DMZ’s Anthony “Amp” Daniels – hope in troubled times

Dedicated Men of Zion – or let’s use the more cool abbreviation, DMZ – is band with a powerful combination of soul and gospel that will make your day brighter, your smile broader and get your feet dancing. It’s infectious, inspirational stuff, packed full of tight harmonies and funky rhythms. The music is traditional in many ways, with a clear heritage in 1960s and 70s soul and gospel, but it’s got a very contemporary feel. It’s music for today. It’s what Music Maker Relief Foundation co-founder Tim Duffy calls “sacred soul.”

And that’s what Bruce Watson of Fat Possum Records recognized three years or so ago, when he signed DMZ to his new Bible and Tire label. [check out our interview with Bruce Watson here.] The band recorded its first album Can’t Turn Me Around, in Watson’s Delta-Sonic Sound studio backed by his all-star band, in Memphis in 2019 and have followed that up now by The Devil Don’t Like It. Like the first album, it’s bursting with positivity, gospel truth, beautiful harmonies and sweet lead vocals.

DMZ emerged in 2014 in eastern North Carolina, a region renowned for its musicality and gospel harmonies. The music made in rural Black churches for many decades has, in fact, been the foundation for so much of the commercial music we’re familiar with. DMZ taps into the deep roots of gospel which its members have experienced in the church, as well as classic sounds of soul and R&B.

Anthony “Amp” Daniels is the eldest of the group, and he’s had a successful a career in R&B down in Atlanta, backing up the likes of Bebe Winans and Toni Braxton, and producing records.

The other vocalists in the band, all fine singers, Antwan Daniels, Dexter Weaver, and Marcus Sugg, are all related by blood or marriage.

I got talking to Anthony about DMZ, the new album and making music. Our conversation sparkled with joy. I asked him first of all, about his musical background. He told me,

“My family was very musical and from a small child, that’s what we did. As a small boy, it’s just music and singing. My mother, she taught me to sing. It’s always been a very serious thing in my home, singing. My mother was more serious about singing than my education! Later she started being more serious about my education, but singing was just so important to her. It came from her father and then from her to my brother and sister and me. So it’s just something we always did.”

I assumed that the singing was really fostered in church but Anthony said that, although he sang in church, it was really his home environment that was his training ground and where his love of singing was nurtured.

“It was a home thing and it was something that we had to do every day. My mother would come in and we would have to sing. In fact, we had to talk in harmony as children!  That’s how it was.

“But we started out in the choir, church choirs, and just traveling to other churches and singing. And even when I visited with my grandmother, she would have my brother and my sister and me sing for her all the time. It’s just singing, singing, singing. I love to sing though. So, it wasn’t a problem. I loved it. And I love to sing now.”

Anthony is a talented guy, not only a terrific singer, but an experienced keyboards player, having played in church and then for years with his mother’s group, the Glorifying Vines Sisters, a longstanding Farmville gospel institution. He’s also had a career as a record producer, producing recordings for the Glorifying Vines and also for R&B and pop music artists. His nickname is “Amp,” which I assumed had some association with amplifiers, but Anthony told me he wasn’t entirely sure how he got it.

“As a child I grew up with that. I guess it’s an abbreviated kind of thing. Sometimes it might be hard for children to say “Anthony” and they’ll say “Amp” instead of a “Ant.” It’s a Southern thing. People give you a nickname!”

How, I wondered, did DMZ get started?

“Well, back in 2014, I was working with a relative of mine on his project and it fell through. His guys started leaving his band so I began to recruit some guys that I knew, but the band fell apart. But the guys didn’t wanna quit, so the group became the Dedicated Men of Zion.”

DMZ consists of four singers – Anthony’s son Antoine, his sons-in-law Marcus and Antwan, and Dexter Weaver, his nephew in-law – and four musicians. They perform far and wide in the United States, but Anthony wants to get the band to Europe.

“I performed in Switzerland with my parents and I’m just ready to get back. I’m ready to get back in the UK. I love that. I just want these guys I’m with now to get an opportunity to just experience that. They’ll love it.”

I asked him how the relationship with Bible and Tire, Bruce Watson’s label, came about.

“We actually met Bruce through Tim Duffy of the Music Makers Foundation [check out our interview with Tim Duffy here]. Tim put us together and it was like a great marriage, man. It was fantastic. I love working with Bruce. We just have a great relationship. I mean we’re talking about a third album already.”

Both albums are brimming with musicality, groove and inspiration. They are obviously gospel, but the description “sacred soul” seems to nail it.

“I think so, because sacred soul music is music for the soul, you know. It’s gospel music and sacred soul is like a division of that. It’s very similar to gospel, but I guess it’s just focusing a little bit differently musically. But I love the name sacred soul. I think it describes it really well.”

When people think of gospel music, they often think about a certain musical sound, certain piano chords and a certain feeling from the music. But I wondered, does it need to be more than that? How important for Anthony is the lyrical content?

“It’s very important. Music is good but the message is important. A good song to me has a message. You can have instrumentals, like, for example, a jazz instrumental and all this kind of stuff, and people still call it a song. But to me, a song should have a good lyrical content, a good story, a good message. And it helps if it’s therapeutic. Sometimes you hear music and it’ll take you somewhere, take you back to another time and place in life. You could be in 2022 and you could hear a song and it’ll take you back to 1985 or something, you know? And it’s just a really good feeling.”

Anthony went on to sum up the message in DMZ’s music: “I guess I would say that the message is positive. We want to give a good positive message, we just want to sing something that will lift your spirit and be encouraging.

“We want it to be encouraging, uplifting, inspirational. Just therapeutic. You know, just help to bring people through – sometimes we need that. You can have a bad back and you have to go to the chiropractor, but where do you go when you’re feeling down? When you need to be uplifted, when you just want to get away and free your mind from some other things. We have a lot of things that we go through – people have bills and they’re dealing with sickness and death, but sometimes a good old song will lift you up, make you feel better. Inspire you. So those are the kind of things we want to get across with this music. And make people smile just for a minute anyway.”

I wanted to know about the faith component of the music. You can have a nice song that has a nice feel about it that might make you feel good. But DMZ songs are more than that, there’s a faith component to the songs.

“Well, yeah, there’s definitely a faith component, we’re dealing with faith and belief. But it gives hope and it’s still encouraging and it still can be uplifting [to anyone]. It’s a feel good. When we were in Switzerland playing, some people didn’t speak English, but they were still saying it felt good. One woman told us, my daughter doesn’t speak English, but she wanted to tell you that she really enjoyed it. So sometimes you don’t have to understand it and it still feels good.”

I asked Anthony about the new album, The Devil Don’t Like, which is very, very good, the levels of production, song arrangements and musicality all very high. It was the band’s second experience of working with Bruce Watson of whom Anthony has said has “a way of pushing an artist to get the best out of them without the artist ever knowing that they are being pushed…the guy is just extraordinary as a person as well as a producer. Trust me when I tell you an outstanding band and a great producer can really bring the best out of an artist and a song. Bruce’s vision of preserving the originality of sacred soul music is educational, unique and inspiring.”

On song selection, Anthony said, “Bruce sent us songs and asked us to select ten. So we listened to them and selected songs that really felt good to us, ones we could really hear ourselves doing.”

Most of the songs, I didn’t recognize, but there’s a great version of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Up Above My Head. I can imagine a congregation or an audience singing along with it and also God’s Got His Eyes On You. I was intrigued by the title track, The Devil Don’t Like It, which funny enough, isn’t very much about the devil. Most of it is about God “putting his hand on me.” You just get that little phrase at the end.

“Yeah. And that’s the ironic part about that song. It’s a very small portion of that song. But I guess it’s a catchy phrase. But when I first heard that song, I said, I’m doing it!”

The harmonies on the album are stunningly good, but so too are the lead vocals – beautiful, modern-sounding singing. I’m Going Home is a great example, where the lead vocalist is to the fore and the harmonizing kicks in here and there to support. Who, I asked, takes the lead vocals?

“Well, mostly we share the lead parts. Everybody in the group can sing lead and everybody has their own style of singing. We’re all different and everybody sings it their way. I love it that variety, you know – it’s one group with multiple talents, so you don’t get so tired of just hearing that same thing over and over. You need to have a variety, you know?”

I was intrigued by A Change Is Gonna Come. We’re all familiar with the famous version by Sam Cooke from 1964, which came right in the middle of the civil rights movement and was clearly about events of the time. So I wondered what DMZ’s song is all about.

“When we heard that song – my son sings that song – and what we got from it, and what we feel with the conditions in the world…to me, it’s about hope, you know? No matter what we’re going through, especially with all the bad stuff – change is coming. And I know Sam Cooke’s version was totally different but it’s still the same message. When we look at the conditions, the bad in the world, the message is don’t worry, don’t give up. Change is coming. It’ll get better.”

As a non-American, someone who doesn’t live in America, I wondered if there was any particular reference to today’s America. Is there any particular change that needs to come?

“I would love to see change in America. Of course there are some things I would like to see changed. No matter how many times people tell you things are equal, things are not equal. If we had more equality, treating everybody the same, instead of, you know, separation, I think that would really solve a lot of the issues that we have.

“Everybody being treated equal, regardless of race, colour or whatever. We should just treat people like people, everybody just as humans. We know that there’s some bad everywhere. It doesn’t matter about ethnicity, black, white color, whatever. You have bad everywhere. But everybody’s not that way. So I would just love to see every person being treated the same. Regardless. You know what I’m saying? That’s one thing I would love to see change.”

Does America need to make a more progress with that?

“Yes, I think so. I really believe in that. I just wish that it would happen. I wish that there was some way that it could. Even with a job application, just as simple as that – why do we have to put our race on a job application? It doesn’t matter – if a person can do a job, then a person can do a job. But there’s just so much division, you know?”

Again, as a non-American, I was intrigued to ask Anthony about the divisions in church life in the United States, where there are black churches and white churches. Would it be better if it wasn’t that way?

“I think it’s historical. It’s just the freedom of religion. But if we’re both in the same belief, in the same faith, why can’t we worship together? Instead of you gotta be over there in that black church and I’m here in a white church. We’re worshiping in the same faith, but we can’t do it together. So much division, so much separation and it would be so much better together.”

Anthony told me that he saw a little bit of movement towards people worshipping together, towards integration, but he sensed that people can be afraid and so division continues.

Bruce Watson

We finished off our conversation talking about the music. Anthony was enthusiastic about the band that Bruce Watson had put together for the album – really, the backing band sounds superb.  

“We had studio musicians working with us and they were fantastic and their attitudes were awesome. Just awesome musicians. And just the greatest guys to be around, that whole band and I love them. Bruce Watson put those guys together. That’s his studio band. We went into the studio and no one wanted to leave.

“You know, studio work is hard work. They want more than you can give sometimes, but you gotta give some more. But those guys made it so relaxed for us. And Bruce had a way of just pushing you without you even realizing you’re being pushed. It’s cool. He’ll nudge you, all smiles, and he’s just trying to get the best out of you. I love it.”

Like most musicians, the pandemic put paid to DMZ performances, but things are picking up for the guys now, with up to twelve dates a month. And Anthony’s raring to go.

Like the music DMZ makes, Anthony Daniels exudes sunny positivity. If you get the chance to go see these guys, don’t hesitate, and in the meantime, go pick up a copy of their two albums. The devil may not like them – but you will, for sure.

