Skip James, Larkin Poe, Charles Dickens and…Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lonesome Christmas Blues?

How do you like your Christmas songs? Schmalzy soft jazz, White Christmas and all that? Gritty like the Pogues? (please, no!) Or maybe with a tongue firmly in cheek, like the Bare Naked Ladies?

And of course there are the Christmas blues songs. B B King with Merry Christmas Baby; Freddie King’s Christmas Tears; Koko Taylor’s Merry Merry Christmas; Roy Milton’s Christmas Time Blues; Bessie Smith’s At the Christmas Ball Blues; or maybe Joe Bonamassa’s Lonesome Christmas. All on the general theme of – it’s Christmas and my baby done left me / I ain’t got a baby / my baby and me are apart.

But then there’s Victoria Spivey’s Christmas Morning Blues, where she’s lamenting the fact that her man’s in jail; John Lee Hooker’s Blues for Christmas, with the plaintive “I ain’t got a dime;” and Blind Blake’s Lonesome Christmas Blues where he remembers last Christmas when he was in jail, and this Christmas isn’t much better – “I’m sick and I can’t get well.” Tough times don’t stop for Christmas. Just ask the millions living in war torn Syria or Yemen or South Sudan; other those going hungry in East Africa, or the brutalized Rohingya people of Burma. Or even the more than 43m Americans and 14m Britons living in poverty.

Truth is, the world can be a tough place, and none of us are immune from tough times – family problems, health problems, relationship problems. The celebrations of the holiday season don’t make these go away.

It’s hard to find a blues song that taps into the heart of Christmas. And by that I mean hope. G.K. Chesterton, the writer, poet, and philosopher said that “hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.” So it was with the first Christmas – a family living under the occupation of a brutal, despotic regime; a new baby, brought into the world in the most humble and poor of circumstances; the birth announced to a bunch of rough, uneducated shepherds; the new family becoming refugees, forced to move to a foreign country. Pretty tough circumstances.

And yet the story is shot through with hope – that change and redemption is possible. That things can be different. That the power of love unleashed into the world through the coming of this baby can ultimately be more powerful than all the tyrants and war-mongers and greed-merchants and liars. That justice and fairness can prevail. Instead of despair at the state the world is in, the Christmas story urges us to take courage – see the possibility of redemption and change for ourselves and begin to make a difference in the world around. Hope in a hopeless world.

Hope. New possibilities. Change. It’s what Bethlehem is all about.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

Bryan Lee: still travelling that old lonesome highway – and loving it.

“Whether he’s wailing a Freddy King inspired blues ballad, stomping out low down and dirty blues, or getting down with a super funky New Orleans groove, Bryan Lee is gonna grab your soul and squeeze it till you scream in blues ecstasy.” – Duke Robillard

BMA Award winner and Grammy Nominee, Bryan Lee, has had a lifetime in the blues. In his mid-seventies, the bluesman, who lost his sight at the age of 8, is still playing consistently and has just released a new album, Sanctuary. His vocal and guitar playing powers are still very much in evidence in a very fine collection of unabashed gospel blues. A long-time resident and performer in New Orleans, with a Chicago blues guitar style which channels Luther Allison, Albert King and Albert Collins, Bryan now resides close to the beach in south Florida, but his musical enthusiasm and passion for the blues is undiminished.

The new album Sanctuary is a top-notch blues album, well produced, recorded and mastered by Steve Hamilton, and, as well as a classy band, features the wonderful, gospel vocals of Deirdre Fellner. There’s a detectable funky, New Orleans feel throughout, from the opener Fight for the Light onward, and Lee’s and Marc Spagone’s guitar work sparkles. Lee lays out his stall pretty early, telling us in Jesus Gave Me the Blues, that the blues is a gift from his saviour – even though he’s “getting low down and dirty.” There’s humour as well – in U-Haul which gets materialism in firmly in his sights, he sings, “I never saw no U-Haul behind a hearse.” You gotta hold on to things lightly. He follows this them again in Mr. Big – where the guy has the big house, fancy car, a Fortune 500 company – “but you ain’t happy.”

