VARIOUS - The Rough Guide To Gospel Blues
WORLD MUSIC NETWORK
New VinylWorld / Rare Grooves / Roots LP / 15 EUR / Sales
Blues and gospel, the secular and sacred songs of everyday folk, are both bound up in sorrow, loss, despair, hope, redemption, resilience and dreams. Despite their conceptual differences, gospel, the Sunday morning music of the church, and blues, the Saturday night music of the juke joint, shared many of the same roots, influences and musical traits. As the market grew for blues records during the 1920s, a black audience developed in parallel for religious songs and sermons. Consequently, many famed early bluesmen such as Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie McTell recorded spiritual songs, often under different pseudonyms, to avoid offending the church who wouldn’t look favourably on associating the music of worship with that of the devil.
Many of the included artists would have started out singing music in church choirs early on before crossing over to the blues, whereas others remained gospel singers whose music was influenced by blues traditions. The ‘guitar evangelists’ combined the raw earthiness of the Delta blues with gospel sentiments, and by listening to its most remarkable performer Blind Willie Johnson, one can hear the mutual influence between the two and how a blues song could be transformed into a gospel song, or vice versa, simply by changing a few words. Other true guitar evangelists such as Reverend Edward W. Clayborn and Blind Willie Davis give further evidence of how playing slide for the Lord sounds pretty much like playing slide for the other side.