The Remarkable Blues Art of Kreg Yingst

Kreg Yingst is an artist, originally from Chicago, but now living in the warmer climes of Pensacola in Florida. He specializes in unusual and rather fabulous portraits of musicians, mostly from the blues, but also from jazz, rock and country. On the wall facing my desk, I have a wonderful wood-based print of Rev. Robert Wilkins, complete with some lyrics from his famous Prodigal Son song.

In his catalogue, blues fans will find work representing Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Buddy Guy, Willie Dixon…the list goes on. They are all superb and every blues fan ought to have one of Kreg’s pieces on display.

With art degrees from the Trinity University,Texas, and Eastern Illinois University, Kreg was originally a painter, but has come to specialize in printing carved wooden blocks. He describes himself as a narrative artist, where the story of the person he is dealing with becomes represented in the finished art-piece. Along the way, Kreg ruminates at length on the story, and then produces a sketch which gets transferred to a block of wood or linoleum, which he then will carve, before ink-printing.

As well as his music range of art, Kreg also has a body of work which focuses on sacred themes, ranging from illustrations of the Psalms to Celtic saints to the Passion of Christ. During the pandemic, when he could not exhibit as usual in the art festivals and fairs where he normally sells his work, he was surprised to find that, when his online sales spiked, it was the sacred art that was being sought.

His hand-coloured woodcuts of the parables illustrate Kreg’s concern that faith be grounded in real life. So, in Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan, an African-American man rescues a Ku Klux Klansman, while in his Lazarus and the Rich Man, a beggar grabs for the cigarette butts tossed by a limo rider.

In similar vein, Kreg has published a book called Glory among the Ruins: The Homeless Project, a portfolio of 15-linocut portraits of homeless men, a portion of the proceeds of which go toward feeding programs in the Florida panhandle. He says, “I joined a group of like-minded men and women from various churches to provide food, clothing, and spiritual nourishment for the homeless of our city. Over time, as I heard their stories, I began to know them individually, and not just as a people group. They had names and faces, hopes and dreams, and a past that would play into the situation they currently found themselves in.”

Kreg is soon to publish a new book entitled Black Light. I’m honoured to have been asked to write a forward, and I’ve seen an early copy of it. I can tell you that it is a stunning piece of work. It’s 28 portraits of black gospel blues artists, with a Kreg Yingst image of the each one along with a short introduction/reflection on each. The book celebrates Black History Month, which occurs in February in the US and Canada, hence the 28 portraits.

I got the opportunity to talk to Kreg and ask him about his work and the new book.

First off, I had to ask him about his name – there aren’t a lot of Kregs or Yingsts in my part of the world, nor, I’m guessing in North America. Kreg told me it came from his German ancestors who came to America in the 1700s and got a bit changed along the way from Juenst to Yingst. That settled, we talked about Kreg’s approach to his art.

“Well, I’ve been working with printmaking probably since the mid-1990s. I was always somewhat interested in narrative or storytelling arts and so I connected initially with the magic realists. I just loved their work from the 1940s, 50s, in America – people like George Tooker and Paul Cadmus. I liked the quirkiness about it. It felt inquisitive, there was something very magical to the work.

“In terms of the narrative aspect of my work, I’d go to libraries and fiddle through different books and try to find artists. And I came across two artists who were working with wood cuts at the time, Lynd Ward, an American, and Frans Masereel from Belgium. They had done what were called wood cut novels. You could read these visually no matter where you lived in the world. And I found that really fascinating. The graphics really appealed to me. And so I started moving into doing wood cuts and lino cuts and relief prints.

“Now the musicians, the subject matter – I think part of that was I had struggled with creating people in my art, so I started doing figurative art just because it was more of a challenge. I used to do more cityscapes and I was very good at it, but I felt it was somewhat of a dead end. So I started doing people, which I wasn’t very good at. To be honest, I still struggle with it!

“At some point I might like to get back to my painting, but at this time I enjoy the printmaking for a number of reasons. It’s more affordable art – that appeals to me. I’ve always liked, say, the Mexican socialist artists for making art so accessible for people. I don’t like painting that is only for the ultra-rich or museums. I like this aspect of art in our daily life.”

And what, I asked him, about the music aspect of his art?

“I remember the first piece I did was a Robert Johnson piece and it was just because the story appealed to me, the myth, the legend. So I did it and I thought it worked well. It was on aged paper, it had particles of the bark or the plant still in it, and to me, it seemed like a tobacco paper and it just represented Johnson’s time. I did it very scratchy with my cutting and I liked the outcome. I then started digging into the blues guys – not that I knew many of these people. So, my art became more of a journey into people I didn’t know, areas I don’t know. And something from it evolved into a work of art on my part.”

Kreg has a wonderful gallery of art covering blues artists, but he also has covered jazz, rock and country artists as well.

“The rock came a little bit later and doing that allowed me to bring in colour. And again, I was trying to represent the time period. On a technical level, it was more difficult because now you’re using multiple blocks, you’re using multiple colors. I also dabbled a little bit with jazz but with jazz, I started doing backgrounds with multiple blocks that I would piece together in different ways and I’d use different colors. And then I would bring the face as the last block on top. So, in a sense, I was able to improvise. I was trying to do visually what I was hearing audibly. So, you got the scratchy blues, you got the high key powered colors of rock and you got the improvisation of jazz.”

All of Kreg’s art has a spiritual element to it, sometimes explicitly, often just in the way that he creates, as an artist. But as well as the extensive music-related catalogue, he has a range of specifically sacred art.

“There’s a spiritual line that runs throughout the entire body of my work and I’m looking for that same element, I guess, that John Coltrane would’ve talked about with the audio.

 “I’m looking for that with the visual, but that’s, I guess, part of my faith and my faith journey that has been embedded in my work. I did a whole series on the parables quite a while back. At the time I was looking at the German expressionists and they were very loose, and I tried to translate the parables to a modern-day context.

“And then eventually I went to do the Psalms in the same manner, but the Psalms were not narrative, so that proved difficult. And to be honest, I thought I was gonna knock out this project in about a year. But it transitioned into more of my own spiritual journey, where I was reading the desert fathers and a lot of monastic literature.

“And I started to incorporate these visual blocks into my own prayer life. Where I would read through a Psalm and I would take something with me, maybe just a sentence. That’s the sort of thing the desert fathers would do, they’d sit around, they’d listen to the speaker, they would take this line and then they would kind of ruminate on it throughout the day. That’s what I would do. And then I’d find the visual within that. And that whole project took me eight years. So, it became kind of my daily practice, taking the Psalm, embedding it, saying it, speaking it, and then doing it visually.

“And then I did another thing too, after the school shooting at Sandy hook, which kind of devastated me. I had young children at the time and I couldn’t understand how these people could live with that. It happened in December, and I decided the following year that I was going to find a prayer and I was going carve one piece per week until that whole year had gone. My output then became an opportunity to change this darkness into light for me. In my work, you start with a black block, basically, and every mark you make, you’re making white into the block. You’re literally carving light out of darkness. If this evil’s gonna happen, I wanted to have something good come out of it.

“And I like the idea that these prayers that are carved, they continue on in life, in somebody else’s reading. And then I started using these books I’d produced of my work as fundraisers so the profits would go to an orphanage. To support the children that don’t have parents, that did survive somewhere in the world. So, I didn’t want the darkness to win out in this. Like some light’s gonna come out of this.”

As Kreg talked about his approach to his art, it made me think of iconography, the icons that have been done in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, where the painting of those is a spiritual exercise in and of itself.

“The icons are very interesting. I’ve recently finished a series on Mary, in conjunction with a book that’s coming out by an American author who now lives in Ireland, Christine Valters Paintner. Whereas with the Psalms, I was taking a word, this project, with the Mary series, I was taking an image – I would take the image through the day and see then how that was going to be interpreted through my concept of what was going on.

“But I have a couple of icons of my own and it’s a calming thing. I like the idea of it – it isn’t really a cognitive thing. We take in art, we take in music, we take in smells, our senses, directly. And so it is with our experience of God or our communication with God. By doing art this way, you’re making a deliberate act and saying, use this time, and this time is going to be with God. And this is going to be prayer.”

As I look through Kreg’s catalogue of art, it seems to me to have a potentially wide appeal. What sort of people, I asked Kreg, buy his art?

“A real mix. It’s kind of fun to be in the booth selling because you have this interaction with the people that are actually buying. It may be people covered with tattoos that love it for the black and white graphics. Or maybe a little grandmother buying one of the icons – so you get a real mix. And sometimes people will unload on me. I’ve had people come in and buy a piece, say like my Clapton’s Tears in Heaven. And the person’s about to walk out the booth but they turn around and say, this means so much to me, my son just died last week. You get that kind thing.

“Sometimes it has a lot of meaning to them. I’ve seen people laugh. I’ve seen people cry. I’ve heard miracle stories.”

My ears pricked up at that – let’s hear about the miracle stories, Kreg!

“I was doing a show in Texas and one person was buying a piece based on Here Comes the Sun, you know, the George Harrison song. And she goes, ‘Oh, I gotta tell you about this. This piece means so much to me.’ She said her son had been diagnosed with a rare disease and she was supposed to meet with the specialist after the weekend. She’d gone home and was really distraught and she’s praying, just pleading with God. It looked like her son had been given a death sentence basically.

“Monday, she gets in her car ready to leave. And she goes, ‘God, if this is gonna work out well, let Here Comes the Sun come on the radio’! So, she turned on the radio and after a moment of dead air time, the first notes of George’s guitar come in. So, she got to the hospital specialist, and he says, ‘I don’t understand this, we’ve taken the test again, and it’s has come back negative.’ And the doctor said, ‘Do you believe in God?’ And she’s like, ‘I do now!’

“Another lady on that same weekend came in and she’s got two of my Psalm prints in her hands and doesn’t know which one to take. So, I said, get the one which speaks to you more. She asked me if I believed in God and I said yes, I do. She told me, ‘You know, I used to. But my brother got sick and I prayed and prayed but he died.’ I replied, ‘Listen, I don’t have the answers, I don’t know why this happens, but I do know God loves him. And he loves you and he’s always there.

“On my iPad, I had all the psalms and I was going back through them and I was trying to find what prompted the image from the Psalm. I had something highlighted and it said something like, ‘I’ve never left you,’ that kind of thing. And I said to her, ‘I don’t know what this means, but I think maybe this is for you.’ And I turned the iPad round and she read the two highlighted lines, ‘I’ve always been there, I’m not gonna leave you’ whatever the Psalm had said. And she goes, ‘I think that’s for me.’ So, I found it very fascinating that, that weekend there were two diverse but related things. One was a miraculous healing, the other not, and yet both in their own individual way, there was a miraculous encounter with God.”

I was very interested to hear about Kreg’s new forthcoming book, Black Light, the one that celebrates Black History Month with the portraits of the gospel blues artists. What’s the story behind it?

“It kind of developed on the spur of the moment and it was my wife that suggested I do this project. I’d done a lot of black musicians and gospel blues is my real interest. So, I thought, I could do something to take us through black history month. So, I started going back through all the people that I’ve done and, sure enough, I had more than enough images. I like the concept of ‘black light.’ I’m living over here in the thick of it. It’s been some crazy times, these last couple of years over here.

“So, I want to get out the history and what this group of people came through and what their faith did and supported them to get through this. And is still having to get through. And I’ve seen how, even as artists or whatever, people misunderstand black and white. I do graphics of black and white, and we’ve always associated black with evil and white with goodness. I want people to know this is incorrect. So that’s why I call it black light. It’s light, but it’s coming from blackness.

