CM NET CLASSICS: Sky-Blue Salvation Saturday Night

[My man Acehole resurfaced after a few years outside of each other's frame of reference recently, and this was always one of my favorite things he did for my site. He has a music critic's ear, which can suck, but he loves music, and I've seen brief glimpses of parts of his strange and elaborate record collection, so I love hearing what he has to say on certain sub-genres, such as this little piece about records that would save even my soul.]
Sky-Blue Salvation Saturday Night - Records That Will Save Your Soul by Acehole
1 - Rev Charlie Jackson - Louisiana Gospel Dynamite cassette (Curlew) 1988
Easily one of the finest recordings in my collection. Pure gutbucket soul shouting cum gospel-blues fury. The Holy Ghost in one hand, a switchblade knife in the other. Jackson was at times a sharecropper, a Mississippi cowboy, operated heavy machinery just outside of Houston and did the good Lord's work every mile of the way traveling in an dusty, late-model Cadillac-a guitar draped across the backseat and a the Holy Bible riding shotgun. By the early seventies lured by the prospect of better wages, a fish fry every Saturday and preaching the good book come Sunday Rev. Charlie found himself in Baton Rouge, La where he forsook all otherworldly pursuits for a full-time life of the cloth. Circuit riding with Shreveport's own "Two Winged Preacher", Elder Utah Smith they hit every Baptist church, Holiness shout and tent revival within a days drive from his trailer emitting the Holy Ghost through jagged guitar chords and hoarse vocals. Playing behind his back and between his knees like Jimi Hendrix lit afire with the Lord's Gasoline.
The self-released cassette, Louisiana Gospel Dynamite- collecting all of his sides for the New Orleans based, Booker label, stands as a testament to the pew-burning power of singing the good word through clenched teeth and furrowed brow. One need not be a Christian or religious at all to appreciate the full-blooded thunder of one-man whomping his guitar with a fervor obviously not of this world.
2 - Sister Rosetta Tharpe - "Precious Memories" Best of Sister Rosetta Tharpe LP (Savoy)
If Aretha Franklin (daughter of Rev CL Franklin) is widely regarded as the Queen of Soul, then Sister Rosetta Tharpe is without a doubt the Queen of all Sanctified singers. She a possessor of Arkansas accent and mercurial guitar skill straddled that great divide between pious condemnation and secular understanding. On my mantel piece there resides a wrinkled photograph of Rosetta Tharpe clad in a white fur coat, playing a Gibson SG that could've easily found it's way onto the slumped shoulders of Angus Young, in front a train station belting out a paean to those twin brothers, sin and redemption and staring into the sky looking for all the world likes she's waiting for deliverance or a nip of warm gin.
3 - Jones Bros - "Amazing Grace" Sun Gospel (Bear Family) 2000
Contrary to popular belief "Amazing Grace" was written neither by Joan Baez nor Cissy Houston; it was wrought sometime in the mid eighteenth century . It was the work of one English preacher by the name of John Newton. "Grace" was first published in 1779 in a book entitled the Olney Hymns. It stands as the probably the best known and possibly the best-executed tribute to hope in the English language. Written by a slave trader embittered with God due to his mother's early death, Newton's tale is one of wickedness. He captained a slave ship and abused his crew. Once, after falling overboard, his crew threw a harpoon at him rather than lower a boat.
It was during this particular torturous and violent storm at sea that Captain John Newton was saved unto God. The starving crew singled out Newton as a "Jonah" or bringer of bad luck, but in that near-death experience Newton had seen the light. The ship was named the Greyhound but it carried not dogs nor vodka.
In a smaller but more luxurious vessel (A Delta 88 no less) on one cold December Morning in Memphis, Tennessee in the year nineteen hundred and fifty-three four brothers crossed over the Arkansas/Tennessee state line, a journey some twenty years in the making to seek salvation and a recording contract at 506 Union Ave, under the employ of one Sam C. Phillips. That brisk Thursday morning James, Johnny, Hank and Walter cut two sides of hard gospel the likes of which had never been heard outside of Holiness tent revival. Fearing the Jones' brand of hard-edged sanctification too much for even the starched and prim Sunday morning revelers both songs remained un-issued for nearly forty years. The first of the songs cut that day was a breathtakingly raucous version of that old slave traders hymn, "Amazing Grace". How that single guitar and four very large voices ever fit into that tiny Memphis studio could only be known by the great one himself. Four voices exploding into cascading harmony that burns with the power of Gabriel's trumpet and the fear of another Monday morning on the farm.
The Jones' went to cut one more session at Sun studios and that one was released though by then the ravages of bad health and broken dreams had taken their toll on the once powerful voices but if nothing else their recording of "Amazing Grace" does answer the age old question if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to see it does it make a sound? Yes, it does. It just may well take forty years to hear it.