The album concludes with two songs recorded with the Adam Douglas band some time ago, but which make a fitting inclusion in Sanctuary. The Lord’s Prayer is as you’ve never heard it before in church – a blues version, but with a distinctive gospel feel, and reverently sung by Lee.

Down at the Crossroads chatted to Bryan about his life in the blues and the new album. He was upbeat, excited about the release of Sanctuary and about life in general.

 

DATC: Bryan, congratulations on the new album. I’ve been listening to it these past few days, and it’s great, catchy tunes, great musicianship and arrangements. We’ll have a chat about it in a minute. But first of all, Bryan, you’ve had a lifetime in the blues. Tell us about how you got started all those years ago – who inspired you?

BL: I guess in the beginning, the early 50s when I was about 10 years old, I started getting into my folks’ music. I heard Chuck Berry and right away, it was like, “if I could play guitar like that!” And then I heard Little Richard, and I was, “man, I wanna sing like that!” And that kind of drew me into the blues a little bit, but the thing that did it completely – I was 17 years old, and we were getting a new drummer into our band, and we went over to his house. And he played Freddie King’s Hideaway, and we were just knocked out! And then we listened to the B side and it was a slow blues called I Love the Woman. I just fell in love with it and I said, “man, that’s where I wanna go.”

So I went down to the record store looking for Freddie King and found a couple of 45s, and the guy working there sold me an album with Hideaway on it. And I really got into that record – that first song…[breaks into song]…man I was hooked. I’ve heard Wolf and BB and all these guys, but Freddie King is the one that connects to me.

Along the way I got to be good friends with Albert King – he was always nice. I recorded an album way back in 1984 that had four Albert King songs on it, and he came to New Orleans, so I went to see him and gave him a copy of the album. And he listened to it and appreciated what I had done with his tunes. That’s really cool.

But through my 20s my shows were getting bluesier and bluesier and I started getting into trouble with the club owners, who only wanted to hear Top 40 music. But then we had that era when the Allman Brothers hit, and it kinda helped for the blues guys to get their foot in the door.

But, you know, I travelled that old lonesome highway, because that’s what I wanted to do. If you love it, man, you do it.

DATC: What is it about this music that has keep you playing it all these years?

BL: As I get more into the music, the blues gets better with age. It’s the understanding of it. It’s not the devil’s music. You can go to, say, Sao Paulo, Brazil, a very large city, and you get 40,000 people answering you with “hey, hey, the blues is all right”…The blues is a universal language. B B King said it’s places, people and things. It goes to our make up in our soul. You can’t just sit there, you gotta move!

And some guys have that knack. I could listen to T-Bone Walker all day. And probably one of my favourite guitar players of all is Matt Guitar Murphy. I got to be friends with him over the last years of his life. I met him back in 1976 when I opened up for the James Cotton Band and Matt was the guitar player. And he was such a gracious guy. Same with James. James and I were really good friends. There’s something in these people, It’s their soul, that’s what it’s about. You gotta feel it, it’s in your soul.

And you can overcome so much in your life with the power of the blues. And that’s why I made this album, to try and make people understand – Jesus gave us the music. It’s pain, it’s sorrow, but it’s also laughter and success. You gotta fight for the light, you can’t just let darkness break you down. God gave you your life and you gotta respect that. To me, music is the thing that will lift you and will bring you to church and will bring you through stuff.

DATC: And of course, Bryan, your new album, Sanctuary, is an album of gospel blues. And you pull no punches – you’re very explicit about your faith. You say in The Gift, “I’m an old bluesman.” And then you say “Jesus has straightened me out.” Tell us a bit about your journey in faith, how this bluesman found faith.

BL: Well, there was a short time in my life, probably about two years, when I rejected organized religion completely. But I was raised as a Catholic, and we were working in a bar in New Orleans in the early 90s, and we’d have a lot of conventions in the city, there were always people in town. And every evening after dinner, they’d be looking for entertainment. So we would fill the house. Anyway, I met this woman one Friday night, and she was from Seattle, Washington. And she said, Bryan, “I’ve been in town since Monday and I discovered you on Tuesday, and have come every night since” – and she told me she was going to go to the St Louis Cathedral on Sunday and she invited me to go with her.

