How Can I Keep From Singing Vol. 2: Early American Religious Music And Song

They Say...

Review by Nathan Bush, All Music Guide

As with its predecessor, How Can I Keep from Singing, Vol.2: Early American Religious Music and Song combines a mere handful of well-known performers from the golden age of American Folk Music with a number of more mysterious names. In the place of obvious choices like Rev. Gary Davis and Blind Willie Johnson, for example, we find Shands Superior Jubilee Singers and Ridgel's Fountain Citians. After all, both Davis and Johnson have full-length Yazoo collections devoted to their music. What How Can I Keep from Singing does so well then, is to convey the scope of religious song (on record) during the 1920s and '30s. Placing bluesman Sam Collins' gorgeous "I Want to Be Like Jesus in My Heart" between the sacred harp singers of "Weeping Mary" and Morris Family's "He Rose Unknown" proves how much apparently disparate musicians had in common, even if the sound of their music seemed so far apart. Even secular performers join in. Sacred music certainly wasn't prominent in the repertoire of Cliff Carlisle, but that hardly concern's Yazoo. The guitarist and his quartet give a spirited reading of the popular "Shine on Me." The sound of the Golden Jubilee Quartet on "Job" seems to predate everything from the sacred style adopted by bluegrass singers in the '40s to the rockabilly panache of the '50s. Elsewhere, Washington Philips finds comfort on "Jesus Is My Friend," Shands Superior Jubilee Singers describe appropriate attire for heaven on "Silver Slippers" and the genteel voices of the Copperhill Male Quartet sound chilling delivering the title of "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood." In bringing together these artists, Yazoo creates a religious community on How Can I Keep from Singing. Though the musicians themselves might not have recognized it as such, on record it seems very real indeed.