

Blind Willie Johnson: “The ferocity he brought to the guitar was unheard of previously.”

Michael Corcoran is an award-winning Austin, Texas-based journalist who has been a serious music critic since he was a teenager. He’s plied his trade in Hawaii and California, and since 1984 has written for the Austin Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Austin American Statesman, Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone. He’s won numerous awards, and has been nominated for two Grammys in the album notes and historical album categories for Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams (Dust-to-Digital). Music has been a life-long passion – he told me, “I was 8 when the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964. A little too young to start a band the next day, but the perfect age to start listening. Some of my younger friends had Kiss, I had the Beatles. Then I got completely into the Monkees, who were less a band than a vehicle for great songs from Carole King, Neil Diamond, Harry Nilsson, Boyce & Hart and so on.”

Corcoran has written a number of books, including, notably his 2017 All Over the Map, (University of North Texas Press), which has been described as a “musical waltz across Texas and is an illustrated collection of profiles of Texas music pioneers, most underrated or overlooked. “It started,” he says, “as a newspaper article for the Chicago Tribune in advance of South by Southwest. The assignment was to describe what makes Texas music special. I’m not from Texas. I came here from Hawaii in 1984, so I had a lot of catching up to do. But sometimes an outsider gets a clearer picture than the folks who’ve been entrenched. Texas has a lot of swagger. It’s where the cowboy movies – popular with blacks as well as whites – were set and so the music tapped into that Old West pioneer spirit.”

Why, I asked him, is Texas so formative for American music? Is it the geography, the people, the history, just what is it?

“Texas was the first state to have large populations of both African-Americans and Hispanics. They worked side by side in the fields, along with whites. Guitars came up from Mexico. It was a musical melting pot. Also, the Czech and German immigrants, who started coming in the 1850s, built these huge dancehalls like back home. Musicians had to play loud to get the people dancing, so Texans were the first to play electric guitars in blues (T-Bone Walker), jazz (Charlie Christian) and country (Bob Dunn of the Musical Brownies). More than anything else, the dancing culture influenced the music.”

Corcoran suggested a while ago, provocatively, that Texas, not Mississippi, is the true home of the blues. What, I asked him is the case for that? He told me that this observation was based on the birth of boogie-woogie in the lumber camps of East Texas after the Civil War. “Blind Lemon Jefferson was the first star of guitar blues, recording three years before Charlie Patton and the other Mississippi Delta guys. A lot of things happened in Texas before anywhere else. But re-thinking this “home of the blues” claim, I’d have to say that the blues were born wherever black people were slaves – which was all over the south. The blues, like gospel, grew out of the Negro spirituals that the slaves would sing in the fields to lift their spirits.”

He has also suggested that maybe 90% of the music that came after the 1920s can be traced back to three Texas artists – Blind Willie Johnson, Arizona Dranes, and Washington Phillips. In support of this, Corcoran told me, “Blind Willie was the first true guitar hero, like the first basketball player who could dunk. Jimmy Page is a direct descendent. Eric Clapton, Duane Allman. Blind Lemon, a lively guitarist and singer, was playing house party dance music, when Johnson was making his guitar the star. Dranes brought a rhythmic, secular pound to gospel music. That’s the original R&B, which became rock n’ roll. Then, Washington Phillips can be credited with introducing introspection to song-writing on gospel songs that were often more about the realities of life. Gospel music was not known for honesty until Denomination Blues or The Church Needs Good Deacons.

Corcoran is currently researching and writing a book coming out in Spring 2020, entitled Ghost Notes, which is basically a sequel to All Over the Map, but with more context. “I’ve woven my research on Johnson, Dranes and Phillips to better reflect what it was like being poor and black in Texas in the 1920s. The church was not just a spiritual sanctuary. I have a section on blues piano, featuring Amos Milburn and Charles Brown, plus Milton Brown and the birth of Western Swing, Roky Erickson, Sippie Wallace. That’s the beauty of Texas music – so many styles and genres, but with the same underlying purpose of coming up with some new stuff that’s going to blow people away.”

Blind Willie Johnson

Blind Willie Johnson is one of the artists about which Corcoran has written extensively. Johnson recorded for Columbia Records from 1927 until 1930, thirty tracks in total, with ten each recorded in Dallas, New Orleans and Atlanta. Johnson’s recordings were very successful, outselling even Bessie Smith, and his guitar playing was the inspiration for a many of the Delta blues artists, including Robert Johnson, whose songs and playing style became foundational for later electric blues and rock’n’roll. So Blind Willie casts a long shadow.