So we went to church and when I walked up to communion, I knew that was where I was meant to be. And I was like, “Jesus, thank you for not forgetting me.” And she and I had dinner and had a wonderful discussion about things, and we became friends. But she was the one that brought me back to church.

But you don’t just be a good person on Sunday. You gotta be a good person 7 days a week, 24/7. But that’s hard to do, with all the trials and tribulations you might have to go through. Even the rich man has got lots of problems.

DATC: You lost your eyesight when you were a boy. How difficult was it for you to get started playing guitar and start performing and then forge a career?

BL: Well…like most young people I was fearless. So, I’d be up on stage, and to me the place was always full, and people looking at me in a funny way, I don’t see it! I had an advantage!

I remember one night I was walking home. And I had a three-piece suit on, with a fancy tie, and I’m walking home, with a cane in my right hand, and all of a sudden, somebody yells at me, “Stop, stop! Blind man, stop!” So I stopped, and this woman comes up to me and says, “Where is your bucket?” I said, “My bucket?” And she said, “Well you’re blind, you have to have a bucket, I want to put something in your bucket.”

So I said, “Ma’am, that’s all right, give it to the Salvation Army, or the church. I don’t need it, as you can see, I’m working, I’m a musician.” And then she was like, “Aw, shucks.” She’d seen this blind man and thought she better do this man a favour. And I got helped across streets I didn’t want to cross, and up steps I didn’t want to go up. But things like this just always used to make me smile. I think now that people are more aware, it’s not so much like that now.

DATC: You’ve a song on this album Don’t Take My Blindness for a Weakness – you don’t downplay the difficulties, but you sound as if you’ve become very strong through it.

BL: Yes. You got it Gary! It might take me a little bit longer than you, but I will get there. I’ve been playing music since I was 13 years old, and I’m 75 now. I’ve travelled all around the world. I got a chance to play the Montreal Jazz Festival this year – 5^th or 6^th time I’ve done it – and oh, it was so much fun! People say at my age you shouldn’t do a lot of travel – but I want to get my message out.

This is what I’ve discovered through the years – if we were all blind, we wouldn’t have all these prejudices, we wouldn’t have all this hatred and stuff. Human beings would have to come together and help each other. So, who’s blind? For me, if I’ve got a choice between eyesight and insight, I’ll take insight every time.

DATC: Bryan, tell us about The Lord’s Prayer. How did that song come about?

BL: I was doing a festival in Norway in an island called Svalbard. This week is their dark season festival, it’s basically a blues festival. It was a 5-day festival, with quite a few bands. On the last day, the woman who organized the festival picked two groups to play in the church to close the festival. So she asked me if I would work with the Adam Douglas group. So we got together, and they were just a killer band – they could take a Michael Jackson song and make it sound like the blues! Well, the night before the rehearsal, I went to bed, fell asleep and had a dream about the Lord’s Prayer, the arrangement, the chords changes and all. And when I got up the next morning, it still was in my head – lot of time, that doesn’t happen – normally you dream a song but when you wake up you don’t remember it. So I went to the rehearsal and they asked me what I wanted to do. So I went through the chord changes with the band and they said, that’s great, let’s do it.

So we did it in the church, and we also did the other one, Jesus is My Lord and Savior, Then after the festival we went back to Oslo and we had about two days, so Adam said to me, “we should record those two songs.” So we went into the recording studio and we did ‘em! And we hugged each other afterwards and said, you know, we’re gonna have to finish this some day. And we all hoped we could get back together somehow in the future – but that never happened.

So in 2017, I just decided that if I don’t record this record, I’ll feel like I cheated the good Lord. Because I had promised him this album, for all the good music he’s put in our soul, and the ability to entertain people and to communicate with an audience. I can rip up an audience, you know! I tell stories, but I don’t think about what I’m going to say. I call the first three tunes and then after that, it’s what happens happens!

