TUE., JANUARY 23, 2007
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Bishop Perry Tillis
by Michael James McGonigal
Even the most casual reader of this column will know that I’m obsessed with the gospel blues, from the guitar evangelists (Ed Clayborn, Blind Willie Johnson) and streetcorner singers (Luther Magby, Blind Mamie Forehand) of the ‘20s and ‘30s on through the gritty gospel singers of the ‘50s (Sister Ola Mae Terrell, Rosetta Tharpe) and the electrified preacher-singers of the last few decades (Isaiah Thomas, the Rev. Charlie Jackson). You can add Bishop Perry Tillis to the list of sanctified blues singers who played invigorating gospel blues from the ‘40s until very recently. I’d never heard of the guy until just the other week, thanks to a release on the Bay Area-based Birdman Recording Group, which came after the label's owner, music biz veteran and Reboot Stereophonic player David Katznelson, came into contact with Swedish archivist Bengt Olsson after releasing the compilation It Came from Memphis Vol. 2. That record included a few of the field recordings that Olsson had made in the American south as a kid in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Katznelson, who’d already released two excellent albums by fife and drum patriarch Otha Turner, quickly realized the worth of Olsson’s tapes and bought the rights to them.
After transferring the tapes to disc for reference, the first CD Katznelson popped in was of Perry Tillis, an almost completely obscure blind blues musician Olsson discovered living alone in abject poverty in rural Alabama. Tillis sang beautiful spiritual numbers in the style of pre-war Delta blues. “I felt like I’d just unearthed a pot of gold,” Katznelson enthuses. “It was almost hard to listen to; it was so real with feeling, purity and sound. His guitar playing is like a fragile mosquito, and his long, monotonous riffs explore Velvet Underground territory.” Released last month — two years after his death in 2004 at the age of eighty-five — the Bishop Tillis album Too Close is a thing of great, ragged beauty. It’s amazing that Too Close is a debut album. But as Tillis himself told the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture’s publication The Field in 1995, “I never did want no records much. There just wasn't enough in it. See, I could get out there with my guitar; I played the blues and I'd get out there in a club or some building and make myself $2000 a week. I couldn't get that on records."
After saving up money by living with his folks and working extra shifts at a printing plant, Olsson headed to the States in the summer of 1969 with a fellow enthusiast who owned a portable tape recorder and some mikes. The two bought a used Chevy in upstate New York and headed to Chicago, where they encountered the great electric blues musicians Hound Dog Taylor and Magic Slim in nightclubs that stayed open almost ‘til sun-up. After a week spent sleeping at the apartment of the guy who ran Delmark Records, the duo headed on to places in the South they’d never heard of. Olsson discovered and documented a wealth of obscure traditional music over the course of his travels, and he returned in 1971 and 1974. Olsson found blues-based musicians no one else had recorded: players of astonishing force. “We were really interested in finding out where no one had gone before,” he explains. He wrote a book, Memphis Blues and Jug Bands (Studio Vista, 1970), centering on the history of jug bands; it fetches upwards of $100 online today. Until recently, Olsson’s recordings had only been released on a few comps on the European label Flyright in the ‘70s.
Studying a map during that first trip, Olsson chose Coffee County at the base of Alabama “because it was the remotest place I could find.” “We got to Elba, Alabama, and asked around about possible local musicians,” Olsson relates. “People immediately mentioned a man named ‘Blind Perry’ and when we found the place we hardly knew we’d found it. The driveway was covered in weeds, the house itself looked abandoned. Dogs were running around. It was not a romantic kind of thing, it was real sad. There he was living all by himself, blind since not too many years back, pieces missing in the wooden floor. He was living in a condition of total despair. Then when he played, the music was so intense, so beautiful! It was like hearing Charley Patton for the first time; it shook me in the same way, musically and emotionally. It was all I could do not to cry.”
Too Close is superlative, one of those releases that not only redresses historical wrongs, but one that you find yourself listening to on repeat without even realizing it. The recordings on Too Close were made by Olsson in ’69 and ’71 and later by a close friend of Olsson’s in ’72, after Terry had gotten an electric guitar. It’s astonishing stuff. The music consists solely of Tillis’ voice and guitar, with occasional percussion caused by his feet stomping the loose floorboards in his house. From the first song, his take on “God Don’t Like It,” a song that advises against the drinking of moonshine, to “Kennedy Moan,” a stirring political number, it is all stirring stuff. Asked about this music’s rarity, Olsson says “I think sanctified blues as a tradition lived on as long as [‘regular’] blues,” but surmises that maybe “sanctified people didn’t buy the records as much, plus you didn’t have sanctified records on jukeboxes except for maybe Sister Rosetta Tharpe.”
Olsson notes that Perry Tillis was a professional musician who traveled extensively back in the ‘40s. “He went everywhere. He literally traveled from Florida to California.” Along the way Tillis met and played with Muddy Waters, with Pops Staples when he still was in Mississippi, and with John Lee Hooker before he went up north. Like a great many blues musicians of the day, from Charley Patton and Bukka White to the Reverend Gary Davis and Fred McDowell, he played blues with both sacred and profane content. Some of the biggest and best early blues singers sang only spiritual-type tunes, so-called guitar evangelists like Ed Clayborn and the great Blind Willie Johnson (who allegedly sought out Tillis in the ’40s to play with him). In the ‘60s, Tillis was converted and devoted himself to his music and his ministry via the Church of God in Christ. He became an itinerant preacher, eventually starting his own church and calling himself a reverend; years later, he made himself a bishop.
