Blues Gospel

If you've never heard Blind Willie Johnson, you are in for one of the great, bone-chilling treats in music. Johnson played slide guitar and sang in a rasping, false bass that could freeze the blood. But no bluesman was he; this was gospel music of the highest order, full of emotion and...

Bull City Red, who played with the Reverend Gary Davis at various times, turns up on vocals for "I Saw the Light," but the rest of 1935-1949 is all Davis' show. Given the quality of what is here; the quality and inventiveness of the playing alone is astonishing, a youthful version...

Yazoo's Praise God I'm Satisfied is an excellent collection of 14 tracks Blind Willie Johnson recorded in the '30s, including such numbers as "Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed," "Praise God I'm Satisfied," "Rain Don't Fall on Me" and "Jesus...

Blind Willie Johnson was perhaps the finest singing evangelist of all time. While the 16 tracks on this CD aren't as striking as those on the seminal Praise God I'm Satisfied, they're still invigorating and a vital part of his legacy. Johnson played acoustic rather than slide on...

Recorded during a three hour session on August 24, 1960, Gary Davis laid down 12 of his most impassioned spirituals for Harlem Street Singer. Starting off the session with a version of Blind Willie Johnson's "Goin' to Sit Down on the Banks of the River." Overall, the...

The Rev. Gary Davis forsook his gospel calling for a little while between 1962 and 1966 to set down formal studio versions of many of his most important lues and agtime repertory. Some of the material here runs over ten minutes, as Davis lays out his best playing and singing voice. The booklet...

The connection between rural blues and spiritual music is sometimes overlooked. This 1966 recording, featuring McDowell, his guitar, and the Hunter's Chapel Singers of Como, Mississippi (including his wife Annie Mae), is one of the best illustrations of how closely the styles can be linked....

Long before Christian rockers were using so-called "Devil's music" to promote a religious message, the Rev. Gary Davis demonstrated that acoustic blues and folk didn't have to be about matters of the flesh. Davis, a fascinating cult figure, was as authentic a lues/folk...

With 18 Decca tracks from 1938-1948, this CD is not only a good survey of some of Tharpe's best work, but one of the best compilations of any sort to illustrate gospel's crossover into lues, R&B, and secular music in general. Admittedly that's not the busiest...

This Rev. Gary Davis release has been issued throughout the world under a bevy of names and should not be confused with the Prestige disc simply titled Pure Religion. These recordings are notable for both their sacred and secular nature. Equally as interesting is the wide range of performance...

This first edition title -- later renamed Gospel, Blues & Street Songs -- is one of the cornerstones of Riverside Records' "Original Blues Classics" series. Regardless of the moniker, these sides loom large in the available works of seminal lues icons Pink Anderson and Rev....

His most Rev. Gary Davis was an active musician in addition to being a guitar instructor during his later years. From Blues to Gospel (1993) contains a bakers' dozen of selections featuring his inimitable performance style on an assortment of gospel and secular lues tunes. By the time of...

Gary Davis (1896-1972) was a decided and acknowledged influence on a number of early rockers, including Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones, and this sampler of works from 1935-49 shows ample reasons why. The pieces are almost all eligious blues, but of an extremely earthy and...

This three-disc "ultimate collection" is an impressive compilation of recordings made featuring Rev. Gary Davis during a period spanning 1956 to 1966. An obvious labor of love, Demons and Angels was compiled and produced by one of Rev. Davis' former students -- Stefan Grossman who...

This purported one-off "gospel" project involving jazz organist John Medeski (yep, that one), pedal steel guitarist Robert Randolph (of Arhoolie's Sacred Steel series fame), and the North Mississippi Allstars (featuring both Cody and Luther Dickinson -- Jim Dickinson's...

Skip McDonald's Little Axe returns for Champagne and Grits, and it could well be the band's finest, most expansive set yet. Little Axe's brand of lues-gospel-dub is probably the most interesting and adventurous of all the projects that attempt to infuse new life into the lues,...

Blind Willie Johnson wasn't a lues singer in the generally accepted sense. He was really a singing preacher with a killer slide guitar style and a guttural voice that indicated clearly that he wasn't about to mess around with the small stuff. While many lues singers woke up in the...

Sounding at times like a diminutive understudy for Dinah Washington, Lula Reed had a high-pitched, sassy, spunky voice that was perfect for the King record label's R&B market. This first volume of her complete works presented in chronological order opens with two sides recorded in New...