The Fredösphere

A kind friend with a better memory than mine has fulfilled a months-old promise to loan me his copy of Goodbye, Babylon, a glorious 6-CD collection of old-tyme gospel music.  To understand just how wonderful this collection is, take the time to read Matt Labash's glorious review of the same.  Just do it.  It's so good, it makes me wish for a new religious order, one devoted to memorizing the words of this review.  They could rise every morning at 4:00 a.m. and chant Labash's words.  It's just a suggestion.

This all fits neatly, of course, in the context of the way recording technology has influenced performance style in the 20th century, as described by Alex Ross, with more comments from Colby Cosh.

The American South was the source of a mighty glacier, and I, a child church singer in Michigan, circa 1970, constituted a pebble in its terminal moraine.  It was a glacier of fire baptism, Hellfire and brimstone, tongues of fire, and (to complete this increasingly conflicted, not to say mixed, metaphor) the burning, purifying light of God's unapproachable throne.  Thus, although I am far removed in time and space from these recordings, I nevertheless recognize them as the source of the music of My People.

From Labash's description, you might think all the musicians were wild-eyed fanatics...

As musicians and vocal stylists, they took a backseat to no secular artists of the day--and often, they doubled as the secular artists of the day. Legendary blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, of Primitive Baptist stock, went so far as to record religious material under the pseudonym "Deacon L.J. Bates" to conceal his secular identity. They were singers like Brother Claude Ely, who in the Kentucky Holiness tradition, sings and plays the perennial Church of God in Christ shout, "There Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down," with a ferocity that suggests he was getting sawed in half while performing.

...not to mention the preachers:

They were stiff-necked dogmatists like Sister O.M. Terrell--a street minister from the Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God--who, with a wink, put everyone from adulterers to "snuff dippers" on notice, singing: You know the Bible right / Somebody wrong / God knows / You're wrong. They are people whose God often seems to have failed them, but who believe anyway--whose songs and wails and murmurs are often defiant affirmations. Death does not make them blanch or prevent them from tending the pressing business of "getting right," which explains sermons like Rev. J.M. Gates's 1926 Christmas pick-me-up, "Death Might Be Your Santa Claus," followed by "Will the Coffin be Your Santa Claus?" and the capper, "Will Hell Be Your Santa Claus?"

I'll end with a few scattered thoughts:

1. There's a consistent driven quality to the singing, a holdover from the pre-microphone days, where the voice needed to fill a room on its own energy.  This doesn't mean everyone sings with consistent focus or intensity.  You can tell the difference between those who are present emotionally in their performance, and those who are telegraphing it in.  Loud and bored can coexist quite easily.  Furthermore, the level of technical proficiency is all over the map, but every performer is very comfortable.  These people have all been doing this for years.  How unlike the typical under-rehearsed classical musician who scowls at the printed page while giving what is often the lone performance of a particular work.

2. It's nice that, just as a famous name pops out among the unknowns in the track listing, the performance associated with that name also pops.  Mahalia Jackson really deserved to be famous.

3. The Sacred Harp singing style sounds more like barking -- you'd think it was a movement of musically and religiously inclined hounds who are treeing the devil.

4. Authenticity fetishists need to explain how a clarinet that honks like a bass kazoo found its way into a song called "Crying holy unto the Lord."  Almighty God, if that is authentic, help us to achieve ever-greater levels of artifice, amen!