DATC: It’s a great album, Bryan – the arrangements and the musicianship are all wonderful.

Bryan: Out of my brain and out of my soul! And I’m not through – I’ve an idea for another album, and another album beyond that. And I used to do 300 dates a year, now, not so many as that. But it’s quality, not quantity!

It’s a day at a time, one step at a time. And Jesus is there – we just need to go to that place of sanctuary, where it’s real still, it’s real quiet, where you can really touch the good Lord and find answers to your problems.

DATC: Thank you Bryan.

Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music?

Bob Dylan said he was a fan; Billboard called him “the most important songwriter since Paul Simon; he played on bills with the Who, Janis Joplin and the Doors. Larry Norman is the most important rock’n’roll artist you’ve never heard of.

Norman was the “father of Christian rock,” an outstanding performer and songwriter, who effectively launched a new genre of music, and who, to the end, fiercely held on to his faith in Jesus and his determination to be an artist, rather than simply a Christian propagandist. Gregory Alan Thornbury’s book, Why Should The Devil Have All the Good Music? (taking the title of one of Norman’s early and most provocative songs), gives us a comprehensive and compelling account of Norman’s career from his childhood in California to his early death in Oregon in 2008.

Thornbury charts Norman’s development as an artist from being a successful “secular” performer in the sixties to leader of the “Jesus Movement” in the late sixties to world-wide touring artist, and the subsequent ups and downs of a career that entailed popular acclaim, distrust and suspicion from fellow believers, betrayal from friends, physical injury and subsequent miraculous healing, and a considerable amount of both single-minded focus on his own values and vision, and naiveite on Norman’s part.

It’s a fascinating tale, woven with considerable skill by Thornbury who had access to Norman’s considerable archive of personal papers. Thornbury’s picture of Norman is sympathetic but never hagiographic, and Norman’s difficulties with other artists and various aspects of the music business are not skirted over. At the same time, Thornbury’s account of the rumour mongering, jealousy and outright opposition that Norman suffered from the evangelical church in the United States, and the outrageous behaviour of his first wife, leave one wondering how he survived with his faith intact and his commitment to his art undiminished.

Although we get a perspective on Norman’s life up until his death in 2008, most of the book deals with the twists and turns of his life up to 1981. There is an engaging story of Larry’s transition from singer in popular Californian group People! in the sixties to leading light in a social phenomenon hailed by Time Magazine as the Jesus Movement at the end of that decade, as disenchantment with flower power and free love began to set in.

Larry Norman’s 1972 album Only Visiting This Planet is considered by many, including Thornbury, to be a masterpiece and one of the best Christian albums of all time. It was inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry as a “cultural, artistic, and/or historical treasure”. In the hard hitting Why Should the Devil have all the Good Music from the album, Norman sings:

“I want the people to know that he saved my soul
But I still like to listen to the radio
They say rock ‘n’ roll is wrong, we’ll give you one more chance
I say I feel so good I gotta get up and dance

I know what’s right, I know what’s wrong, I don’t confuse it
All I’m really trying to say
Is why should the devil have all the good music?
I feel good every day
‘Cause Jesus is the rock and he rolled my blues away.”

Thornbury does a good job of highlighting Norman’s commitment throughout his life to a very personal experience of Jesus. But this, it seems, never led to pietism or a narrow-minded exclusivism. On the contrary, right from these early days, Norman’s all-encompassing vision of what Christian faith should be about made him an incisive critic of Christian hypocrisy.

According to Thornbury,

“Unlike other Christian leaders, Larry seemed to believe that the easy relationship the Church enjoyed with American culture was more of a problem than a blessing. He somehow seemed to understand that apologetics may actually need to start with apologies: for the Church’s racism, ready acceptance of aggression, violence, and war, and for an unwillingness to listen to the concerns of a generation.”