“I like the gospel blues. It’s deals with hard times. It deals with reality. It’s the good and the bad, it’s, you know, on the one hand, why is this happening to me, but on the other, praise God for that. I like how it kind of merges these two things. I mean, your book touches on all of that. [here Kreg refers to my The Gospel According to the Blues.]

“So, you get the highs and you get the lows, whereas sometimes, gospel music is just one extreme and full out blues might go to the other. But the gospel blues deals with both of these issues. And that always intrigues me. Most of the people in the book are gospel blues artists who are fairly obscure to most people, but I’ve also included some people like Marvin Gay and Aretha Franklin who are more well known.”

Take it from me – the book is quite wonderful, and you’re going to want to get yourself a copy. It’ll be printed quite lavishly on heavier, coated paper and will be around 8” by 6”. It’ll be a book you’ll be proud to have in your home, and Kreg tells me it will be available from Juneteenth this year – that is June 19^th – and you can order it from his website. Proceeds from the book will go to orphanages that Kreg knows.

While you’re waiting for Juneteenth to come around, head over to Kreg’s site and browse through his catalogue of wonderful and remarkable art. But don’t just browse – find a piece that speaks to you and buy a copy.

Check out Kreg’s gallery at http://www.kregyingst.com/

Slide guitarist Bryn Haworth has still time for one more dance on Ready or Not

Bryn Haworth, slide guitarist par excellence – no, just great guitarist, full stop – has had a stellar recording career with his own albums and as a session musician for the likes of Chris de Burgh, Joan Armatrading, Cliff Richard and Gerry Rafferty. As well as jamming in the 60s with Jimi Hendrix, he has toured extensively with bands like Traffic, Bad Company, Gallagher & Lyle and Fairport Convention.

His career started in the late sixties with “Les Fleur de Lys” a Motown/soul band which became house band for Atlantic Records in England. After moving to California, he became a founder member of Wolfgang, a band put together and managed by the legendary Bill Graham, and appeared on bills with Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane, Taj Mahal and others.

In 1973 he returned to England and was signed to Island Records where he made his first LP, Let The Days Go By and followed this up by Sunny Side Of The Street. These are both excellent albums which I bought on vinyl at the time and, on listening to again recently, have stood the test of time. You know how when you put on a record you listened to as a youngster, you know every line and what song follows what? – that’s me with these two albums.

I talked to Bryn a wee while ago and he told me his moving and powerful story about finding faith around this time and then a little of his work over subsequent years, taking his music into prisons around the country. [you can find this here]

He’s got a terrific new album just released, called Ready or Not and I got chatting to him about it. First of all, I asked him about the prison work which is so dear to his heart and which he’s been involved in for a long time, but which had been interrupted by the pandemic. He told me he’d continued sending talks and music videos for prisons to play on their community radio stations, but that recently he’d begun to go back in both women’s and men’s prisons in Surrey and London for their Sunday services, where prisoners are entitled by right to an hour of religious service.

“It’s coming back, but you can’t do big gatherings. I basically take the Anglican service for the hour, but you get people just coming along because they want to get out of their cells and don’t have any particular beliefs, but they’re just wanting to see something, a visitor, see something different, hear some music. And that’s been really creative, in that it starts them off thinking about God and about their lives.

“We have a Post Office box and prisoners can write to us through that. So we’re in communication with various prisoners, and then sometimes, when they get out, if we feel it’s appropriate, we can see them. We’ve seen some really good turnarounds in people’s lives. It’s not big numbers, but people can genuinely turn around in a major way in prison. What we do is a drop in the ocean, but I think it’s like what Jesus said about the woman who gave her offering to him, “she did what she could.” So we just do what we can. We feel particularly called to this work. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but we’ve always felt called to it.”

The new album, Ready or Not is a really fine collection of eleven songs, a couple of rerecorded older songs, some new songs, a great cover of Let’s Stick Together and two nice guitar instrumentals. Bryn is not only an excellent guitarist, he’s a talented songwriter and singer, and this album showcases all of this. And it’s also got a group of very talented musicians contributing. He told me about the making of the album.

“I got the title track Ready or Not and I thought, right, that’s a good title for the album. But just as I was supposed to record it in 2020, Martha Rafferty, Gerry Rafferty’s daughter, asked me if I’d play on an album of Gerry’s she was putting together. [Gerry Rafferty passed away in 2011]. And that was more urgent. So I dropped my own plans and I did Gerry’s stuff. [Bryn contributed guitar work on five tracks on the album, Rest in Blue, which was released to critical acclaim in September 2021].

“So then, I started my own album in November a year ago. I did some live sessions with Paul Beavis [drums] and Dave Bronze [bass], just the three of us together, about four or five tracks. And then it all kicked off after that. I then had rebooked to do some live work in January, but COVID came in and the lockdown happened again.”

So Bryn had to improvise, travelling up and down the country to accommodate various musicians he wanted on the album. People like Henry Spinetti, who played drums in the Climax Blues Band, was previously a member of Eric Clapton’s touring band and played on Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, and Teri Bryant, another world class drummer who has done world tours with the likes of Faith Hill, Peter Gabriel and Matt Redman. And then he worked remotely with Chris Stainton, long-time keyboard player in Eric Clapton’s band.

Keyboardist Chris Stainton

So, this album is chock-a-block with top notch English rock musicians and the song arrangements sound like a proper band playing.

It gets off to a great start with the title track with some characteristic Bryn Haworth slide guitar as the song begins. I asked Bryn about this song.

“For me, the whole idea came about when I was playing hide and seek with my niece’s children. You let them go and hide, then you count 20, and then shout “coming, ready or not!” It’s just that whole thing, that you can be doing something, and then you can be suddenly found. And I think Jesus’s return is something we need to be reminded of in the church and the world as well, because to me, it begs the question, am I ready?

“When I first became a Christian, a guy said to me, ‘are you living in the light of his coming?’ And it always stuck with me. It does makes you think. I think generally the album is about that, about that theme – so it’s just that urgency.”

We talked a bit about another song Bryn had written and recorded many years ago, on a similar theme – The Grand Arrival, the title track of his 1978 album. And then I asked him about All I need is a Home, now re-recorded on Ready or Not, which had originally appeared on his 1974 Let the Days Go By album. It’s a beautiful song where you really appreciate Bryn’s singing voice. When I asked him why he decided to include it on this album, he immediately started thinking about his work with prisoners.

“So many people are released from prison and they don’t have anywhere to go. They just end up committing crimes and going back into prison. And there are various homeless charities that we’re involved in as well.

“I wrote that song nearly 50 years ago when I was 23. And that was my experience when I came down to London, then. I didn’t have a home. I slept on buses and bus stations. And then during the day I’d go and try to look for work in music shops, and try and get a gig somewhere, but then I’d go back and sleep on a bench.

“So I know what it’s like to not have a place to live and especially in London, it’s horrible. And I just felt that in the next couple of years, it’s going to be more of an issue in this country, homelessness and people not being able to afford rent, and we’re going to need to do something about it. There are some really good initiatives already going. So I thought recording this song might just help raise the profile of this problem.”

Bryn’s not the young guy he was when he made Let the Days Go By, but here he is still being creative, still making great music, as evidenced by Ready or Not. I wondered what he thinks about getting older and continuing to be creative?

“It’s like the song, Boom, Baby, Boom, that’s on the album. That’s really about this whole thing of getting older. Because when you get older, you feel sidelined, you feel useless, irrelevant, and invisible, and you’re not wanted, but at the same time, you have so much experience from your job, what you’ve been doing and your experience in life.

“And especially as a follower of Jesus, you’ve got so many things you’ve experienced, seeing Jesus working and seeing miracles. I’ve seen amazing stuff happen through prayer. I want to carry that on. Psalm 92 verse 14 says that the righteous will stay fresh and green and they’ll still bear fruit in old age. And that’s what I feel. I mean, as long as there’s something to sing about and something to play, then you keep going as long as your hands are able to play. Boom Baby Boom was about that.”

Boom Baby Boom, a great 1950s style rock’n’roll song with some terrific piano and guitar work, is one of my favourite songs on the album. As I get older myself, I appreciate the positivity here: “You’ve got one life with so much left to give…there’s still time for one more dance.”

When I spoke to Bryn a while ago, he mentioned having problems with his hand, his fingers, so I wondered how that was going.

“Well, you always find there’s a way of playing around it that you can figure out. Bruce Coburn, has problems with his fingers and he’s figured out a way to still keep playing. For me sometimes there’s a way of placing your fingers where you wouldn’t have done normally – you can do it and it still works. You adapt. And I think the thing with slide guitars, it makes it a little bit easier because you’re only playing with a slide, you’re not playing with the fingers so much.”

We Never Thought This Could Happen is a delicious country number. At first I thought it was a song about the pandemic. But as I listened, it seemed to be broader than that – it’s all about the sense of foundations shaking, loss of confidence, “cold hearts and empty eyes” – a hard look at the world as it is.

“I got the idea for the song in a dream ten years ago. In this dream, my grandparents were singing this song, we never thought this would happen, and I thought, that’s really good. And they said to me, don’t you know this song? And I said, no, and then suddenly realized I was dreaming it. And so I better get up and write it down.

“There are two or three songs here that came through dreams. But I think for me how it developed was just looking back in history and it struck me how quickly, how easy it is for the way of life people take for granted to just disappear overnight. And that’s what it’s about. It’s about the things that we take for granted.

“That song’s got many levels, but I think it’s important for people just to think about it. Because it’s not just about the pandemic – although, of course, we never thought this could happen. We never thought our way of life could be disrupted and that’s the weakness that we have.”

I asked Bryn about Enough is Enough, which he released as a single a wee while ago. This is a lovely slice of Americana which starts with Bryn singing over a strummed acoustic guitar and eventually gives way to some sumptuous slide guitar. The song is about our trees being destroyed, which Bryn has been quite vocal about.

“I just changed a couple of lines in this new version. I just think we’re losing so many of our mature trees unnecessarily through the building of houses and roads and railways. The government can say, well we’ll plant more trees, but you know, trees take 150 years to grow. The UK is the least forested place in Europe already, we’ve lost so many mature trees.

“William Blake says, the tree, which moves some to tears of joy, is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. I thought that was really good. To a builder, it just stands in the way. But to some people this is massive. This tree is going to outlive me. And then you start to think how much you need them just to live on this planet. They’re just being felled indiscriminately. So that’s why that song is there.”

There’s a great reworked version on the album of Let’s Work Together, which again has some tasty slide guitar. I only knew the Bryan Ferry version, but Bryn put me straight.

“Wilbur Harrison wrote that in 1969. He was a Black American, one-man-band kind of guy, with a bass drum and a guitar. I remember he supported Creedence Clearwater in the early seventies at the Albert Hall.”

Apparently, Harrison wrote the song as Let’s Stick Together and then changed it a few years later to Let’s Work Together. Bryan Ferry went back to the original title and then Bryn went with Let’s Work Together. All clear?

“I’ve gone to the Canned Heat version [a million seller in 1970) and the Harrison version. I just felt that community is the one good thing that I’ve seen come out of these last two years. Our street has gotten much, much better over these last two years – we have a WhatsApp group and we can look after each other, do people’s shopping for them. And I think in the coming years, we’re going to need that sense of community more and more. So that’s why I put this song on.”

