“As a kid, I would get chills when we used to sing the old 1899 Lewis E. Jones hymn, ‘There is Power in the Blood.’ The women, trying to out-falsetto each other, would sing ‘There is power, power, wonder working power in the blood, of the Lamb.’ The men would double-time, walking a steady bass-line underneath, with ‘There is power, power, power, power, wonder-working power.’ And there is, in fact, power, listening to Jesus bleed into the Devil's music.”
So says Matt Labash in an article at weeklystandard.com – “Goodbye, Babylon: A new collection of old-timey gospel music shows everything that's right about praising God and everything that's wrong with the contemporary Christian music scene.”
My sentiments upon reading this: Amen!
I can stand only so much of contemporary Christian “praise music.” It’s too bland, too…anemic. Better a classical hymn – darkly grand -- that encourages brooding and contemplation; or a gospel romper that sings about sin and judgment and hell. There’s too much sugary contentment goin’ on.
This isn’t the direct subject of Labash’s piece, but there’s something in all this about spirituality and religion itself – and not just the music. That is: if religion is not about being at the end of your rope, if it isn’t about tears, suffering, and blood – what is it?
Labash is of the opinion that the old-timers didn’t mess around: “they portrayed a fierce God -- one of redemption, but also of vengeance -- not the simplistic elbow-patched grandpa, or open-armed hippie-Jesus of the modern superchurch soundtrack. In a 1930 song called ‘Memphis Flu,’ Elder David R. Curry, pastor of the Oakley Street Church of God in Christ, and his congregation sing over barrelhouse piano runs, handclaps, and interjections of ‘Praise Jesus!’: Yes, He killed the rich and poor / And He's going to kill more / If you don't turn away from your shame.”
Labash’s article is a review of a new 6-CD boxed-set collection of 135 songs and 35 sermons -- the largest collection of sacred music ever assembled: old recordings of Christian gospel and Pentecostal tunes from America’s neglected heritage of religious song. Much of the material is newly discovered – retrieved from old records getting dusty in attics and basements. The collection is entitled Goodbye Babylon and was produced by Lance Ledbetter, a 27-year-old Atlanta software installer and former DJ.
Labash’s enthusiasm about it is invigorating....
Labash says:
“What these salvagers have preserved is a gospel hodgepodge, everything from Sacred Harp singing to hillbilly romps to field holler/prison chants to front-porch blues to jubilee quartets to old timey country to Sanctified congregational singing to Pentecostal rave-up's. They all come down in a rain of clamoring tambourines and bottleneck slide guitars, clawhammer banjo-picking, booming jug band-blowing and barrelhouse piano rolls. The songs come from many traditions, though the overwhelming influence comes from both the black and white strains of Holiness music -- which resulted from the merger of the Fire Baptized Holiness Church and Pentecostal Holiness Church in 1911. This came five years after the 1906 Azusa Street revival, in which the black holiness evangelist William Joseph Seymour sparked a movement which church historians say resulted in thousands receiving the ‘Pentecostal baptism with the Holy Ghost with the apostolic sign of speaking with other tongues.’….
“In a recent piece for the Washington Post, Eddie Dean, one of the great chroniclers of lost America -- which isn't a crowded field -- interviewed Dick Spottswood, who, at Ledbetter's behest, served as both music and liner notes wrangler on much of the Goodbye, Babylon set. Spottswood, himself a Washington, D.C., institution as host of the local public radio station's invaluable Obsolete Music Hour, is no holy-rolling Bible thumper. But he perfectly nailed the difference between the old and new sacred music: ‘It's not like contemporary Christian songs, which are all praising Jesus, with nothing about sin or guilt. They've turned Jesus into a very cheap, off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all Jesus. There's nothing of substance left, and the music reflects this sort of mindless cheerfulness. With the old-time gospel songs, like (the Monroe Brothers') “Sinner You Better Get Ready,” there are dark clouds and tragedy and death and all the unpleasantries you have to go through before you can stand in line at the redemption counter.’"
One more quote: referring to the composer and choir leader Thomas A. Dorsey – known as the “The Father of Gospel Music” – Labash offers a line from Dorsey’s masterpiece, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”: “Precious Lord, take my hand / Lead me on, let me stand / I am tired, I am weak, I am old.”
He adds: “There is something ennobling about watching fallible man -- tired and weak and old… stumbling around to find God in the dark.”