Norman’s critique of evangelicalism still echoes powerfully, after all these years. Consider this lyric from The Great American Novel from 1972:

“You kill a black man at midnight just for talking to your daughter
Then you make his wife your mistress and you leave her without water
And the sheet you wear upon your face is the sheet your children sleep on
At every meal you say a prayer; you don’t believe but still you keep on.”

Thornbury notes Norman’s commitment to supporting organizations which sought to bring relief to the poor in various parts of the world to the end of his life.

His insistence on his music as art and not simply proselytizing, however, would bring him into serious conflict with his Christian audience, and his attempts at building a community of like-minded artists ultimately failed, at least partly because of the betrayal and ambition of people Norman considered as friends. The twists and turns of all this are engagingly and, it seems to me, quite fairly laid out by Thornbury. As are the broad sketches of Norman’s two failed marriages, the first of which you become amazed lasted so long.

Norman was a fierce critic of early “Contemporary Christian Music,” questioning its quality and artistic value, but nevertheless he was the first professional singer-songwriter to express his faith in a rock-blues genre. Thornbury notes how he paved the way for a whole new genre of music and a new generation which would acknowledge its debt to Norman’s uncompromising approach.

Friends of mine in Belfast who worked with Larry Norman and had him stay as a guest in their homes over his many visits to Northern Ireland (he was a frequent performer there during the “Troubles” when many other artists refused to come, and a 4-CD set entitled “The Belfast Bootlegs” was released in 2001) recall a Larry Norman who was unfailingly generous and kind, and whose passion and commitment as a performer was second to none.

Thornbury quotes Black Francis, former frontman for the Pixies as saying, “In my humble opinion Larry was the most Christ-like person I ever met.” That, no doubt, would have pleased Norman, who, from reading the liner notes to his 2001 album Tourniquet, was only too aware of his own failings but who was “overwhelmed by God’s incredible mercy and faithful care.”

This is a gem of a book, utterly engaging from start to finish, which will appeal not only to Larry Norman fans, but to both music fans and anyone interested in the engagement, or lack of it, between the Christian church and culture, particularly in the United States.

Gregory Alan Thornbury, Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock, (New York, Convergent, 2018). $26

For more details on the books, click here.

Author G A Thornbury

Bob Dylan’s Blues: Trouble No More

Volume 13 in Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series has just been released, Trouble No More, covering the so-called “gospel years” of 1979-1981. There’s a two CD pack with 30 songs, including a couple never before released, and then a whopping 8 CD + DVD offering which, at over £135, I’m afraid priced me out. I might have a friend who can help me out though!

Dylan’s three “gospel” albums from the period were widely pilloried at the time, but the release of this material, all recorded live from concerts in the United States and Europe, has shown what anybody who attended these gigs at the time knew – the performances were nothing short of electrifying. I went to my first Dylan concert on July 1, 1981 at Earl’s Court, London, which was kicked off by four tambourine swinging female gospel singers, Regina McCrary, Carolyn Dennis, Clydie King and  Madelyn Quebec, before Bob weighed in with Gotta Serve Somebody. By this stage, Dylan was beginning to mix in some of the old songs with the gospel material, so it wasn’t long before the whole place was erupting to Like A Rolling Stone. I was in Bob heaven with the set list that night, but it was the energy and conviction of the performances that pulsated through the arena that stayed with me long after the final chords of Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door had died away.

Rolling Stone, never a fan of Dylan’s gospel material, admitted of Trouble No More, “What’s often lost in those arguments is that it produced some of his greatest concerts,” while the Times of London grudgingly confessed that “the two-disc version is ample proof that Dylan finding God was, in musical terms at least, no bad thing.” The New York Times understood better what went on: “What comes through these recording is Mr. Dylan’s unmistakable fervor…[the songs are] “anything but routine…Mr. Dylan flings every line with conviction.” Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin says simply, “Like the mid-1960s, he was at the absolute peak of his powers.”

This was a prolific period. More than a dozen songs that didn’t make it onto the three albums from 1979 to 1981 show up in Trouble in Mind. The body of work composed by Dylan during this time “more than matches any commensurate era in his long and distinguished career – or, indeed that of any other twentieth century popular artist,” says Heylin, and it’s hard to disagree.

