'Goodbye Babylon' Gospel Collection

[Son-of-a-Weizen]

Interesting product out of Atlanta......clever packaging to boot! 6-CDs packed in raw cotton inside of a cedar box that resembles an old-fashioned hymnal.

Gospel Music's New Apostle

With 'Goodbye, Babylon,' Lance Ledbetter Has Resurrected a

Long-Ignored Era of Sacred Song

By Eddie Dean

Special to The Washington Post

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

In his thrashing of the South, "The Sahara of the Bozart," penned for a New York newspaper in 1917, H.L. Mencken railed against what he saw as a cultural wasteland, "a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence." He conceded there were a few squawks from Dixie worth noting, such as "the lower reaches of the gospel hymn." Eight years later,while covering the Scopes trial in Tennessee, Mencken attended a tent revival meeting and got a whiff of the old-time religion: "They bounced into us as they cavorted," he wrote. "The smell that they radiated, sweating there in that obscene heap, half suffocated us."

What most offended Mencken was the stench of fundamentalism. As the era's greatest scold, Mencken despised most of what he saw in 1920s America, but his contempt for these Pentecostals in heat goes beyond his usual spleen. It is illustrative of a general repulsion for the ecstatic gospel music of the underclass, white and black.

Not that many people got the chance to hear much of it: The records made by these rural southerners were marketed exclusively to their own fringe communities, so few in the mainstream would have known about "The Bible's True," a 1926 song by Uncle Dave Macon, a former mule driver and musician from Tennessee known to wield his banjo like a shotgun. Macon's most popular records included such racy fare as "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy," but he also made some of the grittiest religious music of the era. On "The Bible's True," he snarls his own retort to the evolution controversy: "There ain't no man from anywhere born make a monkey out of me."

This stubborn, fierce fundamentalism has helped keep the music from reaching a wider audience ever since. Meanwhile, the era's secular records have been elevated to the status of authentic American art forms, as in "The Blues," a recent seven-part PBS documentary. The Devil's music is a sexier sell than hymns by backwoods Jesus freaks. It's been that way for years. Postwar compilers lovingly reissued blues, jazz and hillbilly music while ignoring gospel like an unwanted offspring -- when, in fact, it's the granddaddy of them all.

A new collection, "Goodbye, Babylon," is a corrective to this predicament. At six CDs -- 135 songs and 25 sermons -- the set is the largest gathering of American vernacular sacred music ever assembled. Even at that, it is merely a primer on the astonishing range of styles that rode on the gospel train, from Macon's banjo-flailing broadside, dripping with tobacco spit and petulant glee, to the exquisite harmonies of the quartet the Trumpeteers. The music makes a hash of encrusted stereotypes, as bluesmen such as Blind Lemon Jefferson moonlight as gospel singers, and Holiness preachers such as Brother Claude Ely rave on like renegade rockabilly cats.

What unifies these wildly disparate voices is the text of Scriptures, the source of these songs and hymns, making "Goodbye, Babylon" the ultimate soundtrack to the King James Version. A 200-page booklet, designed like an old-fashioned hymnal, provides lyrics transcriptions and extensive scriptural references. A wealth of archival photos and such illustrations as maps, sheet music and death certificates, along with essays by nearly two dozen musicologists, help bring these ghostly performers back to life long after their country churches have turned to cinder. The package comes in a cedar box stuffed with raw cotton, "a reminder of the struggle, strife and sorrow that so many of them endured," and stamped with a 19th-century etching by Gustave Dore that depicts the Tower of Babel.

It's the sort of lavish treatment a major label accords the Beatles or Beethoven, yet it is the first release from Dust-to-Digital, run by Lance Ledbetter, who funded most of the project on his credit card. A 27-year-old native Georgian, Ledbetter says his model was Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" from 1952; reissued by Smithsonian Folkways in 1997, the sprawling, artfully annotated compilation spurred Ledbetter's interest in race and hillbilly records from the '20s and '30s.

With "Goodbye, Babylon," Ledbetter set out to document the long-neglected gospel scene. As with Smith, his goal wasn't simply to reissue old records but to resurrect the culture -- "the Christ-haunted South," Flannery O'Connor called it -- that gave birth to these religious outpourings. "I wanted to create a world where you can enter and submerge into and spend some time and come up with different ideas," he says. "I wanted to produce something on that level where you get lost in it."