Johnson, however, restricted his singing to gospel songs, unlike, say, Blind Willie McTell, who sang the blues along with sacred songs. “His raspy evangelical bark and dramatic guitar,” says Corcoran, “were designed to draw in milling, mulling masses on street corners, not to charm casual roots rock fans decades later.”

Corcoran contributed extensive liner notes for the 2016 Alligator Records Blind Willie Johnson tribute album (God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson), and he has more to offer in his forthcoming book. But it’s fair to say that he feels that there have been more than a few misunderstandings and false stories about Willie Johnson’s life.

“Just finding his death certificate cleared up a lot of misinformation, like that he died in 1945, not ’49. Through the years I’ve found that the most unreliable information comes through interviews. The person being interviewed tends to puff up their own importance and that’s what happened when Sam Charters found Blind Willie’s widow Angeline in the 1950s. Almost all the misinformation, including how he died, came from her. She even claimed to be the female voice on her husband’s records, but we later found out it was another wife, Willie B. Harris.”

Corcoran questions, for example, Angeline’s story of Johnson’s death. She said that her husband died from pneumonia in 1949 after sleeping on wet newspapers after a fire had burned down their home. “We didn’t get wet, but just the dampness, you know, and then he’s singing and his veins opened and everything, and it just made him sick.” She says she took him to the hospital but “They wouldn’t accept him. He’d have been living today if they’d accepted him. ’Cause he’s blind. Blind folks has a hard time – he can’t get in the hospital.”

Corcoran quotes blues scholar Mack McCormick, whom he regarded as “probably the greatest music researcher of our time,” as concluding that such a scenario was “highly unlikely.” McCormick worked in a Houston emergency room in the Jim Crow era and has suggested that Johnson wouldn’t have been turned away. In addition, Michael Corcoran makes the point that it would have been almost unthinkable for Johnson and his wife not to have been taken in by the congregation of their church after the disaster of the fire.

I wonder, however, if Angeline’s story of her husband being turned away from a hospital in 1945 is really not to be trusted. A 2014 paper by Kerri L. Hunkele of the University of New Hampshire (Segregation in United States Healthcare: From Reconstruction to Deluxe Jim Crow) highlights the fact that across the South, Jim Crow medical laws hindered access to medical care for blacks. White nurses were not to treat African American males and hospital facilities were segregated, including entrances and waiting rooms. Even by the end of the ‘40s, the ratio of African American physicians to the Black population remained at one to over 3,600, resulting in real problems for African American males, who could be refused by White doctors or would not be able to see certain doctors because of the all-White nursing staffs. In Mississippi, a law also meant that medical treatment would be available to African Americans only after the White patients were all treated.

With all this in mind, Hunkele says that “scholarship on hospital segregation emphasizes the severe health consequences suffered by individuals who could not gain admittance to White-only facilities or overcrowded Jim Crow wards in biracial hospitals…All of these problems arose because of the Jim Crow Laws, which hindered blacks’ abilities to access proper medical treatment.” (On this, further see Karen Kruse, Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935-1954, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). All this, it seems to me, lends veracity to Angeline’s account of Blind Willie Johnson’s death.

But there’s a lot about Johnson’s life that we don’t know. What we do know, says Michael Corcoran, is “that for a brief period of time, Johnson was a recording star, one of the most popular gospel “race” artists of his era.” And that his influence has been enormous, his songs covered down through the years by Rev Gary Davis and Fred McDowell, but also by more recent rock bands like the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen and the White Stripes. Eric Clapton called his slide work on It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine “probably the finest slide guitar playing you’ll ever hear,” and Jack White of The White Stripes thinks Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground is “the greatest example of slide guitar ever recorded.”

And then, of course, there is the small matter of being launched into space. Johnson has the distinction of having one of his songs feature on a special recording sent aboard the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 to head beyond the outer solar system into deep space – the Voyager Golden Record also contains music by Beethovan, Mozart and Stravinsky.

Willie Johnson’s songs were gospel songs – he sang out of his Christian faith. And yet these songs continued to be covered and are still being sung and performed and appreciated by believers and non-believers alike. I asked Corcoran why this is.