The last couple of songs on the album are Holy Spirit of God, and Doxology, the first of which, within the bounds of a lovely tune, contains a remarkable amount of theology. I asked Bryn if he thought there was enough emphasis on the Spirit and what the Spirit does in the church.

“No, I don’t think there is. Christianity is more than having your sins forgiven, as amazing as that is, and then waiting to die to go to heaven. You don’t really hear much about the fact that we’re called to live a new life and God’s got things for us to do. You know, I love Ephesians two verse ten – it says we are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to join him in the work that he does and the good works he’s got ready for us to do. If that’s the case, then I need to be able to recognize his voice because he’s got stuff for me to do.

“And I think the person of the Holy Spirit is so vital to living this new life. I wrote that song just to remind myself that every day, you need to be asking, ‘Holy Spirit, teach me to hear your voice.’ When I wrote it, I just played it to myself. I’m saying it to myself because I just wanted to be reminded. But then I recorded it and I was pleased with the way that it came out.”

The album wraps up with Doxology, a beautiful, finger-picked acoustic guitar piece, which reminds you again what a fine guitarist Bryn is. But more than this, as you listen and begin to think of the words of the Doxology hymn behind the tune, it’s a fitting note of praise on which to complete the album.

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Jimmy Carter and his Blind Faith is a ray of hope

“I have always wanted to help people. I hope this project will energize people and change lives. Where there is light, there is hope; and where there is hope, there is a chance.” Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter is the last original member of The Blind Boys of Alabama and, remarkably, at 87 has released his first solo album, Blind Faith. He told me he wants this album to be “a ray of hope and encouragement.”

And that it certainly is. In nine songs which encompass gospel, blues, country and roots music and yet cohere wonderfully, Jimmy Carter’s positive outlook on life and faith shine through. The music is great, the lyrics and inspirational and it’s one of the albums I’ve enjoyed listening to most this year.

The album was produced by Ron Pullman – multi-talented guitarist, songwriter, music business manager, writer and wood craftsman – who wrote most of the songs on the album, and who says, “I spent a lot time trying to understand what Jimmy wanted; the feel and message, and the overall sound.”

Guests on Blind Faith include Charlie Musselwhite, Alan Parsons, The Mendelson Choir of Pittsburgh and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. They all provide a suitable backdrop to Jimmy Carter’s distinctive and still-strong voice, which is the highlight of the album.

Jimmy Carter has been a member of The Blind Boys of Alabama for forty years and has sung for three presidents, won five Grammy Awards, been inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, and collaborated with a who’s who of the music industry, including Willie Nelson, Marc Cohn, Ben Harper, Peter Gabriel, Mavis Staples, Robert Randolph…the list goes on.

Carter was there in 1939, one of the boys at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind, when the Blind Boys started out and began to play church engagements, but he was too young to join them on the road. He began singing with them in 1982 and has seen them become the world’s premier gospel group, legendary musicians and hugely respected far beyond the gospel genre.

I had the great pleasure of chatting to Jimmy Carter while ago (check it out), but was pleased to get the opportunity to speak to him again, specifically about this excellent album, along with Ron Pullman.

Jimmy was in fine form, having weathered the storm of the pandemic. “I’ve stayed well. I have all of my shots and I’m doing good.”

From the kick-off I knew this was going to be an enjoyable chat. Before long, Jimmy was joking that “it’s my first solo album and, I mean, I’m beginning to like it!” It helps, of course, that there’s been so much positive feedback for all sorts of quarters, especially ordinary listeners who are finding inspiration and encouragement in it.

Taking over the interview, Jimmy asked me, “what’s your favourite song?”

That’s a hard one, actually, given the quality to choose from. I mentioned Lord Take Me, a gently rocking Americana track, with some rootsy violin by Ryan Joseph and an oh-so-cool guitar solo. The song morphs beautifully into Swing Low Sweet Chariot with the added harmonies of the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh. Then again, there’s I Love to Pray, written by Joey Williams, band leader of the Blind Boys of Alabama, which Carter puts across in a very personal way. Jimmy declares, “my faith is strong” and “if it gets rough, I start to pray.”

Jimmy Carter is a man who believes that God answers prayer, and he told me that “prayer is very important to me. When I pray, I think of the verse that says, the fervent prayer of a righteous man does much [James 5 v16]. If someone is connected with God, you can call him and he’ll hear you. That’s what I’ve been doing. I know what prayer will do. I know what God will do, and I know what Jimmy Carter’s going to do. He is going to stay right there with him.”

Talking of favourite songs on the album I wondered if Jimmy had one? “Yeah, I have one. I Am With You Still.”

This is a quite beautiful song, a tribute to Jimmy Carter’s old friend and fellow original Blind Boy, Clarence Fountain, whom we lost in 2018. The song features a choir of young people from the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and the Blind, the school which Jimmy attended when he was a boy.

There’s a great video for the song which shows the young people singing. Said Ron Pullman, “They got to go down and record in a real studio. They got the experience of going to the Sound of Birmingham Studio and it was just amazing.”

Ron went on to tell me that he and Jimmy had gone recently to visit the school again and brought signed CDs for all the students who had performed on the record.

“And it was most touching when Mr. Carter addressed these kids about how you have to stay fast to your faith. And, you know, the things that happened early in his life didn’t dissuade him – ‘I didn’t deviate from my faith!’ I could hear Jimmy calling out in the background – and he ended up performing for several white house presidential administrations and then on every major TV show. And of course, you’ve seen him perform many times around the world. So, it was a most inspiring speech Mr. Carter gave to the students yesterday. It was amazing. I got to tell you, it made me cry, Gary, because Mr. Carter was so inspiring.”

I Am With You Still is an incredibly powerful song about God’s presence with us. Jimmy told me that this is something that is very important to him.

“I was brought up in a Christian environment in my early life. My parents were Christian people, and they told me about God. They told me about Jesus and all of that. And then I had a personal experience with God – I have – and that built my faith. My faith is strong. That’s all I can say.”

The very personal nature of the record comes to a head in the final song, written by Joey Williams, Why Me. It’s a nice bluesy piece where we get some honest reflections on the fact of Jimmy Carter’s blindness.

Ron Pullman said, “In Why Me Jimmy starts out asking God, ‘Why me? Why was I blind? Because all my brothers were all healthy sighted individuals.’ But then at the end of the song, he’s saying to God, how could I have known that you would select me to do God’s work and would give me so many blessings.”

Jimmy added, in a remarkable testimony of faith, “Yeah. That’s what I felt. I felt that I was called to do what I’m doing. You know when I found out that all my brothers could see, except me, I felt all alone. I was blind, but God saw further down the road, he knew what he was going to do. He knew what he wanted me to do. Because I think if I had gotten my sight back, I don’t think I’d be doing what I’m doing now. He knew that that’s what I needed.”

Ron provided some detail about the recording of the song. “When we got into the studio with that song, we realized the third verse wasn’t written. And so we were trying to come up with writing a quick verse, and finally Jimmy says, how about I just go in there at the chorus and speak? And that’s what he did – we all got chills! And what you hear on the record is the very first take when Mr. Carter sat down in front of the mike and did it. I mean, we all got chills and it was a blessing right off the bat.

And the great Charlie Musselwhite plays on the song. And Peter Levin on Hammond B-3. Just so many people came together on that song to keep that bluesy, gospel feel. But I used to always say. blues is the cousin of the gospel. So we kept that real, real traditional.”

Photo: Charlie Hussey

There’s a great song on the album called Dream On, on which the Blind Boys provide the backing vocals. As I listened to it, I love the fact that Jimmy Carter is still talking about having dreams, even though he’s reached a ripe old age. It kind of follows up a line in the title track, Blind Faith, where Carter sings about following the light that God shined for him when he was a boy. He’s followed his dream all these years, despite the difficulties along the way, including his blindness. “Well, you know,” he told me, “I still have a dream and I’m still following it.”

To add to that, however, Ron Pullman said that “Mr. Carter has an amazing dream still, and that is for this album to bring peace and serenity to the world.” Most people at 87 have already kicked back and forgotten about the ills of the world, but Jimmy Carter’s not finished yet.

In addition, there’s one particular dream Jimmy mentioned to me, that he and Ron are currently working on. “There’s one special thing I want to do before I retire, I want to go and perform in Jerusalem on a Christmas Day. That’s my dream right now.”

It’s one thing to dream your dreams when life is easy. But as you look at Jimmy Carter’s life, for sure there’ve been hard times – not least growing up in the Jim Crow South and, of course, his blindness. He remains resolutely positive:

“Well, you know, that’s when my faith comes in. Like I told you before, I have had a personal experience with God. I know what he will do. I know what he has done and know what he will do. All he’s asking me is to keep the faith and I’m going to do that. My faith is very strong.”

This positivity shines through every song in the album. But it’s not positivity for the sake of it, some attempt to make the most of things. There’s an authenticity here, a sincerity and a joy which is just part of Jimmy Carter. He’s a man who has learned, like St. Paul in his letter to the Philippians, “to be content, no matter what happens to me” because of the “great joy of the Lord.”

Ron Pullman spoke movingly of the great blessing it has been for him “to be able to work with an icon like Mr. Carter. It’s just been a life changing experience.”

Blind Faith finds Jimmy Carter in strong voice and ever-hopeful spirit. Ron Pullman has done a fine job of arranging the songs and assembling the perfect set of musical contributors for each song. It’s an album that will appeal to a wide range of listeners and one which will inspire and speak to each one.

Thank you, Jimmy Carter, for your message of peace and encouragement in these dark times.

Elizabeth King’s Living in the Last Days is a gift for us all.

“Her words have a clear message, but her deep feeling could move anyone.”
VICE Magazine

Photo: Houston Cofield

Elizabeth King is a remarkable woman. She was the female lead of a successful, previously all-male gospel group, The Gospel Souls, in the 1960s and 70s, which had a significant gospel hit on the D-Vine Spirituals label, I Heard the Voice.

She quit singing professionally to raise her children, and now, after a hiatus of nearly 50 years, she has gone into the studio to record a fabulous new blues-tinged gospel album, Living in the Last Days, on Bruce Watson’s new Bible and Tire label. [check out our interview with Bruce here]

Her powerful vocal performance on the record, reminiscent at times of Mavis Staples, is supported by a top-class band assembled by Watson (Will Sexton and Matt Ross-Spang (guitars), George Sluppick (drums), Mark Edgar Stuart (bass), and Al Gamble (organ)) and features the excellent harmonies of Christopher and Courtney Barnes from The Sensational Barnes Brothers. It’s a funky, blues, soul-filled pot of rich gospel fare.

Down at the Crossroads called Ms. King at her Memphis home, and asked her about making the album. She said first of all that this album was her debut solo album and it’s been forty-seven years since she stopped singing professionally. She told me that she was “just sitting at home one day,” when Pastor Shipp, the founder of the 1970s D-Vine Spirituals label, who had recently started collaborating with Bruce Watson, called her up. “And he asked me, did I want to record again? I told him, yeah. That’s how it came to be.”

From initial call to getting into the studio was very quick – “Yeah, no time for rehearsal or nothing,” said Elizabeth.

I asked her about the songs on the album, all terrific, positive songs. She told me that there are some that she has been singing for many years, and some that Bruce Watson brought to her. “And then there are a couple of songs on there I did myself that I have been singing from when I was, you know, a child growing up. The song Walk with Me, my mom used to sing that to me. And then, I got a song, Blessed Be the Name, I kinda got most of that out of the Bible.”

