Various Artists – Gospel Music
Compiled by veteran producer Joel Dorn and veteran photographer Lee Friedlander, this is the kind of album every music fan fantasizes about producing, just as every fan fantasizes at one time or another about being a radio DJ and playing only what he or she wants.
There’s no attempt to tell a story about the history of black gospel. It’s not a collection of major hits, nor an overview of particular subgenres; there’s no guiding principle whatsoever. They might as well have called it Our Favorite Gospel Records. And since it is that personal a collection, any other gospel fans will have quibbles — why Mahalia Jackson’s “My God Is Real” instead of “In The Upper Room”; why Dorothy Love Coates’ “Strange Man” when it already appears on other gospel compilations aimed at white fans; why no Mighty Clouds Of Joy, Pilgrim Travelers, Spirit Of Memphis Quartet, Shirley Caesar, Sensational Nightingales? The short answer is: Go compile your own anthology.
So instead of talking about what isn’t here, let’s consider what is. Spanning about three decades beginning in the late 1930s, the selections cover solo artists, early jubilee groups (think Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet’s “Go Where I Send Thee”), harder postwar quartets such as Slim & the Supreme Angels, and even more modern groups such as the Violinaires, where Wilson Pickett got his start, and whose mid-’60s “What He Done For Me” is virtually soul music, the one track here on which the rhythm section is as prominent as the voices.
And along with rhythm, voices are what gospel is all about, especially to someone who doesn’t buy into the lyrics. You’ll find the long-suffering, but also liberating, true believers of gospel at the emotional core of all great American music; they’ve always been the best argument going that the human voice is the most extraordinary instrument of all.
Here, we have Claude Jeter’s articulations — equal parts vocal, yodel and scream — on the Swan Silvertones’ mesmerizing “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep”; Dorothy Love Coates’ fervent, wildly modulated, yet almost conversational storytelling on “Strange Man”; the red-dirt country duet of the Consolers’ “Waiting For My Child”; Sam Cooke being as smooth and sweet as ever fronting the Soul Stirrers’ “The Last Mile Of The Way”; two radically different versions (from the Original Five Blind Boys Of Alabama and the Staple Singers) of “This May Be The Last Time”, which the Rolling Stones secularized for their early guitar rave-up hit “The Last Time”; the Dixie Hummingbirds’ acrobatic backgrounds to the Angelic Gospel Singers on “One Day”; and Reverend James Cleveland displaying the ageless soul of a bluesman on “He Decided To Die”.
It’s breathtaking stuff, that simple — and as Van Morrison would say, later for the rest.