It was nearly five years ago when Ledbetter first "got lost" in the project. As a disc jockey at an Atlanta college radio station, he began to explore old-time sacred music, a far cry from the spirituals he'd heard as a boy in church in northwest Georgia. "I was raised Methodist," he says. "Very starchy-collared, upright Anglo hymns, really formal, not a lot of expression." Next to such bland fare, the fiery exhortations of sanctified singers such as Blind Gary Davis and Eddie Head made him a convert, not to the church -- Ledbetter remains a lapsed Methodist -- but to the artistry and passion of gospel musicians.

"The conviction of the singers was what spoke to me," he says. "There's an added level of conviction that's not present in the blues. The blues can get as raw as this, but there's not that extra sense. These people are exploring the concept of the afterlife, building toward something. And I couldn't believe the musicianship. I couldn't get over how strong it was -- and how unavailable most of it was."

Although most every blues song ever recorded seems to have found its way onto compact disc, culminating in 2001's seven-CD Charley Patton box set, the deluge of reissued roots music has included only a trickle of sacred songs, mostly from German labels that are loath to allow even a single prewar yodel or field holler to remain out of print. Ledbetter tracked down private collectors and began amassing cassette copies, which he studied as intently as any first-year seminarian poring over theological books.

"Every night, I'd listen on headphones and take notes," he says. "There were a lot of freakout moments where all the hairs on the back of my neck would start rising up. Those sermons had a lot of surprises. You start listening to one of those and it could take you anywhere."

Enthusiasm turned to zeal, and after deciding to put together a full-scale compilation, Ledbetter enlisted the help of Washington collector and music scholar Dick Spottswood, who hosts an old-time music program on WAMU-FM (88.5). The 66-year-old Spottswood was receptive to the youngster's quixotic enterprise: More than 25 years ago, he compiled the 15-LP series "Folk Music in America," and more recently, he contributed exhaustive notes to the Grammy-winning Patton set on the Revenant label.

"The people who have reissued the old material, from Harry Smith to [Revenant's] Dean Blackwood to myself, we all have a very secular mentality," Spottswood says. "For me, it was important because nobody had really addressed gospel music head-on, and Lance wanted to do it so comprehensively and explore both the black and white [traditions]. The music deserves respect and so do the multiple cultures that produced it. And this set conveys that respect."

The evangelical fervor and musical adventurousness that fuel "Goodbye, Babylon" sprang from the Pentecostal movements that swept the country in the early 20th century, especially among the poor segments of the South. They were poor but not meek, and they followed Psalm 95's exhortation to "make a joyful noise." The emphasis was on freedom of worship, welcoming tambourines and female preachers and other elements that were taboo in many Protestant churches. Sister O.M. Terrell was a guitar-playing evangelist for the Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God; "The Bible's Right" -- recorded in 1953 in Nashville with the white country-and-western studio ace Ernie Newton accompanying Terrell on bass -- shows black and white musicians drawing from the same well.

Ledbetter was so moved by Terrell's performance that he decided to include it along with some other postwar recordings, broadening the historical range of "Goodbye, Babylon." "That gospel current is still running strong after the war," he says. "So in the '50s, you have Columbia recording a street singer like Sister Ola Mae. You have Brother Claude Ely doing radio broadcasts that sound like a tent revival. . . . I think his material is as strong as anything Sun Studio did."

Even the wildest rockabilly rarely reached the unhinged delirium of "There Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down," Ely's take on a favorite song of the Church of God in Christ. A Holiness pastor from Kentucky, Ely was a faith healer and a terrific guitarist, judging from the ferocious rockabilly rhythms on "Grave," a country hit in 1953.

Ely and many others in "Goodbye, Babylon" foreshadow the rock-and-soul explosion, when church-reared performers such as Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin fused sanctified and secular styles to revolutionize pop music. Crossing over from the gospel world was no easy route. Sister Rosetta Tharpe angered many fans when she began to play nightclubs along with churches. On "Strange Things Happening Every Day," from 1944, she was backed by a rhythm-and-blues combo that helped propel the song into the Top 10 on the R&B charts. By 1951 she was a national star, attracting a crowd of 20,000 to her wedding at Griffith Stadium in Washington; the flamboyant Tharpe, her guitar strapped over her bridal gown, performed from the infield after the ceremony. (Spectators, mostly women, paid to attend, and Sister Rosetta gave them their money's worth.)