“The ferocity he brought to the guitar was unheard of previously. Plus, his most popular songs – Motherless Children, If I Had My Way, Nobody’s Fault But Mine aren’t overtly religious. Lyrics keep a lot of fans away from gospel, but Blind Willie’s music sounds secular as hell.”

To be fair, however, Johnson’s songs are overtly gospel – you only have to listen to Jesus is Coming Soon, Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning, Sweeter as the Days Roll By or Latter Rain, to appreciate the depth of religious passion that drove Willie Johnson. Johnson was a Pentecostal – I wondered if that had a particular effect on his music making and singing. “It is interesting,” says Corcoran, “that his natural voice was so good. Every other gravel-voiced singer, like Tom Waits, takes that approach because their regular voice sucks. But since Johnson did almost all his singing on street corners for tips, he needed a gimmick to draw the milling crowds towards him. His mentor Blind Madkin Butler taught him that. Blind Willie recorded more songs without the false bass.” If you listen to Johnson’s songs, you’ll hear that he actually has a fine singing voice as opposed to the gravelly rasping you get on some of his songs – e.g. Let Your Light Shine On Me.

Johnson’s Pentecostalism comes out specifically in his Latter Rain, which is often misquoted, largely because most people don’t understand the origin of the term “latter rain.” This refers to the ancient prophet of Israel, Joel, who talked about God sending the early and the latter rain on the crops (Joel 2:23, 28). Joel 2 was quoted by Peter on the day of Pentecost in the New Testament, as foretelling the outpouring of the Spirit, and Pentecostals – whose movement had started in 1901 – went on to interpret the “early rain” as the initial outpouring of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost in the 1st century and the “latter rain” as referring to their own movement of Spirit blessing.

I asked Michael if he had a couple of favourite Willie Johnson songs, and to name a favourite cover of a Willie Johnson song.

“I think God Moves On the Water is an incredible achievement for one man and a guitar. Mack McCormick said that Madkin Butler wrote it and taught it to Willie. I love the sentiment that arrogance sunk the Titanic, that God should get all the glory. Of course, another favorite is Dark Was the Night, though it’s been used in so many soundtracks it’s become old to me.” Then in terms of a favourite cover: “I don’t think anyone’s done a Blind Willie song better, but Cowboy Junkies came closest with Jesus Is Coming Soon from the God Don’t Never Change tribute album Alligator put out a couple years ago. I like Tom Waits’ version of Soul of a Man a lot, too. I wrote the liner notes, but it was more as an excuse to hit the road for more research. There’s not much out there to be found, so every little new bit of info is precious.”

For my own part, yes, Dark was the Night is an incredible performance by Johnson and the slide playing quite awesome. But Nobody’s Fault But Mine (“and that’s one of the few songs he recorded that he almost certainly wrote,” says Corcoran) is a song I always find remarkable, given Johnson’s circumstances of being blind, black and poor in the early decades of the last century in the American South. Life was unremittingly hard, so the sense of personal responsibility, despite all the adverse circumstances, is quite remarkable. But then, Willie Johnson is a quite remarkable man and musician, whose influence, as Michael Corcoran has emphasized for us, has been immense and still continues to this day.

[Check out our piece on the Blind Willie Johnson tribute album]

Thanks to Michael Corcoran for taking to time to discuss with me Texas music and Blind Willie Johnson.

Aretha Franklin: The Miracle of Amazing Grace

“It’s an act of cinematic resurrection if ever there was one. You might even call it a miracle.” (Washington post)

I watched the movie Amazing Grace last night, which shows the creation of the 29-year-old Aretha Franklin’s gospel album, Amazing Grace, recorded over two nights in 1972 in front of a live congregation and accompanied by the Southern California Community Choir in the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles. The album was hugely successful, winning the 1973 Grammy Award for Best Soul Gospel Performance, selling over 2m copies in the US alone and effectively re-inserting black gospel into the American mainstream.

The film was never released because of difficulties syncing the audio with the video. The film was relegated to the vault at Warner Bros. and despite producer Elliott successfully syncing it and paring it down to 87 minutes in length, Franklin resisted it being released. It was only after her death in 2018, that her family agreed to release the film.

Quite simply the movie is extraordinary – riveting, inspirational and deeply emotional. I felt like I was right there, transported back nearly five decades, mesmerized by the power of the gospel music, the musical talent of James Cleveland, the musical director and pianist, and the young choir director, Alexander Hamilton and the fabulous choir – and, of course, by the wonder of Aretha Franklin’s singing. Jon Landau at the time described her singing as “a virtuoso display of imagination.”

