Memphis Sanctified Jug Bands 1928-1930

Recording information: 02/07/1928-02/21/1930.

In 1994, Document's Memphis Sanctified Jug Bands 1928-1930 brought into general availability 21 recordings made in one of the South's largest African-American communities by four ensembles that combined exuberant Christian worship with the kind of instrumentation made famous by the Memphis Jug Band and Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers. That means kazoo, harmonica, banjo, mandolin, guitar, piano, washboard, and at least one person blowing bass tones across the mouth of a big ceramic whiskey jug, with rhythmic handclapping and maybe a brass cornet or trumpet to help establish and define the melody. Even those who have no interest in or inclination toward organized religion may enjoy these exercises in holy rolling, especially the explosive "Come Over Here," "How Much I Owe for Love Divine," "Lord, Lord, He Sure Is Good to Me," and "Watch Ye, Therefore, You Know Not The Day." These constitute the complete Okeh recordings of Elder Richard Bryant's Sanctified Singers. Bryant's Victor recordings, (tracks 1-2 and 7-13, which include three previously unreleased alternate takes) are emphatically ground-out sermons followed by musical post-ludes. "Everybody Was There," which was harvested from a very scratchy phonograph record, closes with a melody that shows up in early 20th century North American music with worldly titles like "Keep A-Knockin' But You Can't Come In" and "Bucket's Got a Hole in It (Won't Hold No Beer)." For some people, the audio distortion on a record like this adds to rather than detracts from the thrill and wonderment of the historic playback experience. During the two Victor recordings by the impassioned Rev. E.S. (Shy) Moore, the gentle singing of the congregation behind him is an especially beautiful example of traditional African-American group ritual. Both the Brother Williams Memphis Sanctified Singers and the Holy Ghost Sanctified Singers (originally on Vocalion and Brunswick 78s, reproduced here as tracks 16-21) make use of extroverted female voices that deliver each song with stirring power and intensity. Aside from the preachers, the only participants on this collection to have been even hypothetically identified are associated with these same two ensembles. They are vocalists Melinda Taylor and Bessie Johnson, and guitarist/mouth organist Will Shade (aka Son Brimmer), a cardinal member of the Memphis Jug Band. According to the carefully researched liner notes by music historian and co-founder of Yazoo Records Bernie Klatzko, the original Church of God in Christ (CoGiC), founded in Lexington, MS in 1895, was by the '20s instrumental, so to speak, in encouraging the mixture of bluesy full-force jug band "continuo" with religiously charged singing, shouting, and even screaming. What's preserved on this collection amounts to the inevitable intermingling of sacred and secular, to the point where the artificially imposed delineations between different ways of expressing the immediate truths of the human condition disintegrate and dissolve in a deep immersion of spirituals and ancestral memory, stirred into a whirlpool by currents of folk, country dances, and the blues. The background for this music leads from Memphis through Alabama and Mississippi to the Carolinas and the Georgia Sea Islands, across the wide Atlantic to the western coast of Africa, from Cape Verde on down to Cape Town. ~ arwulf arwulf

Genre:

• Christian & Gospel