"Babylon" gives us backsliders and hell-raisers and lone pilgrims who have just as much claim to salvation as any upright deacon. Hank Williams offers the hymn "I'll Have a New Body" for a radio show sponsored by an alcoholic elixir called Hadacol. Jimmie Strothers was a blind musician and convicted murderer who bludgeoned his wife with an ax while she slept. Recorded at the Virginia State Penitentiary in 1936, he sings "Down to the Shore," one of the set's most powerful performances. In 1935 a preacher named Hallelujah Joe recorded a sermon, "The Prodigal's Return," and two years later he released a blues song, "Hallelujah Joe Ain't Preachin' No More."

"That motto Lance came up with, 'Sinner, you better get ready,' that sums up what this set is all about," Spottswood says. "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."

The Jesus celebrated throughout "Goodbye, Babylon" reflects the hard lot of the people who made this music, marooned on the lowest rung of society. Instead of the self-help guru many hail today on "What Would Jesus Do?" bumper stickers, here is the Son of God nailed to the cross, suffering as they, too, suffered, and a river of Jesus's blood flows in song after song.

"Come from your lonesome ways of sin," sang Blind Benny Paris and his wife, Pauline, in 1928. "Hide me in the blood of Jesus." The same year, another family ensemble, Ernest Stoneman & His Dixie Mountaineers (who were Washington residents during the postwar era), recorded "I Remember Calvary," a graphic blow-by-blow account of Jesus's last hours: "Just remember how they pierced Him in the side, broken on the cruel tree, hanging there for you and me." Carl Smith, a popular country singer at the height of his fame, wasn't too proud to pay tribute in a 1952 song: "In his pain and agony for every sin to hide, [He] shed the blood that stained the old rugged cross."

The Smith record was one of many that Spottswood contributed to the collection. He was responsible for half of the set's final selections, more than a handful from his private collection of rare 78s. As co-editor of the booklet, he helped distill contributors' essays to concise, thumbnail sketches -- a handy Cliffs Notes guide to these often-obscure artists and their Biblical source material. "It's dense, but not so dense that you need an English degree to be able to read it," Ledbetter says. "The facts were there, but that super-original way of framing it, that's Dick's work."

Spottswood's record stash allowed the set's scope to be widened to include such left-field entries as calypso singer Roaring Lion's "Jonah, Come Out the Wilderness" from 1938. It also kept Ledbetter revising the song roster. "I had picked Blind Gussie Nesbit's 'Pure Religion,' which is awesome," he says. "Dick said, 'Well, the best version is Blind Lemon's.' So he sent a copy to me, and I said, 'Damn, you're right.' "Blind Lemon Jefferson was one of many bluesmen who also recorded sacred material, albeit under pseudonyms to conceal their identities. Jefferson's "All I Need Is That Pure Religion," issued under the name Deacon L.J. Bates in 1926, showcases the slide-guitar pyrotechnics and gut-wrenching vocals that permeate his secular songs. "It matches and almost beats any of his blues," Spottswood says. He also selected a gospel track by Skip James, whose "Devil Got My Woman" remains one of the eeriest, most spellbinding blues of all. James's version of a spiritual, "Jesus Is a Mighty Good Leader," was recorded at the same 1931 session that produced "Devil."

That James and Jefferson could so deftly move back and forth between the blues and gospel realms shows how the two traditions fed each other; it also gives the lie to easy assumptions about these performers, who often little resembled the caricatures of blues lore.

"We all live compartmentalized lives," says Spottswood, who befriended James in the '60s. "I knew Skip. He had his secular persona and he could be a religious person, too. He preached, he sang in a quartet. How is that any different than Bill Monroe? Monroe could draw the three guys to the microphone and do [an a cappella] sacred quartet piece, and then they'd all stand back, pick up their instruments and play 'Pike County Breakdown.' They're all parts of the southern musical personality."