But it wasn’t just her voice – it was the evident feeling she had for the music and the lyrics. Her father, invited to say a few words, related an incident when he took some clothes into the laundry, when someone he met commented on how glad she was to hear his daughter was going back to the church to sing. By this stage, the 29 year-old Aretha had had a string of hits, won multiple Grammys, and was a household name. “Truth is,” he said, “she never left the church.” So much was clear by the passion with which she sang Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend, now amended to refer to Jesus, which then ran seamlessly into Precious Lord, Take My Hand. Introduced by Rev. James Cleveland, intoning, “And Jesus said, call my name, I’ll be there,” Aretha begins to sing slowly, with a sparse organ and piano accompaniment, encouraging the congregation to “close your eyes…and meditate on him.” As the piano chords segue into Precious Lord, and the choir launches in, it really is the most spine-tingling experience. I admit to the tears slipping down my cheeks at this point.

And then there is the scene toward the end of the movie, where, after a stirring performance of Never Grow Old with Aretha accompanying herself on piano, and a short follow up sermonette by Cleveland, Aretha asks for the microphone and, in a startling moment, launches into an unaccompanied I’m Glad I Got Religion, singing a verse, before proceeding to urge the choir into action and then, in an electrifying turn, sings directly toward the choir, with her back to the congregation. It looked entirely unrehearsed, as if Franklin was truly feeling at home, back in the church, and feeling the Spirit move her.

Atlantic engineer, Gene Paul, who worked on Amazing Grace, said he saw producer Jerry Wexler “looking at her like she was really in her place.”

Franklin herself didn’t seem to think she’d moved away from the church. A year after she’d begun singing in nightclubs in 1961, she had written in a black newspaper, “I don’t think that in any manner I did the Lord a disservice when I made up my mind…to switch over.” She went on to say, “After all, the blues is a music born out of the slavery day sufferings of my people. Every song in the blues vein has a story to tell…I think that because true democracy hasn’t overtaken us here that we as a people find the original blues songs still have meaning for us.”

One song, a particular favourite of mine on the album, which didn’t make it into the movie, is Robert Fryson’s Give Yourself to Jesus. The song was the first single after the release of the album. It closes the first side of the original LP and wasn’t one of the traditional gospel songs Franklin grew up with – it’s got a more modern gospel feel to it, more akin to an Andre Crouch song. It’s an incredibly moving piece, with Franklin reciting the words of the 23^rd Psalm in the middle of the song, as the choir “oohs” in harmony behind her. As you listen to this, it’s impossible to think of Franklin without faith in the words.

The interplay between Franklin and the choir throughout Amazing Grace is a thing of wonder. James Cleveland was the musical director and for some considerable time had been the preeminent name in the production of gospel music. He was a hugely talented musician, a wonderful pianist, soulful singer who could rock churches wherever he went. and had produced a prodigious number of successful gospel albums. Cleveland’s piano playing, much in evidence in the concert, is truly virtuosic, tugging at people’s emotions and undergirding and interplaying with Franklin’s vocals. For Amazing Grace, he worked with the youthful Alexander Hamilton, one of his circle of talented musicians, who prepared the choir with intensive drills. Hamilton had written musical scores at the age of six, studied classical music and accompanied Mahalia Jackson. Along with a group of outstanding backing musicians, the foundations were laid for the precision and musicality needed to underpin Aretha Franklin’s singing.

Throughout the performance, Aretha Franklin said little – the speaking parts come from Rev. Cleveland and her father. Was it her well-documented shyness, or simply a sense that it was enough to speak through her luminous singing? Franklin at this stage was one of the most popular and influential singers in the world, but was content to collaborate with the choir and the other members of Cleveland’s working band. To be sure, at the end of the movie, when all the words have fallen to the ground, Aretha’s glorious, inspirational singing resonates on.

Franklin’s Amazing Grace album has been frequently overlooked in her back catalogue, despite it being the biggest selling disc in her career. In Mary J. Blige’s tribute in the Rolling Stone issue in 2008 that named Franklin as the greatest singer of the rock era, the album wasn’t mentioned. And only one song from it was included in the 4-disc compilation released in 1992, Queen of Soul: The Atlantic Recordings. This movie surely redresses the balance. Amazing Grace actually was a very important album that “touched on social and political changes far outside” the doors of the church in which it was recorded” (Aaron Cohen). A friend of Franklin’s, poet Nikki Giovanni, suggested that the title track, (some 11 minutes long) tied together Franklin’s personal history, the state of black America at the time and an image of composer John Newton’s change from being a slaver and human trafficker. “Aretha is just so key to everything: she too is saying, “We have to change…It’s time to change. We can no longer do what we did. And she’s going to be the person to reach generations. She’s going back to my mother, my grandmother, and she’s going to go forward.”