The song performances are in turns exhilarating, rowdy, playful, and combative, combined with moments of prayerlike reverence. It’s hard not to be moved by What Can I Do for You, from San Diego’s 27 November 1979 performance. This was a centrepiece of Dylan’s performances in these concerts and his passion and sense of gratitude is undeniable. The gospel backing and the mournful harmonica adds to the poignancy. “You have given all there is to give; what can I give to you?” Dylan’s sense of indebtedness oozes from the song. My wife and I were listening to this song the other day in the car. She doesn’t really like most of the music I listen too – she’s more of a classical music fan. But she suddenly said, “He’s really a fantastic singer, isn’t he?” The character of Dylan’s voice will always, I guess, be something of an acquired taste, but he is indeed a very fine singer, able to phrase a song exquisitely, and, as he does on this one, wring the emotion out of it.

What I found interesting listening to these performances is how much they are blues songs. Gospel blues, yes – but nothing wrong with that – we have a long line of such songs from Blind Willie Johnson and Rev. Robert Wilkins onwards. Slow Train, Gotta Serve Somebody, When You Gonna Wake Up, Do Right to Me Baby, Are You Ready and Dead Man, Dead Man are all served up in a heady mixture of the blues, rock and gospel. There’s something about the blues, when it’s played right that just manages to get right inside you and touch you deeply. And that’s what’s going on here with these songs – aside, of course from the deeply felt lyrics.

And then there is the very solid blues rock of The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar. The November 13, 1980 performance of this from San Francisco features Carlos Santana on guitar with a couple of blistering solos and Dylan as intense as you’re likely to hear him. The song is not on my vinyl version of Shot of Love, but was eventually added to the CD version.

The Groom’s lyrics are not anywhere near as explicit in Christian meaning as most of the other songs, which speak clearly of God, Jesus, the need for faith, repentance and Christ’s second coming. Here Dylan seems to be in enigmatic prophet mode, speaking of a world of chaos, madness, war and misunderstanding. But remember, this is a period where Dylan has steeped himself in the scriptures, and with his prodigious memory, all this theology and apocalyptic imagery is still swirling around his head. The talk of the groom, the implied bride and waiting at the altar seems to me has to refer to Christ and his bride, the church, straight from the pages of the Revelation of St. John. The stage, says Dylan, is burning and the curtain is rising on the new age, but we’re not quite there yet – the groom (Christ) is still waiting at the altar for his bride (Christ-followers) to be welcomed to the new age. For now, there is chaos, massacres of innocents, enough to nauseate you. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

The song is a powerful one – “a fiery piece of molten fury” [album liner notes] and the repetitive blues riff drives home the prophet’s urgent message. Before anyone gets too dismissive of this apocalyptic thread in Dylan’s songs, here and elsewhere, let’s realize that, like it or not, the idea of a second coming of Jesus has been part of orthodox Christianity for the last two thousand years. Yes, recently some Christians have got a bit confused about the idea of heaven as a golden city in the skies and about expecting a so-called “rapture,” but Christians have always hoped for a new world forged out of the old, where peace, love and justice would prevail. And that idea comes through loud and clear in, for example, When He Returns: “Like a thief in the night, he’ll replace wrong with right, When he returns… Will I ever learn that there’ll be no peace, that the war won’t cease, Until He returns?”

Dylan gives us, as the New York Times put it, “a sense of moral gravity, a righteous tone, apocalyptic thoughts and a delight in the rich and powerful receiving their come-uppance.”

The important thing for Christians is to live now as if that new age mentioned in The Groom’s Still Waiting At the Altar had already arrived – peaceably, loving neighbours and enemies alike, and seeking justice for all. That’s the answer to Dylan’s question, What Can I Do For You?

Brexit, Xenophobia and Blind Willie Johnson

“Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right“

Brexit. The UK referendum on its membership of the European Union has caused a huge amount of division and ill feeling, and we are in the middle of the fall out – the pound is tumbling, markets are reacting badly to the uncertain about what will happen and political parties are tearing themselves apart.

