Marie Knight – The Gospel Truth Live

Posted on April 2, 2018 by aaamc

Artist: Marie Knight

Label: M.C. Records

Formats: CD, Digital

Release date: March 23, 2018

Those with at least a passing interest in gospel music are likely familiar with electric guitar- wielding evangelist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who quite unintentionally became known as “the godmother of rock & roll.” In fact, she will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this month in recognition of her wide ranging influence on rock music. Fewer, however, may be acquainted with the career of Marie Knight, aside from her brief partnership with Tharpe in the late 1940s which produced the hit songs “Up Above My Head” and “Didn’t It Rain.” Of course Knight’s career encompassed far more than her work with Tharpe. As a child she sang for COGIC congregations throughout the Northeast, went on to record with The Sunset Four, and enjoyed a successful solo career performing and recording gospel as well as R&B music.

Knight stopped singing professionally in 1980, but was lured back into the studio two decades later by Mark Carpentieri of M.C. Records, who asked her to record “Didn’t It Rain” for the Rosetta Tharpe tribute album, Shout, Sister, Shout (a companion to the book by Gayle Wald). She went on to record an album of Rev. Gary Davis songs for Carpentieri, who became her manager, and began touring once again. Regrettably, Knight’s newfound success was cut short in 2009 after suffering a stroke, and she died shortly thereafter.

The Gospel Truth Live is Carpentieri’s posthumous tribute to Knight. The album features gems culled from her performance at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts’ 2007 Gospel Fest, held at the Church Street Center in North Adams, MA. Knight was 87 at the time, one of the last living artists from the “Golden Age” of gospel.

After a lengthy standing ovation, Knight comes on stage and opens with Rev. Gary Davis’s 1935 classic “I Belong to the Band” with the audience enthusiastically clapping along. As the concert continues, Knight segues between the Rev. Davis classics she had recently recorded—“12 Gates to the City,” a rousing “I’ll Fly Away” that gets the audience fired up, and “I Am Light of This World”—and Rosetta Tharpe repertoire including “Beams of Heaven,” “Didn’t It Rain,” and “Up Above My Head.” Granted the latter, accompanied by pianist Dave Keyes, aren’t as lively as the original renditions recorded over 60 years earlier, but Knight still has a fine, powerful contralto voice, capable of leaping registers.

In between songs Knight offers a bit of storytelling and some powerful testifying, offering words of wisdom based on her lived experiences. It’s these short sermons and her engagement with the audience that makes The Gospel Truth Live so unique—that and the fact that it’s Knight’s last recorded performance. The gospel doesn’t live in songs alone, and the context provided by this live performance is most welcome indeed.

Reviewed by Brenda Nelson-Strauss

Welcome to the May issue

Posted on May 9, 2008 by aaamc

This month we’re featuring Holy hip hop, also known as Christian rap or gospel rap, which blends the musical style and aesthetics of rap/hip hop with overtly Christian lyrics. To learn more about this subgenre of hip hop, be sure to check out the post “Holy Hip Hop 101,” as well as reviews of new CDs by Holy hip hop artists Sha Baraka, FLAME, Phanatak, and shai linne. The Sound of Philadelphia is explored in reviews of two new Legacy releases: Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia International Records, and a compilation of Gamble & Huff’s Greatest Hits. A big “thumbs up” is given to Palmystery, the new solo CD by bass player Victor Wooten, perhaps best known for his work with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Though we gave Miles Davis’s The Complete on the Corner Sessions a brief mention in our “Best of 2007” line-up, we’re running a complete review in this issue. Also featured is The Great Debaters Soundtrack, with contributions by the Carolina Chocolate Drops; The Manchester Free Trade Hall 1964 performance by Rev. Gary Davis; and John Work, III: Recording Black Culture, which sheds new light on the field recordings made by the Fisk University professor.

Manchester Free Trade Hall 1964

Posted on May 9, 2008 by aaamc

Title: Manchester Free Trade Hall 1964

Artist: Reverend Gary Davis

Label: Document

Catalog No.: DOCD 32-20-14

Date: 2007

In Reverend Gary Davis we had one of the best examples of a musician who carefully navigated the terrain between sacred and secular musics, causing intersections not often heard. In the newly released Manchester Free Trade Hall 1964 from Document Records, we hear Davis performing as part of the “Gospel and Blues Caravan” touring throughout Europe, on a night that captures an excellent showman in top form.

Though the image of a blind guitar player adheres more to blues mythology than gospel, Davis performs four gospel songs on his trademark Gibson Jumbo-200 with natural ease, as if they were intended for the acoustic guitar. One of his trademark songs, “If I Had My Way,” finds Davis shouting his praise while his tremendous finger picking runs up and down the fretboard, oscillating between stellar bass runs and high register licks responding to his vocal lines. “The Sun is Going Down” brings Davis’s long time friend Sonny Terry along on harmonica, and the two sound majestic together, every bit as tight as Terry’s work with Brownie McGhee. Equally impressive is Davis’s “Coon Hunt,” a harmonica instrumental based on Terry’s “Fox Chase,” which gives further evidence of Davis’s wide and varied musical ability.

To cap things off, Davis ends with Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” showcasing his ragtime finger picking chops. Davis complicates the standard repertoire of a bluesman, moving not only between sacred and secular songs, but also with a double dose of ragtime in “Maple Leaf Rag,” and the impressive instrumental “Cincinnati Flow Rag.” According to the liner notes penned by Bob Grooms, Davis also excelled at the piano and banjo, and based on the virtuosic display heard here, one longs to hear what he might have had to offer on those instruments.

The few drawbacks of the album have nothing to do with Davis, but with the remastering of the tracks, which are inexplicably inconsistent. Some sound intimate and clear while others sound like bootlegs made from the audience. The loud applause in between takes is disruptive in its length and volume. This is surprising from Document, which generally excels at remastering historical material. The liner notes are adequate but mostly a song-by-song explication as to where each fits within Davis’s larger performing repertoire, as well as some general history as to Davis’s activities in Europe in the 1960s. The photos are minimal and offer only two shots of Davis backstage, so one never gets a visual sense of Manchester Free Trade Hall. Nonetheless, none of this undermines the astounding performance given that May night in 1964, where it became quite obvious that American blues and gospel had become transnational musics.

Posted by Thomas Grant Richardson