Amazing Grace showed a black icon at home in that traditional black home – the church. In a recent New Yorker article, Emily Lordi points out that Franklin’s concert in New Temple Missionary Baptist Church ought to be seen in the context of the 1965 riots/rebellion in Watts and other black cities across America, and the numerous black deaths of previous years, of which Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination was the most visible, and that “black people continued to ask whether America could be a home. The black church continued to serve the function it has long served: as an alternative site in which to create one.”

The music – and now the film which draws renewed attention to it – had wide resonance in the black community and beyond, bringing Gospel music into the mainstream, a recognised part of America’s musical heritage, part of the foundation that would eventually give rise to rock ‘n roll. But in watching this movie, there’s more to it than that. Gospel music is both music and lyrics. The chord changes, the musical dynamics, the soaring voices all make it what it is – but so too do the inspirational and faith-filled lyrics. The very word gospel literally means “good news” and that is the essence of gospel songs. “I once was lost, but now am found” – that belonging that Aretha found in the church; “what a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear;” “Precious Lord take my hand…I am tired, I am weak, I am lone.” These all speak profoundly of the human condition – but more than that, to the fact that we need not be alone, because of the presence of God, and the possibility of redemption. In that lies the enduring power of gospel, of Amazing Grace.

A Song for Good Friday: Lead Belly, Nirvana, The Welcome Wagon

Huddie Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly,” survived a life that included desperate poverty and long stretches in prison to become a renowned blues and folk singer. Discovered by the Lomaxes in the early 1930s in the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana where he was serving time for stabbing a white man in a fight, Lead Belly was released to become the “King of the Twelve-String Guitar,” – the most enduring image of Lead Belly is wielding his large Stella twelve-string.

His last recording session was around one year before his death, when he set down as much of his repertoire as he could, from field hollers, blues, and country & western songs to children’s tunes, ballads, autobiographical pieces, and popular hits of the day. There are some spiritual songs in there too, including the poignant He Never Said a Mumbling Word.

The song refers to the Good Friday story of the crucifixion, drawing attention to the Gospel’s account of Christ’s silence before his accusers when on trial – “They led Him to Pilate’s bar,
Not a word, not a word, not a word… He never said a mumblin’ word.” There’s a sense of destiny in all of this, that Jesus willingly gave himself up to his executioners, because he knew it served a great purpose.

In Lead Belly’s rendition of the song, it clips along, almost jauntily, sung unaccompanied and driven by rhythmic clapping. It scarcely seems to do justice to the subject matter, until half way through the song when Lead Belly sings, “He’s coming back again, He’s coming back again for me.”

The song was recorded again in 1989 by Nirvana, in a version that in some ways is not too dissimilar from Lead Belly’s, but driven now by electric guitar. Somehow, though, the rough, rather discordant guitar strumming and the vocals seems to fit the brutality of Christ’s crucifixion. Interestingly, however, the “He’s coming back again,” is missing from Nirvana’s version.

Maybe the best version of the song comes from the Welcome Wagon in 2014. The slow tempo, the banjo, the strings, the slide guitar and the gently sung lyrics carry the sombreness of the story from “Pilate’s bar” to the cries of “crucify” from the mob to the “nailing to a tree.” No second coming in this version either, the artists clearly wanting to focus the attention on the crucifixion.

In St. John’s version of Christ’s trial before Pilate, Jesus is not entirely silent, albeit his answers were, to Pilate’s ears, rather enigmatic. Eventually, though, Pilate asks, maybe cynically, “What is truth?” and receives no answers. “The answer to Pilate’s question, this answer he so desperately seeks in his confusion and emptiness, is standing right in front of him. The one who was the way, the truth, and the life. Christ did not give an answer, because he himself was the answer.” (In All Things).

 

Skip James, Larkin Poe, Charles Dickens and…Christmas

What have Skip James and Charles Dickens to do with Christmas?

