TUE., DECEMBER 19, 2006
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Calvin, Rocketown and Blind Mamie Forehand: 2006 in Review
by Michael James McGonigal
As you’re very likely aware, eMusic celebrates independent record labels (which is cool because that’s also all there is on the site). Gospel and contemporary Christian music got much of their start and the music continues to thrive — largely because of the efforts of dozens of small labels run predominantly for the love of the music, for the joy of spreading “the good news.” CCM may be an increasingly expanding market, and the mainstream publications love to throw around the metrics to support this, but it’s important to remember that if it weren’t for small, dedicated labels such as Word, Specialty, Integrity, Sparrow, Tooth & Nail and Gospo Centric, the music would likely be as underground as the early Christians had to be in Rome.
Thinking back over 2006 for eMusic in Spiritual music, the biggest and raddest thing had to be the influx of tunes from the catalogues of Rocketown, Calvin and Revenant. These additions have greatly enriched eMusic's offerings in contemporary Christian music and old school black gospel. Rocketown, started in 1996 by CCM superstar Michael W. Smith, has some of the CCM world’s finest, least hackneyed artists, including Chris Rice, Ginny Owens and Shaun Groves. As an artist-run label, it truly has the interests of the performers at heart, too. Calvin Records has a dizzying array of collections of classic African-American gospel from the golden age: James Cleveland, the Caravans, the Staple Singers and my faves the Swan Silvertones. You pretty much should figure that if it’s on Calvin, it’s gonna be good and it will also be the recordings you want (not some latter-day re-recordings with different members, say).
The single piece of music that really blew me away this year leapt right out when I listened back to the 1997 Revenant compilation American Primitive, Vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel 1926-1936. “Honey in the Rock” by Blind Mamie Forehand is simple, stark and sublime. This 1927 recording based on Psalm 81:16 is composed of a plaintive and bluesy guitar line played by her (likely) husband A.C. Forehand, accompanied by a repeatedly-struck bell and Mamie’s perfect voice. It’s unearthly and amazing, the closest I’ve come to finding a companion piece to Blind Willie Johnson’s beyond-eerie and justly-celebrated '20s recording “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.”
The Revenant label does not release solely gospel, but the gospel it releases is superb. Acoustic guitar innovator, weirdo outlaw Christian musician John Fahey started the label in 1996 with his manager Dean Blackwood. The label’s name “comes from a French word meaning one who returns after a long absence, and is also an English word that means a ghost or spirit [which] comes back,” Blackwood explained to me in 1998. “Raw music of all stripes” is the label’s motto. “The raw musics thing has more to do with the artist's vision being preserved in its raw form,” Blackwood said. “The common thread is that it's all ‘spiritual’ music, I think, meaning it engages the spirit first and foremost, rather than some really cerebral nonsense.” American Primitive Vol. 1 did much to introduce the myriad joys of bluesy gospel and sanctified blues to a new generation. Fahey passed away in 2001, but Blackwood has kept it going since.
The great gospel historian Horace Clarence Boyer wrote about Forehand’s recording in a songbook for the group Sweet Honey in the Rock. He relates how “the song became widely popular among Pentecostal, Baptist and Methodist congregations but, as often happens, it underwent a slight textual change on its way to popularity.” So while Forehand titled her song “Honey in the Rock,” as various congregants sang the tune later, they added “Sweet” to the title and it became known as such. In the early ‘70s, Bernice Reagon formed an all-female a capella gospel act which took their name and part of their inspiration from Mamie’s song.
I’m not one of those Old Time Religion people who thinks that everything was better in the old days. But I keep looking for music that has a direct, spiritual power on the same level that these early bluesy gospel songs from the ‘20s and ‘30s did — these numbers by Blind Mamie and her contemporaries such as the Rev. Edward Clayborn, Willie Johnson and Blind Roosevelt Graves — and I just can’t find it anywhere. This is my job, listening to this stuff, so believe me, I’ve tried; I’ve searched long and hard.
