The Rough Guide to the Roots of Gospel

In the early days of popular recording, blues and gospel marched hand in hand – God’s music and the devil’s music were often made by the same musicians and enjoyed by the same audience, which after drinking and whoring in the juke joint on Saturday night would repent in church on Sunday morning. This superb compilation collects 26 gospel tracks, all (with one notable exception) recorded between 1926 and 1936.

Several of the names here including Blind Willie Johnson, Rev Gary Davis and Thomas Dorsey (aka Georgia Tom) will be familiar to blues fans. But there are also jubilee quartets with their close harmonies, street preachers and even white country-gospellers, such as Ernest Phillips & his Holiness Quartet, whose hillbilly hoedown ‘Don’t Grieve After Me’ leads all the way to bluegrass. As for that notable exception, the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet’s 1902 recording of ‘Down on the Old Camp Ground’ is an antique gem. It’s also intriguing to hear how much later performers borrowed from the early gospellers. Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Free’ may have derived its talking blues style from Woody Guthrie but its earlier template was 1929’s ‘Po Mourner’ by the Four Dusty Travelers, while Paul Rodgers and Free borrowed at least the chorus of their biggest hit from Arizona Dranes’ 1926 recording ‘It’s All Right Now’.