Skip James was a totally original, Delta blues artist who recorded in the early 1930s. He was an accomplished guitarist and pianist, and his music, often in a dark, minor key, was eerie and mysterious, made all the more so by his singular, high-pitched, keening singing style. One of his Paramount 1931 recordings was Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, which reflected the plight of black communities during the Great Depression.

The problems of the Great Depression affected virtually every group of Americans, but it greatly worsened the already bleak economic situation of African Americans. By 1932, approximately half of black Americans were out of work, suffering from an unemployment rate two to three times that of whites. In early public assistance programs African Americans often received substantially less aid than whites, and some charitable organizations even excluded blacks from their soup kitchens. Racial violence again became more common, especially in the South. Lynchings, which had declined to eight in 1932, surged to 28 in 1933.

James’s song Hard Time Killing Floor Blues is a pretty bleak response to the situation he and his community found themselves in, in Mississippi during this period.

Hard time’s is here
An ev’rywhere you go
Times are harder
Than th’ever been befo’

You know that people
They are driftin’ from do’ to do’
But they can’t find no heaven
I don’t care where they go

People, if I ever can get up
Off a-this old hard killin’ flo’
Lord, I’ll never get down
This low no mo’

The song has been covered by a great many artists over the years, including Chris Thomas King, Buddy Guy, Colin Linden, Rory Block, amongst others. A recent one is, to my mind, one of the best – the Lovell sisters, known as Larkin Poe have given us an outstanding version on their album, Venom and Faith.

But what has all the doom and gloom of Skip James’s response to the Great Depression have to do with Christmas? Well, I started thinking about it as I re-read this year Charles Dickens’ Christmas novel, The Chimes. Much better known, of course, is his A Christmas Carol – a fabulous morality tale which is celebrated every Christmas through film, plays and TV shows. Miserly old Scrooge is shown the error of his ways one Christmas Eve and shows generosity and compassion to his beleaguered employee’s family, the Cratchits. (Incidentally, can any version be better than The Muppets Christmas Carol, from 1993?)

While A Christmas Carol points to the benefits of one man’s generosity to another family (and nothing wrong with that), as Tim-Laing Smith pointed out in a recent newspaper article, “nothing much changes in the wider world.”

In The Chimes, another man – this time a poor delivery porter – is granted a vision of the future, which shows his loved ones each falling into destitution and despair, crushed by injustice and a system of inequity. At the time, some thought Dickens was inciting a class war, so potent was the message of the book.

Anyway, it’s quite clear that the inequity of Dickens’ times and of Skip James’s time have not gone away. The U.S. Census Bureau in 2018 said that 39.7m people were living in poverty – over 12% of the population. 20% of the UK population is in poverty.

In 2015, the top 1% of families in the United States made more than 25 times what families in the bottom 99% percent did, according to a paper from the Economic Policy Institute.

This trend is a reversal of what was seen during and after the Great Depression, where the gap between rich and poor narrowed. “Rising inequality affects virtually every part of the country, not just large urban areas or financial centers,” said the report. The gap between the rich and everyone else, has been growing markedly, by every statistical measure, for some 30 years. The UK, likewise, has a very high level of income inequality compared to other developed countries.

Which brings us back to Christmas. Beyond the children’s nativity plays, the Christmas trees, the extraordinary excess of indulgence, and the broad details of the Christmas story is a passage from Luke’s gospel which perhaps is not so well known. Mary, pregnant with Jesus, goes to visit her relative Elizabeth, and the two women rejoice over what they see God doing through their pregnancies. Mary says,

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Here’s where the Christmas story meets Charles Dickens and Skip James. The powerful are to be brought down, the lowly uplifted, the hungry fed and the rich sent empty away. The coming of the Christmas baby is meant to challenge and defeat the inequality the world experiences. Because into the world is unleashed a new power of hope and love in the person of Jesus, where Jesus-followers are to exemplify this new era of equity and justice and to work tirelessly to see the world change. As Tom Wright puts it: Jesus followers are to “pick up the threads of his own public career and live as kingdom-people under his direction, bringing his saving rule to bear in acts of love and mercy, in working for justice and truth…what will make the cacophony of human folly fall silent quicker than anything else is the strong, steady sound of those who love Jesus and celebrate his birthday singing his praises as Saviour, Messiah and Lord, and letting that praise inform and transform our public as well as our private lives. That is what Christmas is all about.”