I can break the song back down into its constituent parts, to try to dissect and learn from it. A street singer for years in Memphis, Tennessee, Forehand’s voice is exceptional and delightfully quavering; unlike many street performers cutting records, she didn’t feel the need to shout. I can remark how that slide guitar is knife-sharp, and the constant banging of bells is spooky and pretty at the same time. I can try to imagine the scene, the husband and wife recording a song in a makeshift Memphis studio, on February 28, 1927, almost eighty years ago. But always, it’s the direct yet sepulchral beauty of this song that just makes me melt. I can never listen to it once; it’s either a dozen times or none at all.
Thinking back over 2006 for eMusic in Spiritual music, the biggest and raddest thing had to be the influx of tunes from the catalogues of Rocketown, Calvin and Revenant. These additions have greatly enriched eMusic's offerings in contemporary Christian music and old school black gospel. Rocketown, started in 1996 by CCM superstar Michael W. Smith, has some of the CCM world’s finest, least hackneyed artists, including Chris Rice, Ginny Owens and Shaun Groves. As an artist-run label, it truly has the interests of the performers at heart, too. Calvin Records has a dizzying array of collections of classic African-American gospel from the golden age: James Cleveland, the Caravans, the Staple Singers and my faves the Swan Silvertones. You pretty much should figure that if it’s on Calvin, it’s gonna be good and it will also be the recordings you want (not some latter-day re-recordings with different members, say).
The single piece of music that really blew me away this year leapt right out when I listened back to the 1997 Revenant compilation American Primitive, Vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel 1926-1936. “Honey in the Rock” by Blind Mamie Forehand is simple, stark and sublime. This 1927 recording based on Psalm 81:16 is composed of a plaintive and bluesy guitar line played by her (likely) husband A.C. Forehand, accompanied by a repeatedly-struck bell and Mamie’s perfect voice. It’s unearthly and amazing, the closest I’ve come to finding a companion piece to Blind Willie Johnson’s beyond-eerie and justly-celebrated '20s recording “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.”
The Revenant label does not release solely gospel, but the gospel it releases is superb. Acoustic guitar innovator, weirdo outlaw Christian musician John Fahey started the label in 1996 with his manager Dean Blackwood. The label’s name “comes from a French word meaning one who returns after a long absence, and is also an English word that means a ghost or spirit [which] comes back,” Blackwood explained to me in 1998. “Raw music of all stripes” is the label’s motto. “The raw musics thing has more to do with the artist's vision being preserved in its raw form,” Blackwood said. “The common thread is that it's all ‘spiritual’ music, I think, meaning it engages the spirit first and foremost, rather than some really cerebral nonsense.” American Primitive Vol. 1 did much to introduce the myriad joys of bluesy gospel and sanctified blues to a new generation. Fahey passed away in 2001, but Blackwood has kept it going since.
The great gospel historian Horace Clarence Boyer wrote about Forehand’s recording in a songbook for the group Sweet Honey in the Rock. He relates how “the song became widely popular among Pentecostal, Baptist and Methodist congregations but, as often happens, it underwent a slight textual change on its way to popularity.” So while Forehand titled her song “Honey in the Rock,” as various congregants sang the tune later, they added “Sweet” to the title and it became known as such. In the early ‘70s, Bernice Reagon formed an all-female a capella gospel act which took their name and part of their inspiration from Mamie’s song.
I’m not one of those Old Time Religion people who thinks that everything was better in the old days. But I keep looking for music that has a direct, spiritual power on the same level that these early bluesy gospel songs from the ‘20s and ‘30s did — these numbers by Blind Mamie and her contemporaries such as the Rev. Edward Clayborn, Willie Johnson and Blind Roosevelt Graves — and I just can’t find it anywhere. This is my job, listening to this stuff, so believe me, I’ve tried; I’ve searched long and hard.
I can break the song back down into its constituent parts, to try to dissect and learn from it. A street singer for years in Memphis, Tennessee, Forehand’s voice is exceptional and delightfully quavering; unlike many street performers cutting records, she didn’t feel the need to shout. I can remark how that slide guitar is knife-sharp, and the constant banging of bells is spooky and pretty at the same time. I can try to imagine the scene, the husband and wife recording a song in a makeshift Memphis studio, on February 28, 1927, almost eighty years ago. But always, it’s the direct yet sepulchral beauty of this song that just makes me melt. I can never listen to it once; it’s either a dozen times or none at all.
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