She sings this song unaccompanied on the album, a quite spine-tingling performance. The song tells the story of Job, perhaps a story that not a lot of people are familiar with these days. Job is a character in the Old Testament book of the same name, who suffers tremendous loss, including his family and all his possessions, but somehow is able to say, “God gives and takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

“To me,” she told me, the story “means that we can be blessed, in that God gives us a thing, and he has a right to take it away. And, I take the role of Job to just be patient. And when things are going good, or going bad, you just have to be patient.”

That’s a lesson that Elizabeth King has learned through the ups and downs of life. “Well, I kind of learned it mostly through my lifetime. And when I was a child – because my mom, you know, would tell me she gonna give us something, but you got to wait for it. So, as I got older. I found out that if you really want something, just wait, it’ll come.”

Elizabeth King was born in 1944 and grew up in Charleston, in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. Life wasn’t easy, with the young Elizabeth having to help the family pick cotton before going to school each day. Positive person that she is, she had nothing negative to say about that.

“Well, to me it was fun, I guess, because that was all I knew. And we had to walk a long way to school and I would get tired walking, so my brothers would carry me because I was younger than they were. But it was a lot of picking cotton and chopping cotton. I loved to chop cotton. It really wasn’t so hard for me because I guess I was the only girl in the family and my brothers kinda spoiled me a little bit.”

I mentioned one of the songs on the album to her, Testify, which is a rocking, upbeat number. I wondered if, looking back over the years, this song of a testimony to God’s goodness and God’s guiding hand, reflects her own experience?

She told me that she had recorded a version of this song back in 1970, but was keen to have it on this new album, though rearranged somewhat. “It’s been a part of my life, because I’ve gone through quite a bit. I got fifteen children, and I’ve gone through three accidents. So, I do have a testimony.”

Elizabeth King quit recording music in the mid-seventies to concentrate on family life. She told me she has fifteen children, 57 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren. And she is proud of every one of them, including some of her grandchildren who are now recording artists in their own right.

“When my children were small, I stopped. Let’s see, what year was that? It’d be around, 1970, maybe 1972, and an opportunity for travel overseas came. But my children, my older two, were small and I didn’t want to leave them. So, I stayed at home to raise my children. Everybody said ‘you won’t get a chance to do your dream if you have to wait until your kids get grown.’ But I still have an opportunity. I just still believe I would have an opportunity to sing, you know?”

And here she is, all these years later, having just made this wonderful album. Not that she had quit singing entirely – for many years she has been singing in her church choir and singing solos. But “the only music and singing I know is a spiritual song and they call it a gospel song.” She was never interested in sing the blues or R&B.

“I guess because my heart just wasn’t in it. I didn’t like going to parties and stuff like that when I was young, I just didn’t like it because I always was afraid of drunk people.”

I asked Ms. King why music is important to her, and in particular, why gospel music is so important to her. She told me that it was her way of communicating with God and the source of God’s power in her life – to help her “be a better person. That’s what inspires me.”

And what does she think is at the heart of gospel music? The music, the feeling, the words?

“The words mostly would count for me. The music is good, don’t get me wrong. But it’s the words that carry the message for me. Because you know, you got some songs that they call gospel songs but they really don’t have too much of a meaning. But when you sing songs like Precious Lord or Amazing Grace, when you sing songs like that, it touches people’s heart. If you do it from your heart it’s going to reach the heart of any man, whether he’s saved or unsaved, and you can connect to that spirit.”

She had mentioned the accidents that had affected her life and I asked in particular about the one back in 1969, that was very serious.

“That one was a serious accident. I worked for a florist at the time, and a man hit me head on. I stayed in the hospital, I think, around 17 days. I really couldn’t remember anybody coming to visit me, but there was this one priest in the hospital that would come in every morning and ask me, ‘My child. Can I pray with you today?’ I would say, Yes. And so, when I came to myself, I was asking the staff, you know, the nurses about him. And they said that they didn’t have anybody on their staff like that. So, I said, who was this? Now I never could see his face, so I just described his body and what he had on and all of that. And they said, ‘we don’t have anybody like this on the staff.’ So, I just started praying and I just knew it was God. I knew I was in bad shape. I really was; I had to learn to walk all over again.”

With her remarkable recovery, Elizabeth King said she “dedicated my life to God, to my singing and to try to encourage people. My job now is just try to encourage people…when you’re going through something, just turn to God. If you don’t know him, get to know him.”

I wondered how Ms. King had got on with the musicians when she’d gone into the studio to make this record, and how had she learned the songs so quickly.

“Oh, they had the music all lined up for me and I don’t know, I just sing to the music! I used to be real fast learner when I was young, but the process of learning now is quite a bit slower, as I get older. But it wasn’t hard for me to adapt to the music because, you know, I never stopped singing. I’ve been singing all the time. I just hadn’t recorded.”

The album finishes with a very cool, bluesy version of one of my favourite songs, You Got to Move, famously recorded by Mississippi Fred McDowell and then, of course, the Rolling Stones on their Sticky Fingers album. I’ve always thought of that song as a resurrection song. When the Lord gets ready, you gotta move – it always reminds me of Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones. Elizabeth agreed and said, “I would say no matter what nobody tried to do to keep you here, when it’s time for God to say you got to move, you got to move. I just love it.”

I asked her about another song on the album, A Long Journey, another one about Christian hope which talks about going home to get your crown. Elizabeth said, “My mom used to sing that to me when I was a child. Now that was a long time ago because I’m 76 years old! And that song has been with me all these years, but she used to tell me that I’m gonna leave you one day. I’m going on a long journey and I won’t be back. And I tell you, that song, it has stayed with me in the heart, and anytime I record an album, A Long Journey going to be on there.”

We finished up our conversation by talking about Elizabeth’s faith, which is clearly central to her life and being. She told me, “It’s been important to me because of the things that I suffered, things that happened to me, a lot of things that I had to go through. My faith made me strong about suffering, that’s what made me strong.” Life has not been easy for her, but she is certain that it was God that kept her going in the hard times and it was her faith that sustained her. “I believe in God, God gives me strength. And that would keep me going.”

Elizabeth King is a remarkable woman. She is positive, upbeat, ready to take on the next challenge and opportunity in life. She is a breath of fresh air. Here’s what she finished our chat with:

“Every day I get up, I thank God. Just let me be able to just take care of myself you know, and I just thank him. And I’m going to keep on trusting him until the time comes when he says that you gotta move!”

Living in the Last Days is testimony to Elizabeth King’s remarkable spirit and faith. Not only that, it’s a top-notch album, full of great songs, music that touches you, and Ms. King’s powerful vocal performance. It’s a gift for us all.

Rev Gary Davis – A Great Change

Bob Dylan called him “one of the wizards of modern music.” His biographer, Ian Zack, called him “one of the world’s greatest, if not the greatest, of all traditional and ragtime guitarists” And for Alan Lomax, the folklorist, he was “one of the great geniuses of American instrumental music.”

We’re talking about Rev. Gary Davis, the blind son of dirt-poor sharecroppers in South Carolina, who went on to exert a major influence on the folk scene of the 1960s and the early rock scene of the 70s. Yet for most of his career, he refused to perform blues music publicly until the latter years of his life.

He was remarkably musically gifted and his guitar virtuosity was an inspiration to people like Jorma Kaukonen, Bob Weir, Stefan Grossman and many others. Davis was born in 1896 in the Jim Crow South Carolina, became blind as a small child, and was abandoned by his mother. Raised in poverty by his grandmother, it was a thoroughly unpromising start. But she made sure young Gary went to church where he sang in the choir. He took up the guitar early, playing spirituals in earshot of his grandmother and other songs learned from traveling minstrel shows when she wasn’t listening,

He began to have real success as a musician in his late teens at picnics and in string bands, then playing on street corners for nickels and dimes, eventually adopting the rambling lifestyle of the wandering bluesman. But, at the age of 38, when his mother was dying, Davis experienced a vision, where an angel, appearing as a child, called him to God. Right there, he says, he “surrendered and gave up. Gave up entirely.” He soon was ordained as a Baptist minister.

He now harnessed all the musical skill he had amassed in playing ragtime, jazz, blues, and minstrel music and his considerable creative energies in composing and playing spiritual songs in pursuit of his new calling in life. There had been a great change.

One of Gary Davis’s song which reflects this is simply called Great Change Since I Been Born, and I got to thinking about it, when a good friend of mine, Gary Bradley, an Irish musician, sent me a recording he had made of the song for use in the book launch of my new book.

The reason I wanted the song is because my book, Paul Distilled is about the thinking of the apostle Paul, whose letters form part of our New Testaments. He, too, experienced a great change – from a man of violence to a man promoting love and peace, because of his own encounter with God. Specifically, meeting the resurrected Jesus on the famous Damascus Road. In his letters, it’s clear that he thought the epoch-shattering event of Jesus’s resurrection meant the possibility of transformation – both personally and for the world. A transformation based on love. These short thirteen letters of Paul dropped a depth charge of thought into the ancient world, whose effects are still being felt in the world. Can love really change the world? According to Jesus, and the greatest exponent of the meaning of his life, Paul – a resounding Yes!

Gary Davis eventually made has way to New York City, where his incredible skill and talent became appreciated and where he was eventually persuaded to perform more than just spiritual songs in the 1960s Though his faith was still intact, the good Reverend clearly struggled with alcohol and was known to be pretty foul-mouthed and angry at times. As Bob Dylan observed in Solid Rock,

“It’s the ways of the flesh to war against the spirit
Twenty-four hours a day, you can feel it and you can hear it”

He was reflecting, of course, St Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he talks about doing the things he doesn’t want to do and not doing what he knows he ought to do. We’ve all been there. The good news, is that a great change is possible. A life empowered by the Spirit of Jesus “is life and peace.” The secret is, in Gary Davis’s words, to “surrender and give up. Give up entirely.”

Check out Ian Zack’s excellent biography on Davis here.

 

 

 

 

The Spirit and the Blues

I’ve been listening to the latest album by Larkin Poe, Self-Made Man, and there’s a great track on it called Holy Ghost Fire. You tend to get a few references to the Bible in a Larkin Poe album, not doubt reflecting the sisters background in the Southern Bible Belt.

“Who’s gonna help me carry my load
Burn, burn baby burn with that Holy Ghost Fire
From your fingers to the frets…gonna testify.”

It’s raw, apocalyptic sounding stuff, conjuring up images of wild Pentecostal exuberance. Exuberant joy, is of course, the mark of the Spirit moving – it seeps through the Bible’s pages, even though you wouldn’t think it when you attend most churches today. Kenny Meeks’s song, When Jesus Takes You Dancing, catches the exhilaration of all this on his 2016 bluesy Americana album, New Jerusalem. “When Jesus takes you dancing…the Holy Ghost takes over you and sets you all on fire…”

You get the same holy dancing in Beth Hart’s Spirit of God from her 2012 album, Bang Bang Boom Boom which takes us on a rockin’ journey from Beth’s house to the house of God where she goes “hip shakin’ down the aisle”, then “breaking bread with my own special style”. Spirit of God worship is clearly not the sombre sit-in-your-pew, be quiet and sleep through the sermon version which is served up in too many churches. In Beth’s church, it’s a “soul celebration,” where the preacher’s “goin’ crazy…knocking devils down on the floor,” the choir is “giving it up to the Lord,” and Beth knows she’s sure “feeling something!”