Hard time’s is here
An ev’rywhere you go
Times are harder
Than th’ever been befo’

That’s the truth for a great many people in the world that we dare not ignore is this season of excess. But Christmas tells us it need not be the last word.

16 Gospel Blues Songs You Must Hear

Gospel blues has a long history reaching back to the likes of Blind Willie Johnson and Rev Robert Wilkins right through to recent work by Kelly Joe Phelps and Ry Cooder. It’s not surprising, given the close relationship between the spirituals and the blues. It’s a genre rich in musicality, spirituality and inspiration. Here are 16 gospel blues songs that are really worth listening to.

Blind Willie McTell: I’ve Got to Cross the River of Jordan

Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell, sang Bob Dylan. True, but McTell also left us a fine collection of gospel blues songs, including River of Jordan, which focuses our attention on the inevitable journey we all must take across Jordan – on our own, facing the consequences of our lives. There’s some fine slide playing on the song and McTell’s vocal performance is strong and compelling. The song is essentially another version of Nobody’s Fault but Mine.

Check out Mark Millers 2010 album, The Gospel Songs of Blind Willie McTell.

Blind Willie Johnson: Dark Was the Night

Arguably Willie Johnson’s masterpiece, it is making its way across the universe as part of the musical offering on the Voyager space craft. Recorded in 1927, it features Johnson’s inspired slide playing which creates an incredible other-worldly, eerie effect and his agonized moaning. You really cannot hear the words of this old spiritual which focuses on Christ’s trial in the Garden of Gethsemane, but Johnson’s vocals and slide work more than evoke this terrible hour. Click here for our more detailed look at this song.

Rev. Robert Wilkins: Prodigal Son

Wilkins’ compelling retelling of the gospel story of the prodigal son was recorded in 1935, six years after he had recorded the same song with secular lyrics. Now, having turned his back on the blues and an ordained minister, he re-recorded the song, and eventually performed it at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. For more on the song, go to here.

Skip James: My God is Real

The music of Skip James, the most enigmatic of all the Delta blues figures, was ominous, bleak and mysterious, made primarily for his own emotional release. James was an exceptional guitarist, with a trademark E-minor tuning and an eerie falsetto vocal delivery. After making some seminal blues recordings, in 1931 he moved to Dallas, where he served as a minister and led a gospel group. His My God is Real, speaks of a deep, very personal experience of faith.

Josh White: My Soul is Gonna Live with God

White was a prolific blues artist and civil rights activist in the first half of the twentieth century. He took a clear anti-segregationist and international human rights political stance and recorded a number of political protest songs. He also recorded gospel songs under the moniker, The Singing Christian. His 1935 My Soul is Gonna Live with God puts his guitar playing chops and his fine singing on display and focuses on the Christian hope for after death.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Rock Me

Rosetta Tharpe was a major star during the 1940s and 50s and was an inspiration to the early generation of rock’n’roll artists. She grew up immersed in the church and her faith was a constant inspiration to her music throughout her life. Rock Me, one of her most loved songs, was written by Tommy Dorsey and first recorded by her in 1938. An instant hit, the song contains various Biblical and hymn references. Isaiah 41 comes to mind: “For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, “Fear not, I am the one who helps you.” The song was also another of Blind Willie McTell’s gospel recordings, under its original title, Hide Me in Thy Bosom, in 1949.

Find our tribute to Rosetta Tharpe here.

And check out this fine recent version by Brooks Williams, accompanied by Hans Theessink:

Mississippi Fred McDowell: You Got to Move

Fred McDowell’s song was brought to prominence by the Rolling Stones on their Sticky Fingers album. It’s essentially a song about the Christian hope of resurrection – “when the Lord get ready, you got to move!”

For a great recent version, check out Paul Thorn’s take on his Don’t Let the Devil Ride album. Check out our conversation with Paul, including his comments on the song here

Sister Fleeta Mitchell & Rev. Willie Mae Eberhard: Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down

Most people are more familiar with Robert Plant’s version of this old spiritual, but Fleeta Mitchell and Willie Mae Eberhard’s stripped down version which appears on Art Rosenbaum’s 2007 album of traditional field recordings is well worth checking out. The song is based on Jesus’s words in Luke’s gospel when he said, “I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning.” For Christians, the power of evil personified by the “Adversary” is under judgement because of the coming of Christ and ultimately we are not to despair, because good will triumph under the Lordship of Jesus.

Mississippi John Hurt: Here Am I, Oh Lord, Send Me (Don’t You Hear My Saviour Calling?)

