My Home--The Blue Ridge Quartet (Queen City Albums 80871, prob. 1968)

 

The Waldorf post left me without much time to prepare a Sunday offering, but three quick thrift stops early this evening yielded this very fine Blue Ridge Quartet LP, which I'm nearly sure is from 1968.  You can't go wrong with this group, and one glance at the track lineup--When We All Get to Heaven, On the Jericho Road, Looking for a City--told me I was set for Sunday.  Unless some condition issues arose--and so far they haven't.  And there are some unfamiliar songs that have turned out to be marvelous.  (I'm listening as I type these notes.)  

A superb up-tempo number, Victory Is Coming, is playing now, and I can't find a thing on it.  I checked my more "down home" songbooks, and I Googled some of the lyrics (the title Victory Is Coming brings up an earlier, complete different  number), and not a bit of luck.  It doesn't seem right that Anon. should get the credit for this classic toe-tapper (though I could credit it to Unknown, but same difference).  Anyone with any info on this number, please share.  As we speak, a slow, reverent version of Lowell Mason's mega-classic Nearer My God To Thee is playing in my headphones, and it's gorgeous.  Lowell Mason was part of the correct (read: European-influenced) American school of gospel songwriting in the early 1800s--the big name in the movement to get rid of all those play-to-the-crowd "fuging" tunes and such (see William Billings, Daniel Read, and the other early New England hymn and anthem composers who paid little attention to "proper" part writing).  Mason was intent on bringing popular hymns up to snuff, and so it's ironic that, all these decades later, the allegedly crude Read and Billings stuff sounds just fine, while many of the hymns from the proper movement of Mason and Thomas Hastings have a very "gospel" sound.  Besides these excellent singers, folks like The Louvin Brothers have recorded them, and what would Lowell have thought?  Just goes to show there are fewer things more ephemeral than artistic standards.  Worry about what sounds good, not what's "correct," I always say.  Well, since this moment, at least.  I plan to adopt that saying, unless it slips my mind.

The closing track, Halls of Fame, belongs to the No Match on Google school of hymns, unless it's the 1962 Troy Lumpkin number I just found a copyright listing for.  Publisher is "Faith Music"--so it's very possibly this number.  Getting your picture in Heaven's Hall of Fame definitely beats ending up as one of the "pictures from life's other side" in the world's mighty gallery of pictures, where hang scenes that are painted from life.  (Reference to the classic lyrics of Pictures from Life's Other Side, that late 19th century number that became a bestselling gospel side for Smith's Sacred Singers in 1926.)

So, we get Luther G. Presley's lovely and famous I'd Rather Have Jesus, with the label spelling his name "Pressley," which appears to have been a common alternate spelling.  I do not know why.  Of course, like just about everyone else, when I see "Presley" in the songwriting slot, I think Elvis.  It's an auto-reaction.  It doesn't matter if I know it's Luther, and not Elvis--my brain will go, "Presley.  Oh, Elvis."  It's not just you--don't worry.  And we get the marvelous On the Jericho Road, the work of Donald S. McCrossoan, though Queen City Records doesn't appear to have known that.  And the "Couper" credited on There Is a Fountain (aka, There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood) is actually Cowper--as in, William Crowper (1731-1800).  They were only one letter off.  Marvin P. Dalton gave us the gospel masterwork Looking for a City, and I still don't know who penned the terrific Victory Is Coming.  Someone who knew his or her craft, anyway.

An excellent LP, and it gets a million thanks from me for showing up just when I needed a quick rip.  Er, let me reword that...  (We'll pretend, for the sake of the post, we don't know the slang meaning of that word.)

To the Grade A gospel...

DOWNLOAD: My Home--The Blue Ridge Quartet (Queen City Albums 80817; prob. 1968)

Lee