Famous L. Renfroe, Children

What a sweet discovery! Here's a guitar-heavy gospel soul album recorded in 1969 by the one-man band Famous L. Renfroe. Fans of the Numero Group's outsider soul compilations, you have found your next favorite album. Musically, there's more variety than one would typically find on a gospel record from this era. Songs like "Believe," "And Man" and "His Love" are groove-heavy, languid numbers with a solo singer, while "It's So" is a funky, slow-burning guitar jam — the MGs on laudanum. Renfroe performs everything except the drums. The songs are all original compositions, though true to the gospel tradition there's a bit of borrowing here and there; the wonderful mid-tempo "Circle" is clearly based on "Trouble in My Way," for instance. What's really extraordinary are numbers like "Feed," "Circle," "Why Not I" and "Reaching," where the dude recreates all the parts in quartet style singing: tenor, alto, bass, all of it. These songs are a wonderful and mildly eccentric update of Golden Age gospel. It's not a tight quartet style, and he doesn't perfectly hit every low and high note, but that's part of the appeal.

If you know anything about this guy, please contact me! The record label, after hyperbolically referring to him as the "J.D. Salinger of soul gospel," reports that the album was recorded in Memphis. But the liner notes they sent along state the album was cut in Seattle. No other biographical or geographical information is available; a full search of the internets and phone calls to record collectors reveal… nothing. Likely a self-released effort, one wonders how many other records there are like this just lying around in Goodwills and record shop 99-cent bins. I have dozens myself, though only one or two are anywhere near as good as this. Judging by the endless supply of rare(!) private press(!!!) psychedelic and folk records we've all seen go for thousands of dollars on eBay only to be bootlegged later — in editions of, say, 60 copies — there must be a lot of them out there. Get your knees dirty looking for them tomorrow; for today, lay back and crank Famous L. Renfroe's uplifting odes to the Creator.