The Holmes’ Brothers Speaking in Tongues from their eponymous 2001 album, gives us more Pentecostal action:

“You got me speaking in tongues, speaking your name,
Lord let me understand you
You got shaking my head, lifting my hands…”

Think it’s strange? Sister Rosetta Tharpe was singing in 1944 about the strange things that happened every day when God’s on the move. People might get healed:

“There are strange things happening everyday
He gave the blind man sight
When he praised Him with all his might
There are strange things happening everyday.”

Songs about the Holy Spirit in the blues go back to Blind Willie Johnson, with his Latter Rain. The lyrics of this are often misunderstood. You need to appreciate that for Willie Johnson’s Pentecostal church, the latter rain was the rain of the Spirit that the Old Testament prophet Joel had prophesied. Joel was quoted by Peter on the Day of Pentecost when the Spirit fell on the first group of Jesus followers – “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.” But Joel also talked about the early rain and the latter rain. The early Pentecostal believers like Willie Johnson believed that what they were experiencing was a fresh shower of the Spirit’s blessing – the latter rain, as opposed to the early rain that had fallen on the first believers. “It’s for you, it’s for you, it’s for you and your children too,” go the lyrics, reflecting the prophet Joel’s word.

Spin forward another 25 years and you have the Rev. Gary Davis singing I Heard the Angel Singing, where the “Holy Ghost on fire” fell on him, and he “got in the Spirit and began to shout.” The devil tries to stop him praying, but the singing of the angels spur him on. Eric Bibb has a great version of this song. [check out, too Eric’s Spirit and the Blues album]

Larry Norman, father of Jesus rock in 1972 wondered “why should the devil have all the good music?” He’d been filled with the Spirit, he sang, “I feel OK, because Jesus is the rock and he rolled my blues away.”

And bang up to date, we have the Mason Creek Project’s Holy Spirit Blues. “Everytime I feel the Spirit, I feel like dancin’ in my shoes.”

Giving a slightly different different angle is this great Kelly Joe Phelps song, The Holy Ghost Flood. There are no fireworks in Kelly Joe’s beautiful song, featuring his characteristic and wonderful guitar picking, just a recognition of his own need: “Oh Lord a sinner I am, Asking you to forgive me.” He needs a “flood” of the Holy Spirit, of God’s presence which means:

“Blessing us in kind,
Leaving not a soul behind.”

According to Pew Research, Pentecostalism and related “charismatic movements” represent one of the fastest-growing segments of global Christianity, with around a quarter of the world’s 2 billion Christians. They celebrate the gift of the Spirit in exuberant worship and a keen sense of God’s Spirit at work in their everyday lives.

Actually, this pretty much reflects the early Christian movement that we read about in the New Testament. These early communities were communities of the Spirit where the speaking in tongues, healing and prophesying we’ve seen in the songs above, were a regular feature of their worship. As were other Spirit inspired ways of life like love, patience and kindness.

Maybe it’s time to let the Spirit move and go with Beth Hart “hip shakin’ down the aisle.” Something to try next Sunday morning you’re at church!

Paul Jones: Life, the blues, and faith

How much can one man pack into one lifetime? In the normal scheme of things, not remotely as much as Paul Jones has. From incredible success as the singer in Manfred Mann in the 1960s, with chart-topping hits in the UK and US, like Do Wah Diddy Diddy and Pretty Flamingo, to lead roles in musicals and plays on London’s West End, to acting in films and on TV, presenting the Blues Show on BBC Radio for over 30 years, and singing and playing harmonica with his Blues Band for the last 40 years – and, “don’t forget songwriter,” he gently chided me, when we chatted recently about his life, the blues and faith.

Now in his eighth decade, Paul Jones is still going strong. He told me that next year is scheduled to be “the most gig heavy year out of the last ten or fifteen,” with shows all round the UK with the Blues Band and the Manfreds, a reformed Manfred Mann. Where does he get the energy from? “Oh,” he said nonchalantly, “I have energy! I always have. I enjoy what we do.”

That enjoyment and zest for life came across in spades during our conversation. I asked him, first of all, of all the things he’s done along the way, what does he consider himself most successful at. Singing was the obvious thing he said, because of all the Manfred Mann hits, the West End musicals and the other bands he’s been a part of. “But from, from my point of view,” he said, “I like being a harmonica player as much as I like being a singer.” It’s the one thing he would choose out of all he’s done, if forced to.

He’s been a top-notch harmonica player for a long time, and has played a long list of major artists, including Joe Bonamassa, Van Morrison and Eric Clapton, as well as his own bands.

What was the most challenging of all the things he’s done? Although in his acting career, there were some straightforward roles where the play was good and he had a top-notch director, sometimes, “at the other end of the scale, there’s stuff where you really have to dig deep.” Although he enjoyed the acting, he’s left that behind – “Things have changed and there’s very little I would want to be acting in now.”

Jones presented the BBC Radio Two Blues Show for 32 years, as well as broadcasting on Jazz FM and the BBC World Service. He told me he thoroughly enjoyed his years with the Blues Show.

“All credit to Dave Shannon, who was the BBC producer who invented the program in the first place and actually offered it to Radio One. They turned it down saying, no, that’s music for old people. You want to go to Radio Two. So we did, and it worked. The program survived for 32 years with me at the helm. And it still exists with Cerys Matthews.

“At the beginning Dave Shannon wrote most of the script. I was allowed to make some additions, which kind of suited me. If, for instance, we were talking about somebody that I had a personal knowledge of, then obviously that would be of interest to the listener. So that was fine. I could do that. And then after a while Dave said, ‘Just talk about this record yourself. You don’t need me writing stuff for you.’ And so I said, ‘Okay, I think I can do that.’ Well, actually I knew I could do it because before I was at Radio Two, I had about three or four years of the World Service so I obviously knew how to present the program.”

I asked Paul about the many artist interviews he’d done on the show. Were there any that particularly stood out for him?

“Van Morrison stands out. He was one of the first people that I interviewed – I had interviewed him previously for the World Service before the blues program came along. I concentrated mainly on that wonderful double album that he recorded in 1994, A Night in San Francisco. He was absolutely brilliant, tremendous guest. I remember doing that interview with Van, because people had warned me, he’s not easy. And actually, Van did sort of throw me a curve ball here and there, but I enjoyed it. And Junior Wells was notable.

“But the very first person I interviewed in my life was Memphis Slim. At that point I was still an undergraduate in Oxford. I noticed that he was in the UK, and with the confidence of youth, I got in touch with the organization for which he was touring. I’d just been asked if I would write on musical subjects for a magazine called Oxford Opinion, which was just starting up – we’re talking round about 1960, 1961. So they said, yes, okay. And Memphis Slim was staying in a rather nice hotel, not far from Trafalgar square. So I went to visit him and I think he thought I was very young. I was still spotty!

“But I, you know, I got a nice interview out of him. I remember he said that he thought it was not entirely fair that Ray Charles was a lot more successful than he was! And, of course, at that time, Memphis Slim was having a lot of commercial success with a couple of albums that featured not only him, but Matthew ‘Guitar’ Murphy – wonderful guitar player – and he also had terrific horn players in those times as well. They were some of the most successful, the most commercially slanted things that Memphis Slim ever did.

“So he sticks out. I never interviewed him again, although I did play on an album that he made at Ronnie Scott’s in London.

“Several times I interviewed Taj Mahal. He’s an artist I admire greatly because he’s never been entirely easy to categorize. And I kinda like that and I’m impressed by it, but he does have a wonderful voice. And he has lovely sort of style on guitar when he chooses to do that. And, of course, he plays harmonica and percussion and all kinds of stuff. I’ve interviewed him several times – the last time was when he came over to Britain with Keb’ Mo’ in 2018. They came in and did an absolutely marvellous interview.

“I’ll tell you one more, Gary. There’s an absolutely marvellous, wonderful jazz singer called Cassandra Wilson. And she sometimes does Robert Johnson songs and things, and always surrounds herself with absolutely stunning musicians. She’s wonderful. And she came in for an interview and somebody said, she’s very nice, but she is very serious. And one thing you mustn’t do is compare her with anyone else because she might get very difficult. She had a marvellous album out at the time and she’d done a song, I think it was a self-written and an absolutely wonderful piece of work. And I played the track somewhere about halfway through the interview. And I said as it came up, I don’t know if I should say this, but as I listen to that, surely I can hear just a teeny bit of Nina Simone. And she said…’I love Nina Simone!’

“And one more somebody warned me about was Koko Taylor. What a great artist and absolutely part of blues history. And the person who warned me was actually her manager and the boss of her record label, Alligator Records, Bruce Iglauer.” [Check out our interview Bruce Iglauer about his book, Bitten by the Blues].

“We had run into Bruce and Koko Taylor in Chicago. Bruce had warned me in advance, ‘She’s in a filthy mood. And you can have 20 minutes if you’re lucky.’ Now I actually think that Koko Taylor was tremendous, great artist. Anyway, I had all my Koko Taylor facts and all my Koko Taylor records lined up. And she came in and sure enough, she had a face like thunder and she was really just barely tolerating me. Well, I just told her what I thought of her, and I played the records and I told her what I thought of the records, and then I asked her some questions. And after about 25 or 30 minutes, Bruce said to me, ‘Well, Paul, I think that’s about it.’ And Koko turned round to him and said, ‘Shut up, Bruce, guy knows what he’s doing!’

“So I’ve had some marvellous interviews. I’ve always liked interviewing people over all these years – I’ve loved all the people that I interviewed.”

I then asked Paul about his relationship with the blues, which he’s been immersed for nearly all of his life. What is it about the music that really resonates with him?

“Well, like so many people of my generation and background, you can blame Lonnie Donegan for a lot of it. I was a jazz fan by the age of 14 and was listening to everything from Nat King Cole to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and by the age of 17, 18, I was into modern jazz. However, alongside that along came Lonnie Donegan. I think I was still only 14 years old when Lonnie Donegan did this wonderful recording called The Rock Island Line. And I heard him being interviewed on a radio program. The presenter said, ‘What an extraordinary song. What on earth made you write this?’ And Lonnie said, ‘No, no, I didn’t write it. I got it from Lead Belly.’ And the presenter said, ‘Who?’ It was Lead Belly – Huddie Ledbetter, of course, a wonderful folk blues artist.

“Anyway, I used to go to a second hand record shop in Portsmouth where I lived, and on Saturday mornings I would take my little amount of pocket money and I would I would buy a 78 – I think 45s were just coming in about then. I would buy a Humphrey Littleton record or a Count Basie record and I was already listening to singers like Jimmy Rushing in those Count Basie records.

“Then in first term at university, I went down to stay with my parents for the Christmas holiday in Plymouth where my father was captain of Plymouth dock yard. And I went into a record shop – Pete Russell’s Hot Record Store. I thought that sounded really hip. I mean, nobody used the word ‘store’ in those days except in America. So, I went in there a few times during that particular Christmas vacation, and about the fourth time I went in, Russell said to me, ‘You like blues, I suggest you should listen to this.’ And he put on the record, and it had wonderful electric guitar – most of what I’d been listening to had been acoustic guitar. And not only that, but it had a harmonica. I said, ‘What is this?’ And he said it was a 10-inch LP on French Vogue records by an artist called T-bone Walker. And I looked at it and I saw that the harmonica player was called Junior Wells. I went out of Pete Russell’s shop with that album and then I went to a music shop and bought a harmonica.

