Category: Gospel

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All record labels from the collection of Axel Küstner. All photos taken by Axel Küstner. Special thanks to Bernd Van Werven for digitizing the photos.

On today’s show we spotlight the guitar evangelist tradition with the bulk of the tracks from the 20s and 30s and well as some later day performers. During the Depression era of the 1930s into the 50s, street musicians were a commonplace of Black American life to be found both in small towns and cities. Many of these musicians, like Blind Willie Johnson, sang religious music and played guitar for change from the passing crowd with a handful finding their way on to record. In the realms of commercial recordings, the original guitar evangelist was the Rev. Edward W. Clayborn who was bestowed that title in the copy for ads advertising his records which appeared in the Chicago Defender in 1927. If Clayborn remains obscure, Blind Willie Johnson is far better known and the subject of a good deal of research. By the time Johnson began his recording career in 1927, he was a well-known evangelist and recorded through 1930. Some of today’s artists are well remembered, such as Blind Gary Davis and Sister Rosettta Tharpe, but the rest, like Mother McCollum, Blind Joe Taggart, Rev. Utah Smith, Lonnie McIntorsh, Eddie Head, Sister O.M. Terrell and others featured today remain obscure. There were several notable latter day guitar evangelists and we hear from a few, such as Flora Molton, Rev. Charlie Jackson, Leon Pinson and Boyd Rivers. I may do a part two as there were several artists that I didn’t quite have room for, including several latter day performers. We kick the show off with three by Blind Willie Johnson considered by many as the greatest of the guitar evangelists.

By the time Blind Willie Johnson began his recording career, he was a well-known evangelist. On December 3, 1927, Johnson was assembled along with Billiken Johnson and Coley Jones at a temporary studio that talent scout Frank Walker had set up in the Deep Ellum neighborhood in Dallas to record for Columbia Records. In the ensuing session, Johnson played six selections, 13 takes in total, and was accompanied by Willie B. Harris on his first recording, “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole”. The first songs to be released were “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole” and “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed”, on Columbia’s popular 14000 Race series. Johnson’s debut became a substantial success, as 9,400 copies were pressed, more than the latest release by one of Columbia’s most established stars, Bessie Smith, and an additional pressing of 6,000 copies followed.

Johnson, accompanied by Willie B. Harris, returned to Dallas on December 5, 1928 for a second recording session. Another year passed before Johnson recorded again, on December 10 and 11, 1929, the longest sessions of his career. He completed ten sides in 16 takes at Werlein’s Music Store in New Orleans. For his fifth and final recording session, Johnson journeyed to Atlanta, Georgia, with Harris returning to provide vocal harmonies. Ten selections were completed on April 20, 1930. Some of his songs were re-released by Vocalion Records in 1932, but Johnson never recorded again.

Practically nothing is known about Rev. Edward Clayborn who was the earliest guitar evangelist on record. He cut over two dozen numbers for Vocalion between 1926 and 1929, scoring a major hit in 1926 with “Your Enemies Cannot Harm You (But Watch Your Close Friends).”

Chicago Defender June 4, 1927

Blind Joe Taggart made his first recordings in 1926, for the Vocalion label as Blind Joe Taggart. More sessions followed in 1927, 1928 and 1929. Josh White was a lead boy for Blind Joe Taggart during the late 1920’s, for the sum of $4 per week and apparently leased out by his mother. While performing his job, Taggart kept White dressed in rags with no shoes, presumably in order to invite sympathy from the audience when performing or otherwise. Taggart’s last commercial recordings were issued in 1934. He remarried in Chicago in 1943, and made a acetate for the Presto label in 1948 which has been reissued by John Tefteller.

Rev. Gary Davis ran with legendary bluesmen such as Willie Walker and Blind Boy Fuller down South, making his debut with fifteen sides cut in 1935 for the ARC label. In the 1940’s he moved to New York where he recorded prolifically in the post-war years starting with a few scattered sides in the 1940’s, more in the 1950’s before really picking up steam in the 1960’s. While he was never a star on the folk scene or blues revival, he attracted a flock of devoted mostly white followers who learned directly from him and many in turn became well known musicians in their own right ensuring that Davis’ legacy was carried on.