4 - Gospel Travelers - "God's Chariot Pts.1 & 2" 45 (Duke) 1952
In which the wind of a tornado is played by God storming through the Southeastern United States giving notice that he will be back someday and those not redeemed there's is no place on Earth they can hide. The best in a long ling of gospel allegories in which God takes the form of some sort of natural disaster, sickness or other epidemic to punish those who've sinned against him. The whipping wind and storm sound effects backing up the blood-curdling, multi-part torrential harmony make it even more harrowing.
5 - Rev.Lonnie Farris - Rev Lonnie Farris & The Gospel Flames LP (Eden) 1962
Another traveling Louisiana preacher. Played lap-steel guitar with a switchblade for a slide. Perched somewhere between the Holy Spirit and the un-holy mugging.
6 - Blind Benny Paris & Wife - "I'm Gonna Live So God Can Use Me" Guitar Evangelists 1927-36 LP (Truth Records)
Sounds as if one foot is in the graveyard and the other is firmly in the pulpit. Eerie as all get out.
7 - Brother Claude Ely - "There Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold this Body Down" 45 (King)
Though the harder strains of Black gospel music have never been at a real loss for documentation their
white brethren have rarely been afforded the resources and recognition bestowed by the patronizing, liberal yankee fanboys that have sought to keep alive ever lost/dying culture their enlarged pockets can afford to.
The un-heralded influence of Brother Claude Ely and his Kentucky/West Virginian Pentecostal and Holiness movement is like finding one of the missing lynch pens of 20th century popular culture. One only has to listen to the heavily blues-based cathartic thump of any of Brother Claude Ely's early fifties recordings (all now compiled on a CD entitled, Satan Get Back on the British Ace label) and then cue up Elvis Presley's first single, "That's All Right/Blue Moon of Kentucky" from a little over a year later and see the kind of influence the old-time church shouts and baptismals had on the birth of rock'n'roll.
8 - Holiness Church of Hazard, KY - "Great Speckled Bird/Old Time Shout" Mountain Music of Kentucky (Smithsonian-Folkways)
As above another prime example of White Pentecostal/Holiness church music. Just listen to the spine-tingling version of the oldest Pentecost anthem, "The Great Speckled Bird" and close your eyes and picture yourself in some small clapboard church, badly in need of a painting. Maybe you're in Jolo, West Virginia or Whitesburg, Kentucky and there are three men banging old flat-top guitars and double that man playing tambourines and over there behind the pew a young boy maybe in his teens is summoning the Holy Ghost from a pawn shop organ and eyes closed you can feel that rushing, that unnamed power rushing up through creaking floor boards filling you with spirit. Your knees are weak and the plainness of the King's English has transformed into alien tongues. You look and the man to your immediate right is wearing two intertwined copperheads like a crown of thorns and the women behind the disused pulpit is mixing strychnine in an old Mason jar and you can see the jubilant looks on their faces and you feel flush with fear. All thoughts of the Holy Ghost, salvation, sin, redemption have left you and all you can hope to do is fleeuz, see you and I we know to well, we've become to smart for belief. Too jaded for faith. And at the end of the day that's what were lacking- absolute faith. With the rush of knowledge comes the loss of innocence and the knowing will burn your eyes and keep you up at night until you're blind or just give up.
9 - Rev Isaiah Owens- untitled CD-R (un-released)
Rev Owens could easily be Montgomery, Alabama's gospel version of Hasil Adkins. All detuned guitars and frenzied shouting giving away to dolorous moaning and the stomping of feet on a hardwood floor. Owens for years did a 15-minute radio program on AM radio in Alabama alongside Sister Ann Talbert, hawking caskets and pimping his day gig at one of Montgomery's finer tonsorial parlors. If you ever find yourself in that neck of the woods and should you happen to run into a impeccably groomed guitar playing street preacher - say on N. Lincoln or South Court Street chances are your in the presence of one Reverend Isaiah Owens and you'd do well to stop a minute and wipe your brow and soak in a little Sunday prayer before Saturday burns your ass once again.
10 - Joe Townsend - "Take My Burdens to the Lord" On The Road Again: Country-Blues Obscurities (Flyright)
Townsend was a mechanic in Independence, Mississippi- working on Plymouths and Chevrolets by day and doing the Lord's work by night when two Swedish musicologists made the first and only recordings of his hyper-kinetic, funky renditions of standard gospel classics. Two further Townsend cuts are found on the seventies blues and gospel compilation album, Southern Comfort Country.

five more to get you thru the gates.
11 - Rev Louis Overstreet & His Sons of Thunder Congregation - "I'm Working on a Building"
12 - Rev Presley Thomas' West Coast Jubilees - "He'll Be There"
13 - Mother McCollum - "Jesus is My Air-O-Plane"
14 - Henry Green - "Strange Things Happening" 78 (Chance) 1951
15 - Stanley Brothers - "Are You Washed in the Blood?" The Stanley Brothers of Virginia LP (County) 1973