“And eventually, not long after that, I heard Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Walter. I’d already heard Sonny Terry by then. Although I was impressed, he didn’t make me want to play; Junior Wells made me want to play.”

Paul Jones became a Christian in the early ‘80s and his faith is central to him. So, I wanted to know about the relationship between blues and his Christian faith. People have referred to the blues as the devil’s music and there’s all the mythology linked to the blues about the crossroads, mojo and so on. What was his take on all of that?

“Well, one of my favourite interviewees – I can’t absolutely say for definite whether this was Pop Staples, or Clarence Fountain from the Blind Boys of Alabama, but one or other of those two eminent gentlemen – wonderful singers, and in Pop’s case, great songwriter as well, but just two absolute icons of gospel – one of them said to me, ‘What is this devil music stuff? Devil ain’t got no music, except what stupid people give him.’ And that’s right. Because if the devil could make music, then he would be doing something that was true. But as Jesus said, he’s a liar! He’s the father of lies. So, if he did anything, if he actually invented anything or created anything himself, he wouldn’t be a liar. No, all he can do is mess around with stuff that’s already been created and make lies and try and mess people up. So that’s what I think about the phrase, the devil’s music.

“I actually loved gospel music throughout my years of atheism and believe me, I was a serious atheist. I was brought up in a Christian family, we went to church as a family and it was real. At a fairly early age, I was discovered to have a fairly usable voice, so I was drafted into the local cathedral choir, and I actually began to take Christianity seriously. But at that stage – I was probably slightly younger than 14 – some very, very bad behaviour on the part of a Christian turned me against Christianity entirely. And I decided since I was never going to be a Christian, as long as I lived I should be an atheist.

“But in all my years of atheism, I liked gospel music. And in particular I liked early Mahalia Jackson, the records that she made the Falls-Jones Ensemble, which chiefly had a piano and a church organ, and sometimes a rather jazzy bass and drums as well. Boy, that woman’s voice! In 1958 I remember going to see the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day and Mahalia sang The Last Mile of the Way. So here I am, an atheist collecting Mahalia Jackson and Blind Boys and The Swan Silvertones, and things like that. I liked The Swan Silvertones because Claude Jeter had an almost falsetto voice and reminded me of quite a number of soul singers who did the same thing. And I used to walk around singing falsetto all those gospel songs like Smokey Robinson or somebody like Eddie Holman might sing.

“I loved all that stuff. I remember when I was doing a play in New York on Broadway, and I used to walk from my apartment to the theatre, singing the whole way. And at one point I was singing something by Smokey Robinson, Tears of a Clown or something like that. And this guy passed me and he stopped and turned around and said, ‘Righteous man, righteous.’ I just loved that music. So, when I finally became a Christian, I had all these albums I could pick out and listen to.”

We turned from talking about the blues to talking about Paul’s faith, which he said means “everything” to him. I asked him about deciding to follow Jesus – whether looking back, some things had happened along the way that were stepping stones, or whether it was a very sudden thing. He told me how important discovering the work of a 19^th century German landscape artist had been in starting to unravel his atheism. As the Blues Band began to take off after 1979, and they started touring in Europe, it had tremendous success, with large audiences cheering, clapping and stomping their feet as the band came on stage. Paul was only too aware from the height of his success in the 1960s, when his life had gone badly off the rails, of the dangers of getting into a fantasy world of fan adulation where you could begin to think that was the only reality.

Paul told me he needed to “Get out from the centre of that maelstrom of his own success and popularity,” and that visiting art galleries whilst on tour allowed him to do that. And it was there that he discovered the spirituality of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. “When I look at them now, I don’t know why I didn’t become a Christian right there and then,” he told me. But he went on to explain what brought things to a head for him as far as faith is concerned:

“In 1982, Richard Eyre, the director of the National Theatre [in London] called me up and asked if I wanted his ticket for Guys and Dolls’ opening night, because he hated sitting in the audience on his own opening nights. So I sat in the best seat in the house, right in the centre of the stalls. And it was absolutely wonderful, and I’m a man who did not like musicals. By that time I had actually been in one or two, usually Lloyd Webber’s or something like that, but I didn’t really like musicals. And here I was absolutely blown away by this musical.

“And there was this one girl in the cast who really caught my eye. Anyway, about five or six weeks later, Richard rang me again. And he said, “My next production at the National Theatre is going to be the Beggar’s Opera. Would you like to come and play Macheath, the highwayman?’ So I soon found myself in the Guys and Dolls company. And the beautiful girl was in it! So, to cut a long story short, I fell in love with her. In October of that year [1982] – about 9 months after I’d first gone along to see Guys and Dolls – I wound up in Guys and Dolls as well, because Ian Charleson, the actor who was playing Sky Masterson, decided to leave. So I found myself playing Sky Masterson, and then the girl who was playing smaller roles in Guys and Dolls and Beggar’s Opera was suddenly promoted into lead roles in Guys and Dolls and Beggar’s Opera, so there we were, playing opposite each other, and life started imitating art, and we fell in love.

“So, fast forward to 1984. We were still at the National. And something happened where Fiona began to think she was missing something and she really need to do something about it. She was doing a play at the BBC on the radio, and when she finished, she came in to do the evening show at the National. So, she knocked on the door of my dressing room, and she said, ‘Don’t laugh, but I came out of the BBC and I went into that church just opposite the entrance to the Broadcasting House. And I just opened the Bible, and I read something about Jesus and eternal life.’ Turned out, of course, it was John 3:16.

“So she said, ‘I’m going to that church on Sunday,’ and I said I would go with her – partly motivated by the fact that I didn’t want her to go anywhere without me! But also partly because I’d been following these Caspar Friedrich paintings, and they’re so obviously Christian and so powerful. So we went to that church, All Souls, Langham Place, and we thought, this is absolutely marvellous.

“A few weeks later, the phone rang one afternoon, and it was Cliff Richard. And he asked us to come and hear a man called Luis Palau speaking at White City Stadium in West London. I hummed and hawed a bit, so Cliff said, ‘Tell you what, when the evening’s over, I’ll buy you dinner!’ And do you know something, he was just doing what God told him. God told him to get as many people from show business as possible into that stadium. And he invited over 130 people! The night that Fiona and I were there, we were not the only show business people there, there were some other very well-known people.

“And Cliff bought dinner for all of us. So I was pretty impressed by him at that point! Essentially, we gave our lives to Jesus that night. It wasn’t just what Luis said, it was what God said through Luis. And we just looked at each other, and we said we have wasted enough of our lives, let’s not waste any more.

“The next day I telephoned All Souls and asked if we could get married in the church – and they said no! And this lovely guy – who actually conducted our service of blessing, and with whom we’re still friends and are godparents to his three daughters – explained that because I was divorced, the Church of England couldn’t marry us. So we got married in a registry office on a Saturday, and then on the Sunday we went to All Souls and had a great service of blessing with a wonderful black gospel choir, and a large contingent of actors and directors from the National Theatre. We had a wonderful day, and we always celebrate our wedding anniversary on the 16^th December, the day of the blessing.”

I wondered how Paul’s faith had developed and matured over the past 36 years, what his faith means to him, and he told me that it meant everything to him.

“Really, for the rest of my days, getting people into the kingdom is my priority. The Bible calls it ‘bearing fruit.’ That’s what both Fiona and I want to do.”

Paul Jones has had a remarkable life, and after nearly six decades as a performer, has clearly no interest in retiring – “retirement is a dirty word, as far as I’m concerned. We usually just refer to it as the ‘R’ word!” He was a breath of fresh air in our conversation, full good humour, full of stories from his rich and varied experience, clearly in love with life, and still inspired by the faith that dispelled his atheism all those years ago. If he’s appearing on a stage near you, or you hear of him coming to your town to tell his story along with his wife, Fiona, don’t hesitate to go and see him. You’ll not regret it.

[interview slightly edited for clarity and length]

The Blind Boys of Alabama’s Jimmy Carter: “I started singing for the Lord and I ain’t finished yet.”

Jimmy Carter is the oldest member of the Blind Boys of Alabama, five-time Grammy winners and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners. He sang with the original group, including Clarence Fountain back in the 1940s when they were at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind, but was too young to go touring with them at the beginning. After singing with the Dixieland Blind Boys and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, he eventually officially joined The Blind Boys of Alabama and has been singing with them for forty years.

From the 1980s on, The Blind Boys were able to widen their audience beyond just the black community and have enjoyed tremendous success. After their 2000 Spirit of the Century album which mixed traditional church material with songs by Tom Waits and the Rolling Stones, and which won the first of their Grammy Awards, the group has gone on to stellar success, becoming living legends in the world of gospel and roots music. In many ways, they have defined 21^st century gospel.

Over the past 20 years, the Blind Boys of Alabama have worked with the likes of Ben Harper, Robert Randolph, Mavis Staples, Taj Mahal, Ruthie Foster, Bon Iver, Paul Thorn and Marc Cohn. The list goes on. Everybody, it seems, wants to perform and record with them.

Rolling Stone Magazine has called the Blind Boys of Alabama “gospel titans” and The New Yorker simply said they were “legendary.” Few would disagree.

I got the opportunity to chat to Jimmy Carter aka The Jimster for Down at the Crossroads. It was an incredible privilege to talk to a man who has gone through as much as he has, has achieved so much and is one of the most positive, cheerful people you could meet.

I asked him first of all about the Blind Boys’ 2017 album Almost Home, which was originally released by Amazon, but is now being made available to all digital music platforms for the first time in a couple of months’ time. It’s a wonderful album of mostly original songs which chronicle the lives of Clarence Fountain and Jimmy Carter. The song-writing (by the likes of the North Mississippi Allstars, Phil Cook, John Leventhal, Marc Cohn, and Ruthie Foster) is superb, the arrangements terrific and the Blind Boys’ singing characteristically wonderful. It’s an album I return to again and again.

Jimmy told me that the album is about the life he and Clarence had growing up. “Yes,” he said, “it talks about the early times of the Blind Boys. It talks about how we went to school and all that. It’s kinda like a little scene of history, you know.”

Jimmy went on to talk about Let My Mother Live, an incredibly moving and very personal song.

“Yeah, that’s a song that came straight from me. When I went to school, I was only seven years old, and I was blind. So, you can picture a seven-year old boy put in a school where he’d never been before; he knows nobody there. And I used to pray every night, oh God, let my mother live till I get through this. And he let her live until she got a hundred and three years old!

He did that for me and that’s why I love God. Everybody got their own opinion about him, but for me, I’m gonna serve him till I die.”

I asked Jimmy to tell me a bit about what he remembered about growing up as a boy in Alabama. He told me,

“When I went to school, it wasn’t a school that you’d come home every day from. We had to stay there for nine months at a time. We went to school in September and only came home in May, apart from the Christmas holidays.” It was here Jimmy first started singing in choirs.

“Yeah, I went up there and I met all the rest of the Blind Boys, and we started singing together. We had a choir, and a male chorus and we had a quartet. And the rest of it is history, my friend!”

I wondered about his visual impairment and how that has affected him and his music over the years. Jimmy was more concerned to talk about his calling to sing for the Lord.

“Well, you know,” he said, “when we started out, we didn’t sing because we wanted to be well known or famous. We weren’t thinking about that; all we wanted to do was to get out there and sing and tell the world about Jesus Christ. We weren’t thinking about no accolades or nothing like that. Because that’s what God wanted us to do.