While listeners will find much that is familiar here -- the bluegrass of Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers; gospel diva Mahalia Jackson's best-selling "Amazing Grace"; the Carter Family anthem "Keep on the Sunny Side" -- the bulk of "Goodbye, Babylon" will strike many as strange, exotic and just plain weird. The Taskiana Four's "Creep Along, Moses"; a convict named Jimpson singing "No More, My Lord" as he chops wood in a work gang; the zombie drone of "Exhilaration," by J.T. Allison's Sacred Harp Singers -- these are all wondrous utterances, bristling with a sense of mystery and awe.

The record companies didn't care squat about salvation or deliverance -- only about music that sold. Many songs on "Goodbye, Babylon" did just that: Rural southerners bought more than 100,000 copies of "Keep on the Sunny Side," sparking the birth of the country-music industry. In the days before radio, sermons enjoyed great commercial success, and the set's sixth disc reveals a mesmerizing sampling of that lost American art, the public oratory. Preachers such as J.M. Gates of the Streamline Baptist Church were bona fide stars, and his funeral in 1945 was the largest black memorial service in Atlanta before Martin Luther King Jr.'s. Blacks bought more than 80,000 copies of the Rev. J.C. Burnett's "The Downfall of Nebuchadnezzar" in 1926. "These sermons were for southerners, and also for the northern [migrants], to give them a little taste of something back home," Spottswood says. "It validated a very important part of who they were, to have their religious observances on phonograph records."

"Goodbye, Babylon" has found an audience as well, selling out its initial run of 2,000 at $100 for the set and garnering raves in the rock press, such as a five-star review in Rolling Stone. "The people buying it aren't so much from the roots music crowd," Ledbetter says. "They are the adventurous listeners, always looking for new stuff." Ledbetter has already shipped 1,000 more sets to keep up with demand.

The brisk sales of the set have helped Ledbetter break even, and additional proceeds will fuel more projects on his Dust-to-Digital label. He is planning a box set of old-time music from Georgia, county by county, as well as several discs that follow themes that Spottswood has featured on his WAMU program.

Down the road, Ledbetter says, will come a sequel to the gospel set, tentatively titled "Babylon Has Fallen." "We fit as much music on six discs as we possibly could, but there's a lot more I wanted to get on there," he says. "Stuff like 'Sermon on a Silver Dollar,' and 'Something's Wrong With the Bible,' there just wasn't enough room. These sermons are the foundation of hip-hop."

Spottswood says that after a half-century immersed in this music, he still has yet to plumb its depths. "The set is introductory," he says. "It's going to take most of us to places we've never been before. This isn't about politics, and it isn't about the Christian right. It's about the Christian experience, as bound as it was to the agricultural, small-town America of the time, when we were closer to the soil, closer to our families and closer to God."

[JSngry]

Looks like it's gonna be about $100 + shipping, and I've only been able to find a few places that carry it (best source/price seems to be directly from the label http://www.dust-digital.com/index.html ), but when I can afford it, I'm getting this one, guaranteed.

Thanks for posting this, Weizen. I had yet to hear about it. This kind of stuff is usually guaranteed goosebumps for me.

[John L]

This came as a Christmas present for me. Very, VERY nice. There is some very powerful stuff on this collection, and in much better sound than ever before.

It comes with two balls of cotton, which gives you an appreciation of just how much manual work it was back in the day to get the seeds out.

The last disc in the set is sermons, very well programmed for maximum impact. It is incredible what they recorded in the wake of the success of Reverend Gates. You can really hear the roots of jazz here. If you would substitute horns for some of the simultaneous and spontaneous singing of the congregations, I swear that some of the results would be little different from low down New Orleans jazz. It makes you believe Kid Ory's claim that Buddy Bolden got a lot of his stuff from the "holy roller church."

Edited February 19, 2004 by John L

[jazzbo]

Man, this looks good. . . but. . . I wish I could get a less deluxe version without cotton and cedar. . . .

Specially the cedar the way my allergies have been the last few years!

[jazzbo]

Well, I've become less and less a fan of "special packaging". . . . I'd have everything in Maxislim cases if I could (and believe me I've converted hundreds of releases TO Maxislim recordings in the last year!)

[Stan C]

I picked up the Goodbye Babylon set before Christmas. Highly recommended! The elaborate packaging is nice but unnecessary and the music is incredible with excellent sound considering the age of the recordings.