If the above artists were relatively well recorded, there were a slew of fine artists who left just a handful of records such as Dennis Crumpton and Rob Summers’s who cut one great 78, Eddie Head and His Family, Blind Gussie Nesbit and Rev. I.B. Ware who all left behind two 78’s and the fine team of William and Versey Smith. William and Versey Smith were husband and wife team who recorded four tracks for Paramount Records in August 1927. Their song “Everybody Help The Boys Come Home” relates to World War I; and “When That Great Ship Went Down” relates to the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912. Blind Willie Johnson recorded his songs “When the War Was On” and “God Moves on the Water”, which relate to those same topics, and which share lyrics and tunes with them, on December 11, 1929. It therefore seems likely that Johnson knew that record.

There was quite a tradition of guitar toting gospel ladies such as Mother McCollum, Willie Mae Williams, Sister O.M. Terrell, Marylin Scott, Flora Molton and most famously Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Mother McCollum as billed as “Sanctified Singer with Guitar” and recorded six sides in June of 1930 for Vocalion Records. Nothing is known about her background.

Sister Sister O.M. Terrell was born Ola Mae Terrell in 1911, the Atlanta native experienced a salvation experience at age 11 while attending a Holiness Movement tent revival. From the Depression years of the 1930s to the Eisenhower ’50s, Sister Terrell lived the life of an itinerate evangelist and supported herself with her music. In 1948 she cut a record for the Playboy label. In 1953 she recorded six sides for Columbia. She was tracked down late in life by Bruce Nemerov at a nursing home in Conyers, Georgia.

Little is known about Marylin Scott or Mary Deloatch, she recorded under both names as well as Marylin Scott the Carolina Blues Girl. She may have been from Charlotte, North Carolina or Norfolk, Virginia, and did some local recording in the mid-40’s then in 1950 for the new independent label, Muse Records. Scott then moved to Savoy Records where she recorded with the Johnny Otis  which were released on Savoy’s subsidiary label, Regent Records. In 1951 she cut several gospel numbers for Regent as well as a few final gospel numbers for Savoy. She was still active in gospel music as late as 1967, cutting a 45 that year for Arctic.

In the post-war era the tradition the guitar evangelist tradition continued with artists such as Rev. Anderson Johnson, Rev. Utah Smith, Rev Charlie Jackson, Leon Pinson and Boyd Rivers among others. Rev. Anderson Johnson’s recording career was thought to have consisted of the i6 tracks cut in Miami during 1953 but one other earlier recording has been located issued on the Angel label. Johnson started preaching at the age of and at age 19 and was singing gospel on a street corner in Miami when Henry Stone walked by and offered him a record deal.

In 1923 Utah Smith became an evangelist in the Church of God In Christ, usually just called the Holiness or Sanctified Church. Smith had taken up harmonica as a teen, soon switching to a steel guitar, then an electric guitar by 1938 which he played in his revival meetings. He would make three commercial recordings, which would be issued on at least six different labels, three of which were versions of his theme song– I Want Two Wings. First came a 78 RPM for Regis, recorded and first issued in 1944, then re-issued on Manor (1949), Arco (1950) and on 45 rpm on Kay-Ron (1958). In 1953 he cut a session for Checker in Chicago, two songs were released. Smith ran his own Church in New Orleans called the Two Winged Temple.

Rev. Charlie Jackson was born in 1932 and by age ten was performing music for friends and at school. Jackson released a dozen or so singles on the Booker label out of New Orleans and on the Jackson label. Those recordings are collected on God’s Got it: The Legendary Booker and Jackson Singles. ackson played his breed of gospel blues at churches all over the Baton Rouge area in the 1970s and later as pastor of St. Raymond Divine Spiritual Church in the 1980s.

Beginning in 1929, Leon Pinson traveled the northern Mississippi region alongside his musical partner, the harmonica player Elder Roma Wilson. The pair built a strong following on the church circuit. In the 1940s, Roma Wilson left Mississippi for Detroit, where he would make his first recordings. Meanwhile, Pinson settled in Cleveland, where he played outside of Charlie White barber shop. Later he opened his own shoeshine stand, picking up the guitar when business was slow. Pinson and Wilson were reunited in the 1970s, when Wilson returned to Mississippi. The pair gained widespread acclaim from appearing at several prominent festivals. Pinson was recorded by Georg Mitchell in Cleveland, Mississippi Sept. 18, 1967, cut some sides in 1991 on Global Village and pressed a couple of 45’s himself to sell at gigs.

Boyd Rivers was born near Pickens in Madison County, Mississippi and started playing blues guitar at the age of 13, but three years later switched into spirituals. In 1979 he played at the Mississippi Delta Blues Festival with one song captured on record. In 1980 he was recorded by Axel Küstner with tracks appearing on the Living Country Blues USA series. Sides captured by Axel in 1991 were issued in 2012 on the album You Can’t Make Me Doubt.