“So, we have been blessed, we won five Grammys, we won a national Achievement Award, and God’s been good to us.”

The first song on Almost Home is the joyous Stay On the Gospel Side – “I started singing for the Lord and I ain’t finished yet.” Despite many offers to cross over and record secular songs, The Blind Boys have remained true all these years to their original calling.

“That’s right! There were a lot of them that did not stay on the gospel side. But we did. Because when we started out, we promised the Lord that we would stay on the gospel side, no matter what. And we did that. Although it gets hard sometimes, but, you know, God takes care of his own. We’re alright.”

I said to Jimmy, “Well, tell me this, when you talk about gospel music, some people think gospel music is just all about the music, but in your gospel music, it’s about the message as well, isn’t it?”

Jimmy agreed. “We have a message. Gospel is not just music, it also has a message. Somebody might say, tell me, what is gospel? When they ask me that, I say that gospel is the good news of God. That’s what gospel is.”

Jimmy Carter comes across as an incredibly positive person. My chat with him was punctuated with frequent chuckles and smiles I could hear over the phone. He told me:

“Yeah, well, you know, I’ve had my difficulties, I’ve had my setbacks, I’ve been taken advantage of at times, But it takes all of that for us to go through what we need to go through. People say, you aren’t doing anything but singing, but they just don’t know what we have to go through. We love what we do, that’s what keeps us going so much, because when you love what you do, it keeps you motivated. But it’s not easy, we have to go through a lot of difficulties.

“But by the grace of God, we’ve gone through that, and we’re still going through that, and we’re gonna stick it out until the end!”

What a fantastic attitude. I then wondered about what keeps Jimmy going, what it is about performing that has enabled him to keep on well past the time that a lot of artists might have stopped.

“I just love to go out on that stage and hear the audience respond to the Blind Boys. We go out there and say, well here we are, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and I say, I hope that we can say something or sing something that will lift you up and make you feel good. When you come to a concert of the Blind Boys, we don’t like for you to go the same way you came. We want to give you a message. When you leave us, we want you to feel differently about life.”

Despite his age and his visual impairment, Jimmy Carter frequently comes off the stage during concerts and delights audience by coming to sing right down amongst them. “Oh, I love to do that!” he said laughing.

I asked him about the Blind Boys being invited on several occasions to the White House. “Three times!” Jimmy said proudly. And what was it like singing for President Obama?

“Well, it was kinda special because he was a black president and I thought I would never see that in my lifetime. But I’ve seen it, and I’m grateful for that. We’ve sung for President Obama, for President Clinton and President Bush, and all three of them were extremely nice to us.”

The band played Free At Last at the White House on February 9, 2010.

That made me ask about his experience of the many changes in race relations in America. The Blind Boys of Alabama toured throughout the South during the Jim Crow era of the 1940s and 1950s and were a part of the soundtrack to the Civil Rights movement. And on Almost Home, they cover the North Mississippi Allstars’ Pray for Peace, which laments the changes which still need to come in the United States: “I think our grandmother would be heartbroken / To see their children’s children right back where we started.”

Jimmy said, “You know, when we started out, the South was segregated and we weren’t allowed to sing for nobody but our people. We did not know that the white people wanted the Blind Boys before we got over there. We just wasn’t allowed to give it to them. But they loved our music, and as time went on, and we got a chance to give it to them, they accepted it, they’re still accepting it, and everywhere we go we have people who come up and tell us how they have enjoyed our performances. And that’s what we like to hear!”

I just had to ask him about Amazing Grace, which the Blind Boys sign to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. I’d heard it was his favourite song.

“Yes it is. We sing that song every night. The reason why it’s my favourite song is, if it wasn’t for His amazing grace, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.”

So how much longer does Jimmy Carter intend to keep on singing for the Lord?

“Oh, well, it won’t be too much longer, because I’m no spring chicken [laughs]. I’m gonna have to think about retiring pretty soon! But there are two or three things I wanna do before I step down!”

He then proceeded to tell me how he intended to come back to Ireland to sing for us. Sing on Jimmy Carter, we’ve loved everything the Blind Boys of Alabama have done, and we never want you to stop.

Praying away the blues

These are troubled times for us all, for sure. The Coronvirus pandemic is sweeping the world and normal life is impossible as we self-isolate, keep our social distance, wash our hands, and try and keep ourselves and each other safe.

(Photo by Miguel Medina)

Suddenly we’re in a situation in which we feel out of control. For those of us in the wealthy parts of the world, life has never been so good – healthcare, nutrition, peaceable times, leisure and the ability to spend on non-necessities, overall are better than they’ve ever been in the history of the world. Apart from the small matter of the despoiled planet, which to many people still seems personally unthreatening, life is pretty good for most of us. But here we are, suddenly feeling vulnerable. We’re suddenly beginning to understand, just a little bit of the uncertainty that people in poverty in the two-thirds world face, who are threatened by the global pandemic of tuberculosis – it kills 4,000 people a day – or by malaria, which causes more than three hundred million acute illnesses and kills at least one million people every year – nearly 3,000 a day – or the hundreds of thousands displaced, injured or killed because of conflict.

For sure we need to take the warnings about this pandemic seriously for ourselves and others, but how do we cope with the fear and anxiety that can take root? Keb’ Mo’ comes to mind here – “get on your knees and pray.”

Which is clearly what Blind Willie Johnson did in the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which killed 50 million people worldwide. In his God Don’t Never Change, Johnson looks back to his experience of God in those times:

God in the time of sickness
God in the doctor too
In the time of the influenza
He truly was a God to you
Well he’s God, God don’t never change
He’s God, always will be God.

Here’s great version by Ashley Cleveland:

Prayer crops up a surprising amount in the blues – perhaps not surprising given its roots in the hardship and suffering of black communities. For people whose life choices are limited, who face hardship and troubles, often there is no option but to pray for help. Even Robert Johnson, often (mistakenly) more associated with the devil because of the crossroads myth, appeals to God in his song Cross Road Blues, “Asked the Lord above to have mercy; save poor Bob if you please.” Muddy Waters who, like many blues artists had grown up in the church, doesn’t seem to have lost at least some of what he learned at a young age, and knew where to turn when things got bad –  “I be’s troubled, Lord, I’m troubled, I’m all worried in my mind”, he sings in I Be’s Troubled.

Son House in his Preachin’ Blues says he “went into my room, I bowed down to pray”. Problem was, “the blues come along and they blowed my spirit away”, presumably the “old worried heart disease.” as he later referred to the blues. Same thing happens again for Son House in Death Letter Blues, where he’s in his room praying when he gets the terrible news that the woman he loved had died.

B B King, in the bluesy Servant’s Prayer, prays to the Lord to:

Keep me safe from hurt and harm
When I’m burdened or I’m lonely
Comfort me within Your arms.

Trixie Smith’s Praying Blues from the early 1920s, catches this note of needing to turn to prayer when trouble comes:

Hope you don’t know half the trouble I’ve seen…
Nobody knows but the good Lord and me,
Lordy, lord, won’t you hear my plea

We find Lightnin’ Hopkins in Prayin’ Ground Blues, also praying in a situation of some desperation:

Well, I went down to my prayin’ ground
Wooo, fell down on my bended knees
Now mama we ain’t got no home
Oh, the poor children runnin’ cryin’
Now mama we ain’t got no home
Take heed to Mother fair, trust in the Maker your Lord.

We get anxious, not only about ourselves, but about those we love. Bob Dylan’s Protect My Child expresses the prayer of every parent. More than ourselves we wish good things for our children. Here’s a great version by Susan Tedeschi:

Sometimes praying doesn’t seem to come easy, even when we want to – you remember Jesus’s disciples kept falling asleep on him when they should have been praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Eric Bibb has a great version of the Rev Gary Davis song, I Heard the Angels Singing, where the singer is opposed by the devil:

What you reckon the devil said
I heard the angels singing
He said that heaven’s door is closed, go home don’t pray.

But, “I heard the angels singing,” and he presses on to the valley to pray, Bibb’s animated performance accompanying the victorious pray-er.

Then there’s Kelly Joe Phelps’s Down to the Praying Ground from his excellent Brother Sinner and the Whale album, where Phelps’s prayer is for forgiveness and mercy, a cry from a man who has exhausted his own resources.

The cry of distress to the Lord, the anxieties that disturb the mind, are all, of course, familiar to readers of the Psalms – Israel’s blues book.

In Psalm 6.6, we get “I am weary with my moaning; Every night I flood my bed with tears”. Psalm 38.17 says, “For I am ready to fall; And my pain is ever with me”. The Psalmist’s response to the injustice of life and the calamities that befall him and his people is to cry out to God, “O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer (Psalm 17:1); In my distress I called upon the Lord, And cried to my God for help (Psalm 18:6).

At such times in life, it seems the only thing to do, even for those of us who rarely pray or admit our need of God. The God of the Bible of course is the God of the needy, the oppressed, the afflicted, those with that “old worried heart disease”. As the Psalms writer says confidently in Psalm 120.1, “I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me”.

How God answers prayer, of course is a mysterious business. In fact, the whole business of prayer defies explanation. Why does God seem to answer our prayers sometimes and not to hear at other times? Why should God answer our prayers in the midst of the current pandemic when there’s a whole world of suffering out there?

One of the best approaches to this that I’ve seen comes from a song by Canadian blues singer, Colin Linden (and talented music producer, music director and songwriter). It’s called God Will Always Remember Your Prayers and is on his superb 2009 album From the Water.

Linden asserts “God will always remember your prayers”. This even “though it seems like he ain’t even there”. How many of us can identify with that? But Linden goes on:

“Just get on your knees and pray,
He might not answer right away
But God will always remember your prayers”

Linden notes what we’ve just been talking about, “We all pray our deepest prayer when trouble comes.” Ain’t that the truth? But insightfully, Linden suggests that God “only longs to hear us pray his will be done.” Our prayers are made from the limited perspective of our own circumstances and difficulties. Maybe God sees the bigger picture of our lives and we need to come to a place of trust. The song goes on:

“In this world understand that he might have a better plan
But he will always remember your prayers
God will always remember your prayers”

Not only might God not seem to answer your prayers, suggests Linden, he might actually leave you for a while “stranded”, not able to “find a way”, not able to “tell the darkness from the day”. Says Linden,

“He might leave you on your own
And let you find your way back home.”

So where does that leave us? The song’s last verse gets to the heart of things – when things are at their darkest and “you think your words can’t reach so far above”, well, maybe “all that you can give him is your love” – at this point, at an end of our own resources,

“The answer you’ve been waiting for
Is the peace down in your heart”
God will always remember your prayers”

There’s a serenity, Linden seems to suggest, that comes, after doing all we can do and all we’re supposed to do, from surrender to God’s “better plan” and a trust in God’s loving care that brings peace, even in the darkest of days. This, then, the song suggests, is what prayer is about – not about simply asking God to come and make things better (that’s our immediate inclination, and there’s nothing wrong with that) but getting ourselves to a point of trust in a God who loves, cares and who sees the end from the beginning. Linden’s chorus sums it up:

“I’m calling you Lord, I’m calling you Lord
I’m calling you Lord, Lord, Lord, calling you Lord
I’m waitin’ on you, I’m waitin’ on you
And I can’t do nothin’ till you come”

The last word, we’ll leave to Eric Bibb: I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.