Birdman plans to issue multiple discs culled from Olsson’s recordings over the next few years; there’s a lot to dig through. And if the other releases — by the likes of Lum Guffin, Dewey Corley and Lattie Murrell — are even half this good, it’ll be something special!
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After transferring the tapes to disc for reference, the first CD Katznelson popped in was of Perry Tillis, an almost completely obscure blind blues musician Olsson discovered living alone in abject poverty in rural Alabama. Tillis sang beautiful spiritual numbers in the style of pre-war Delta blues. “I felt like I’d just unearthed a pot of gold,” Katznelson enthuses. “It was almost hard to listen to; it was so real with feeling, purity and sound. His guitar playing is like a fragile mosquito, and his long, monotonous riffs explore Velvet Underground territory.” Released last month — two years after his death in 2004 at the age of eighty-five — the Bishop Tillis album Too Close is a thing of great, ragged beauty. It’s amazing that Too Close is a debut album. But as Tillis himself told the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture’s publication The Field in 1995, “I never did want no records much. There just wasn't enough in it. See, I could get out there with my guitar; I played the blues and I'd get out there in a club or some building and make myself $2000 a week. I couldn't get that on records."
After saving up money by living with his folks and working extra shifts at a printing plant, Olsson headed to the States in the summer of 1969 with a fellow enthusiast who owned a portable tape recorder and some mikes. The two bought a used Chevy in upstate New York and headed to Chicago, where they encountered the great electric blues musicians Hound Dog Taylor and Magic Slim in nightclubs that stayed open almost ‘til sun-up. After a week spent sleeping at the apartment of the guy who ran Delmark Records, the duo headed on to places in the South they’d never heard of. Olsson discovered and documented a wealth of obscure traditional music over the course of his travels, and he returned in 1971 and 1974. Olsson found blues-based musicians no one else had recorded: players of astonishing force. “We were really interested in finding out where no one had gone before,” he explains. He wrote a book, Memphis Blues and Jug Bands (Studio Vista, 1970), centering on the history of jug bands; it fetches upwards of $100 online today. Until recently, Olsson’s recordings had only been released on a few comps on the European label Flyright in the ‘70s.
Studying a map during that first trip, Olsson chose Coffee County at the base of Alabama “because it was the remotest place I could find.” “We got to Elba, Alabama, and asked around about possible local musicians,” Olsson relates. “People immediately mentioned a man named ‘Blind Perry’ and when we found the place we hardly knew we’d found it. The driveway was covered in weeds, the house itself looked abandoned. Dogs were running around. It was not a romantic kind of thing, it was real sad. There he was living all by himself, blind since not too many years back, pieces missing in the wooden floor. He was living in a condition of total despair. Then when he played, the music was so intense, so beautiful! It was like hearing Charley Patton for the first time; it shook me in the same way, musically and emotionally. It was all I could do not to cry.”
Too Close is superlative, one of those releases that not only redresses historical wrongs, but one that you find yourself listening to on repeat without even realizing it. The recordings on Too Close were made by Olsson in ’69 and ’71 and later by a close friend of Olsson’s in ’72, after Terry had gotten an electric guitar. It’s astonishing stuff. The music consists solely of Tillis’ voice and guitar, with occasional percussion caused by his feet stomping the loose floorboards in his house. From the first song, his take on “God Don’t Like It,” a song that advises against the drinking of moonshine, to “Kennedy Moan,” a stirring political number, it is all stirring stuff. Asked about this music’s rarity, Olsson says “I think sanctified blues as a tradition lived on as long as [‘regular’] blues,” but surmises that maybe “sanctified people didn’t buy the records as much, plus you didn’t have sanctified records on jukeboxes except for maybe Sister Rosetta Tharpe.”
Olsson notes that Perry Tillis was a professional musician who traveled extensively back in the ‘40s. “He went everywhere. He literally traveled from Florida to California.” Along the way Tillis met and played with Muddy Waters, with Pops Staples when he still was in Mississippi, and with John Lee Hooker before he went up north. Like a great many blues musicians of the day, from Charley Patton and Bukka White to the Reverend Gary Davis and Fred McDowell, he played blues with both sacred and profane content. Some of the biggest and best early blues singers sang only spiritual-type tunes, so-called guitar evangelists like Ed Clayborn and the great Blind Willie Johnson (who allegedly sought out Tillis in the ’40s to play with him). In the ‘60s, Tillis was converted and devoted himself to his music and his ministry via the Church of God in Christ. He became an itinerant preacher, eventually starting his own church and calling himself a reverend; years later, he made himself a bishop.
Birdman plans to issue multiple discs culled from Olsson’s recordings over the next few years; there’s a lot to dig through. And if the other releases — by the likes of Lum Guffin, Dewey Corley and Lattie Murrell — are even half this good, it’ll be something special!
Browse Recent eMusic Editorial Features
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