John Hurt is renown for his blues and his rhythmic, alternating bass guitar style, with fast syncopated melodies. Reputed to be a gentle soul, his music is quite transcendent, whether blues or gospel. Here Am I, Oh Lord Send Me is a fine example of his technique and is based on Jesus’s words in John’s gospel about the fields being ready for harvest. The song has a devotional feel about it, with the singer offering himself for God’s service.

Rev. Gary Davis: I Am the Light of this World

Born blind, black and in the American South, Davis had little going for him, and yet he became a master of the guitar, ending up in New York City where he was recognized for the musical genius he was. Davis stayed faithful to his calling as a minister of the gospel until he died and only in the last decade of his life was he persuaded to sing blues songs publicly. His ragtime, blues and gospel performances are all outstanding. I Am the Light of this World recalls the words of Jesus in St. John’s gospel.

Check out Ian Zack’s riveting biography of Gary Davis – reviewed here.

Larry Norman: Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?

Blues-based rock, rather than strictly blues, but this song from Only Visiting this Planet in 1972 puts to rights the misconception that the blues is the devil’s music. Norman, the father of Christian rock, takes up the line from Salvation Army founder William Booth almost a century earlier and then proclaims loudly, “there’s nothing wrong with playing blues licks.”

Read our review of the excellent Larry Norman biography by Gregory Alan Thornbury.

And in a similar vein, check out Lurrie Bell’s The Devil Ain’t Got No Music, from his 2012 album with the same title.

Eric Bibb: I Want Jesus to Walk With Me

Often played by Eric Bibb in his concerts, he captures completely the dual nature of this old spiritual – on the one hand mournful about the trials and tribulations of life, and yet hopeful about the reality of the presence of Jesus in the midst of those trials. As Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

Click here for our recent interview with Eric.

Walter Trout: Brother’s Keeper

From the 2012 album, Blues for the Modern Daze, Walter Trout’s dazzling technique, intensity and emotion seizes you, along with the hard-hitting lyrics. The song recalls the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 and calls for more neighbourliness in our relations. Trout reminds us that “Jesus said to feed the hungry, Jesus said to help the poor,” and finishes he song with a searing criticism of modern “so-called Christians” who “don’t believe in that no more.” For more on the song go to here.

And click here for our interview with Walter where he talks about the song.

Ry Cooder: Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right

Ry Cooder has produced one of the best gospel albums ever in Prodigal Son, reviving and updating a number of old gospel songs as well as a couple of his own. We could have picked almost any song from the album for inclusion, but his excellent version of Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger right is surely a song for our times, with xenophobia at an all time high. Strangers, sojourners and immigrants were all to be treated with care and welcome according to the Hebrew bible – “And if a stranger dwell with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him. The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God,” (Leviticus 19:33-34). And reflected in the words of Jesus in Matthew 25 – “I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me … When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? … Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.”

Find our take on Ry Cooder’s album here

Kelly Joe Phelps: Goodbye to Sorrow

Phelps’s 2012 album, Brother Sinner and the Whale, is arguably the best gospel roots album ever. Phelps’s guitar work and slide playing, as always, is immaculate, and the songs are a remarkable testament to Phelps’s rediscovered faith. They brim with creativity, inspiration and spirituality. His reworking of the old hymn, Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah is masterful, but we’ve chosen his own Goodbye to Sorrow here, which is simply a wonderful song and packed with theology:

“My God came to earth a humble man
As part of a divine and master plan
When they crucified our Saviour He set the captives free
That death would lose dominion over you and over me

I have said goodbye to sorrow as I lay before the cross.”

Click here for Down at the Crossroads’ comments on this album here.

Blind Boys of Alabama: Nobody’s Fault But Mine

Singing together since 1944, the Blind Boys have been singing blues tinged gospel for an awfully long time and you’d be hard pressed to pick the best of. For a good list, check out Paste’s take here. We’ve gone with this sparse arrangement of another Blind Willie Johnson song, Nobody’s Fault but Mine, which is full of the personal regret and heartache. The plaintive harmonica, the slide guitar and the tight harmonies combine to make this an outstanding version of the song.

Check out our tribute to the Blind Boys of Alabama here and our comment on Nobody’s Fault but Mine here.

If you’re interested to find out more about the relationship between the blues and faith, get yourself a copy of The Gospel According to the Blues, by Gary W Burnett.