Sunday morning gospel: Blackwood Brothers, Taylor Mountain Boys, Singspiration Quartet, The Smith Brothers

Some toe-tappin' gospel singles to start your Sunday morning, or afternoon, or evening.  Doesn't have to be Sunday, of course.  But it helps put one in the mood.  We start with two numbers I put up in 2017, but they're worth the repeat.  Both are by Charles H. Gabriel (four of his numbers grace this list) and are done with gusto by the Lee College (Cleveland, Tennessee) Choir, with Gabriel's once-famous Awakening Chorus taken at a very fast clip.  From a 45 rpm EP made by/for the choir, and one of my favorite singles, in fact.  The excellent Singspiration Quartet gives us Gottschalk's famous Holy Ghost with Light Divine (one of several similar titles given to this tune), the melody adapted from the once-standard parlor music classic The Last Hope.  And I'm not using "parlor music" in the standard sense (fluff)--the original is a lovely light piano work, and it works beautifully as a hymn tune.  Army of the Lord is by the once-household-name Stuart Hamblen, whose material was often corny and folksy in that fabricated '50s fashion, but who possessed a great deal of songwriting ability, so I can just shut my yap.  I do like his stuff, by the way.  I don't run across Word label 45s very often, and the one in this post may be my sole example--the Imperial Quartet singing Rain, Rain, Rain and Someday, Somewhere, both excellent sides.  At the moment, I don't remember the history behind Gloryland Jubilee, featured here in a superb version by the Blackwood Brothers Quartet, but it's awfully close to A Wonderful Time Up There, a.k.a. Gospel Boogie.  Occasionally, you'll have two gospel numbers that are so close, it's hard to pry them apart in memory.  There are two resurrection-morning numbers that fall into that category, and I spent years finding songbook versions of both.  Time for a paragraph break.

The Statesmen's killer 1959 Get Thee Behind Me, Satan has to be heard to be believed--it pretty much sets the bar for lively Southern gospel.  My copy sounds slightly distorted, but the music is so fabulous, it doesn't matter.  Looking at the disc right now, I can't see much, if any, groove wear--maybe it needs a cleaning?  Looks clean, though.  I'll clean it and tell you what I discover.  Stay tuned.  The Cathedral Quartet's 1970 Laughing Song (in stereo, no less!) is actually Ticklish Reuben, which Wikipedia tells us is "a folk song written by Cal Stewart in 1900."  Stewart was known for his laughing songs, a tradition which, far as I know, started in England.  Or so I was told, back when I was collecting 78s in Scotland.  Anyway, a folk song, by definition, is a song with no known authorship, so this is just Wikipedia being stupid.  And my guess would a minstrel show origin for the number--so much was stolen from African Americans, and while "Reuben" of course goes hand in hand with the standard slang for mountain/rural folks ("rubes"), there's no reason an entertainment form awash in class stereotypes would shy away from "rube" or "Reuben."

Why a gospel group recorded this, I don't know.  Why did I put it up?  Um....

Deliverance Will Come is also known as Palms of Victory, and was written by the Reverend John B. Matthias in 1836, and, despite the fact that its authorship is known, Wikipedia doesn't term it a folk song.  Consistency, please, Wiki.  It's a gospel masterpiece--one of those unbelievably simple things that shouldn't work so beautifully but does.  As for the two measures that sound like O Susanna, be advised that Foster's song was published twelve years after this, in 1848.  The bluegrass-times-ten version of Amazing Grace, by the Taylor Mountain Boys, was recorded right here--well, sort of.  It's on the Columbus, Ohio B&4 label, and I'm metro Columbus, so....  To my astonishment, a B&4 discography is out there, and so I'm able to inform you that this is from 1966.  Since we're talking tune history, no one knows when the standard Amazing Grace tune was written, or by whom.  (We know all about the words, of course.)  My sitting-at-the-PC-desk memory tells me that there were three tunes floating around the American tunebooks of the 19th century--Harmony Grove and New Britain were two of them.  Over the many decades, the text has been matched to any number of tunes (I stopped counting after I found the 20th), but just when it became glued to this one, I know not.  A fun musical game is to think of all the tunes that the lyrics fit.  There is Antioch, for instance, the standard tune for Joy to the World.  Try it.  It can also be sung to "The Ballad of Gilligan's Isle," i.e. the theme to Gilligan's Island.  You can use the tune to Just As I Am.  A friend and I discovered it goes with the OSU fight song.  It's a crazy world, and we humans are the reason.

The Smith Brothers' highly entertaining Working in God's Factory is "literal" Christianity taken to surreal levels....







CLICK HERE TO HEAR: Sunday morning gospel 1-20-19







Reapers Are Needed (Gabriel)--A.T. Humphries and Lee College Choir
Awakening Chorus (Gabriel)--Same
Deliverance Will Come (Matthias)--Masters Trio
Get Thee Behind Me, Satan--The Statesmen w. Hovie Lister, 1959
Amazing Grace--The Taylor Mountain Boys (B&4 817B-3999; 1966)
Gloryland Jubilee (Buford Abner), 1953
One Step (Toward the Lord), 1953
I'm Gonna Shout--The Smith Brothers, 1955
Working in God's Factory--Same
When Morning Comes--Masters Trio
Holy Ghost with Light Divine (Gottschalk)--Singspiration Quartet, early 1950s
The World Is Not My Home (Brumley)--Same
I'm Gonna Sail Away--The Smith Brothers w. the Gospel Singers, 1953
Rain, Rain, Rain--Imperial Quartet
Someday, Somewhere--Same
Army of the Lord (Hamblen)--The Prairie Choir w. Darol Rice's Orch., 1955
The Church in the Wildwood--Terry Pillow Singers (Royale EP112)
Jesus, Rose of Sharon (Gabriel)--Tops R1003-49)
Brighten the Corner Where You Are (Ogden-Gabriel)--The Browns, feat. Jim Edward Brown, 1960
Laughing Song--The Cathedral Quartet (Eternal 701108; 1970)


Lee