When’s the last time you got your Gospel on?
Of the many things I’ll miss, again, this year at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, as much as the food, the weather, the drink, the culture, and the music, is that Gospel tent. Getting your gospel on gives you an otherwise impossible opportunity to connect with a different time and a way of seeing the world that is increasingly rare. If churches are good for one thing, they have inspired some amazing music. From Bach to Coltrane, faith and spiritual expression have served as the impetus for some of the most joyful noise we’ve ever received. Gospel music, perhaps our earliest American art form, remains a living link to the (often appalling) circumstances under which our country developed. For the African Americans brought here against their will and forced to live in unimaginable conditions, faith was a source of salvation (however curious or unsatisfying) and testifying was at once a form of protest and transcendence: it can, of course, be stirring and often beautiful, but it can also be raw, ugly and confrontational. At its best, it somehow manages to incorporate all of these elements.
Fire In My Bones is, quite simply, a miracle of music. It covers everything from street-corner preaching to sanctified blues, and includes ancient-school Fife & Drum as well as good old fashioned church harmonies. This set focuses on obscure tracks from mostly unheralded musicians, and it’s the closest thing I’ve heard in ages to a sonic encyclopedia of history in sound. And feeling. The results are uplifting, harrowing, deeply odd and ceaselessly affecting.
Check it out:
Laura Rivers, from 1963 (“That’s Alright”):
Rev. Steward & Family, from 1953 (“I Made A Vow To The Lord”):
Mississippi Nightingales, from 1971 (“Don’t Let Him Ride”):
That is addictive stuff and it’s just the tip of the iceberg. One of the best songs on the collection, “I’ll Never Turn Back” by Brother Shelby Bransford, Jr. aka Singing Son Of Zion (any fucking questions?) –from 1977 but sounding like 1877– is a masterpiece of the first order (if you’ve ever taken my advice on anything, download it @ Amazon for .99. It’ll be the best buck you drop in 2016). A stripped down, slow-as-a-summer-evening scorcher, it features minimalist organ and electric guitar interplay which creates an uncanny, elegiac atmosphere. And the vocals…I don’t know what else to say other than this: it’s one of the most moving and profound performances I’ve ever heard. Yearning, vulnerable, hopeful and, above all, resolute: I’ll never turn back in this world anymore. You don’t have to be religious to feel this. Spiritual in the simplest, most authentic sense, it’s a testimony from one human being who has seen things and has to share them: Stepped down in the water; water was cold/Chill runs at yo’ body, but not my soul/You can talk about me, just as much as you please/But before you talk, oh I’ll bend my knees/Storm may ride, wind may blow/Friends may come, they may go…
You need this shit. And there are three full discs of it. For less than ten bucks a disc (for over 70 minutes worth each disc) you can own this, today. This is a crucial document of the ultimate underground sounds. You can read about Black History month (and you should) but you should also feel it. Fire In My Bones is an awesome opportunity to do that.
Go get hit in your soul.
Still not convinced? Of course you are. But still.