A small majority of people in the UK – and these, for the most part in England, rather than Scotland and Northern Ireland – voted for the change, and one of the issues that many people felt very exercised about was that of immigration. The EU allows for free passage of people between all the member states. “Britain is in the grip of an immigration crisis,” said Nigel Farage, one of the leaders of the “Leave” campaign. The UK is at “breaking point,” he claimed, all the fault of the EU. Great Britain, he says, has “frankly become unrecognizable” and looks “like a foreign land.”

Although this xenophobia clearly played on the minds of voters in what are clearly anxious times, Farage’s immigrant fear-mongering is badly flawed. First, it is quite clear, and now admitted after the vote by the Leave Campaign itself, that withdrawing from the EU is unlikely to reduce immigrant numbers in the UK.

Secondly, the evidence shows the benefits of immigration to the UK economy:

• According to research by University College London, European immigrants who arrived in the UK since 2000 contributed around £205bn to the economy between 2001 and 2011.
• Not only that, they also rewarded the country with valuable human capital and vital skills that would have cost the UK £6.8bn in education.
• Earlier this year, nursing leaders warned the government that if lower-earning non-EU workers were to be deported, the shortage of nurses in the UK could worsen and the NHS would have to spend millions on recruitment.
• In terms of the UK’s benefits system, immigrants arriving in the UK after 2000 were43% less likely than UK-born workers to receive state benefits and were 7% less likely to live in social housing.
• Immigrants from the European Economic Area paid 34% more in tax than they took out.

And yet Farage and the other leaders of the Leave campaign were able to play on the latent xenophobia which exists in the UK, as it does in virtually every other country in the world. And it’s interesting – and extremely disturbing – that since the vote to leave the EU, we have seen instance after instance of ugly racist abuse around England both in terms of graffiti on buildings and personal abuse.

Sadly there is the same race-baiting rhetoric coming from would-be presidential candidate, Donald Trump. “People are pouring across our borders unabated,” he says. He’s on record saying that the Mexicans that are coming into the US are killers, criminals and rapists, and that he wants to ban all Muslims from the US. Similar rhetoric, similar xenophobia.

Whole every country wants to have a proper immigration policy, and the world refugee crisis, caused largely by war, is not an easy problem to solve, but we seem to be sliding away from the values of neighbourliness, civility and openness that have often been part of life in the US and the UK. I’ve found it interesting, as I’ve travelled around the world and met people in desperate poverty – that it’s these very same people who have so very little, that are the most generous. They’ll share what very little food they have with you. They’ll welcome you into their tiny homes.

Maybe that’s why we get this theme appearing in the blues – amongst blues singers and communities who had very little, and yet were prepared to share what they had with others. Take Blind Willie Johnson, who lived a life of extreme hardship and penury – he might have expected nothing less as a black blind man in the early decades of the 20^th century. But check out his Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right, recorded in 1930 with backing vocals by Willie B. Harris on Columbia.

“Careful of how you treat a stranger, Careful of how you turn him away.”

At the end of the day, Willie Johnson says, “All of us here are strangers, None of us have no home.” There but for the grace of God…

And then there’s the classic Careless Love, recorded by a host of singers. “Don’t you never, drive a stranger from your door…it might be your brother or your sister, you’ll never know.”

There’s the nub of it right there – we’re all brothers and sisters. Our common humanity demands we take care of each other, demands compassion – never mind the fact that the immigrant might actually be bringing our society something beneficial.

But Willie Johnson goes further, particularly speaking to those of us who are Jesus followers. “Well Christ came down as stranger, He didn’t have no home.” Jesus became a refugee – exiled to Egypt as a child – and was at times all but homeless – “foxes have holes, the birds of the air nests, but the Son of Man nowhere to lay his head.” Is it possible to be a follower of this Christ and not reach out in compassion to the immigrant, especially if he or she has been dispossessed, made a refugee by war or danger?

The words of an early disciple come to mind: But if a person has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need and that person doesn’t care – how can the love of God remain in him? (1 John 3:17)

 

 

Mavis Staples – inspiring, uplifting, joyous.

