Rough Guide to Spiritual Blues

As the music of gambling dens, bordellos, barrelhouses and anywhere else vice was to be found, the blues swiftly earned the tag ‘the devil’s music.’ More sacred aspirations were expressed via gospel, yet in truth they were two sides of the same coin. It’s a dialectic that is splendidly explored on this 26-track compilation, which shows that some of the most intense music to come out of the Deep South was made by black singers who drank and whored in the juke joints on a Saturday night but lived in dread of hellfire and damnation on Sunday morning.

Perhaps the greatest of the ‘holy blues’ singers was Blind Willie Johnson, whose 1927 recording of ‘Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed’ opens the disc and is a haunting example of the genre. Some of those included, such as Reverend Gary Davis and Thomas A Dorsey (‘Georgia Tom’), abandoned secular blues to sing only gospel. Others, Charley Patton, Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson among them, interspersed sacred songs that held out the prospect of redemption with earthier, more carnal material. Either way, it’s a fascinating history that shows how blues and gospel became what they were not despite of but because of each other.