Mavis Staples is a youthful 76. She says, “It puts a wonder on your mind. I’m losing all of my friends, and you really wonder how much longer you have, and how it will be when you leave. But whenever I have to go, I feel like I’m ready. I feel like I have lived a wonderful life.”

This joie de vivre comes through in spades in the new documentary about her life, Mavis!, which if you’re not lucky enough to see in a movie theatre, you can download from itunes. Mavis! is an hour and a half of sheer joy, taking you through Mavis Staples’ career from the 1950s until now. And what a career, from singing gospel in her family’s band to their becoming civil rights icons with the freedom songs of the 60s, to funky soul in the 70s, to two albums with Prince in the 80s, and of late 3 excellent rootsy, bluesy, stripped back albums produced lovingly by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedie.

The Staples Singers led by the indomitable Pops Staples and featuring Mavis’s charisma and amazing voice moved against the tide of gospel singing in the 60s under the influence of Martin Luther King Jr. whom Pops admired greatly. They began to sing protest and freedom songs, like Why (Am I Treated So Bad), where other gospel groups wanted to stick with the more spiritual stuff. The truth is, of course, that the freedom material is every bit as spiritual as the “spiritual.” Faith without works is dead, as someone put it a long time ago.

Staples still sings these political songs.  “They’re still relevant. You know, sometimes I can watch the news on the television and I feel like I’m back in the 60s,” she says. MLK Song on her new album, Livin’ On  A High Note is based on a Martin Luther King speech she remembers hearing: “In the march for peace / Tell them I played the drum / When I have to meet my day.”

Livin’ On A High Note, her 13^th solo album, is terrific, typically Mavis and, like the film, joyous. She told her songwriters, “I want something joyful. I want to stop making people cry. I’ve been making people cry all my life. The songs I sing, the freedom songs and my gospel songs — I know I’ve been inspiring and uplifting people. But now I want to reach them in a joyful way.”

And what a great panel of songwriters she has – a testimony to the respect in which Mavis Staples is held. They include Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Merrill Garbus (Tune-Yards), Nick Cave, Neko Case, Ben Harper and M. Ward.

One song I find very intriguing is Nick Cave’s contribution, Jesus, Lay Down Beside Down Me. The song is interesting from a theological point of view. We tend to think of God – rightly – as the one who looks after us, cares for us, loves us. This song inverts things and invites us to think about us caring for God, for Jesus. “Jesus, lay down beside me, lay down and rest your troubled mind…lay down your worries,” it says, trying to get us to a perspective other than our own. What is the world like from the perspective of the divine? “The truth has fallen on deaf ears, Lord…And the flowers of your love, Lord, refuse to seed, In a world full of greed.”

It reminds us a bit of those doleful verses in John’s gospel, chapter 1, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.” In a world where everyone is more concerned about getting more than their fair share, and truth is whatever you want it to be, and Jesus is irrelevant, can we imagine a God’s eye view of things?

“Are you in need?” sings Mavis to the Lord. It reminds me a little of the old John Wesley hymn, O God of Good The Unfathomed Sea, where Wesley says, “yet self sufficient as Thou art, thou dost desire my worthless heart.” Somehow, incredible though it may seem, God – self-sufficient, eternal, omnipotent – desires human love in return for his love. And Nick Cave’s song somehow seems to me to capture this. Love is never a one-way street where one party does all the giving and one all the taking. So perhaps Cave is onto something here, making us think about our part in a relationship with God – real love given, with a care and concern for the other. It starts to take the divine-human relationship away from a sterile belief system into the realm of something real, tangible, alive.

The relationship, given the nature of God, can never be equal. The dependence ultimately will be us upon God. And yet God’s love calls for love in return and love can never be simple dependence; it must be active if it is to mean anything. As St. Augustine once said, ‘To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.”

When Mavis Staples first heard the words of Cave’s song, she said “Woah. I’m going to comfort Jesus instead of him comforting me.” Perhaps they’re both on to something.