(Blues / Gospel / Gospel Blues) [LP] [16/44.1] Reverend Gary Davis - New Blues and Gospel - 1971, FLAC (tracks)

Мой вольный перевод того, что написал в своём релизе на Вате автор этой оцифровки - SourPix: "Это редкий заключительный альбом Преподобного Гэри Дэвиса, содержит последние студийные записи (и возможно последние его записи вообще), который он сделал за свою долгую и прославленную карьеру... Эта пластинка продавалась на интернет-аукционах за приличную сумму денег, благодаря своей редкости, но также из-за фантастической музыки, на ней записанной. Я получил свой экземпляр пластинки, (который находится действительно в превосходном состоянии, имеются только поверхностные шумы в целом), от пожилого джентльмена на улице, и решил, что самое лучшее, что я могу сделать, - это поделиться этим сокровищем со всем миром. Если Вы - поклонник фолк-блюза и/или госпела, эта пластинка - специально для Вас." Все благодарности направляются конечно же оригинальному автору оцифровки и релизеру - SourPix!
Кстати, этот альбом в оригинальном виде до сих ни разу не переиздавался на CD, и некоторые версии песен не изданы больше нигде!
(Поскольку в оригинальных файлах было что-то неправильно с тэгами, другой пользователь с Ваты - Kenny_AF исправил тэги и зарелизил там же этот материал уже от себя, но с указанием оригинального оифровщика и релизера.)
Приятного всем прослушивания.
Reverend Gary Davis на трекере

"From the back cover:
"At seventy-five the Reverend Gary Davis is virtually an institution, his musical reputation so secure that his astonishing feats as a performer are apt to be taken for granted. Despite his advanced age his life has changed little over the past decade; when he is not giving concerts, he is likely to be regaling visitors at his Jamaica, Queens home with stories or musical pointers. No other "folk" musician is more generous with his time and gifts. His five dollar lessons are an outrageous bargain, but Davis is reluctant to hike his prices, reasoning: "I don't never look for a cow to give more milk than what she's made to give.... I don't go around everybody's pocket and make myself a bed and go to sleep: I don't think that's right."
Over the years many musicians have lines their own pockets with renditions of Davis pieces. His songs have been recorded by Dave Van Ronk, Taj Mahal, and the Grateful Dead, and his playing has influenced various guitarists with no immediate relationship to his style: Ry Cooder, Stefan Grossman, and Larry Johnson. But Davis himself acknowledges no musical mentor, declaring of music: "It's a thing you have to work out yourself. No one else can work it out for you."
He entered the ministry in the 1930's on a similarly independent note. His formal theological training consisted of a single session at a school for the blind near Spartanburg, South Carolina he attended through the patronage of a white Southerner who was impressed by his guitar-playing. After sampling courses in the Bible, Braille, and organ-playing, his stomach rebelled against the inadequate institutional food offered. On the pulpit as an assistant pastor he continues to shift for himself, never preaching from a preconceived text.
Davis' inate [sic] optimism and his religious faith have enabled him to rationalize and even surmount setbacks that would have embittered other men. In his own blindness he saw a larger and ultimately benevolent design: "If you got a dog, you know, you don't want him to run around: you know the next thing you do is tie him. Sometimes God has a way of fixin' people so He can get a hand on you.... And sometimes you know when God takes a man's sight He gives 'em somethin' greater."
He refuses to speculate on whether he would have taken up music had he not been blind from birth or childhood (accounts of his tragedy vary). Besides providing a livelihood and an outlet for his huge creative gifts, music came to gratify his competitive instincts. He recalls his early progress as swift and sure, adding: "I never really was shy of no guitar-players." By the 1920's he proudly bracketed himself among South Carolina's elite guitarists, who included his blind acquaintances Willie Walker of Greenville ("He was a guitar dog") and Simmie Dooley of Spartanburg. Both were recorded years before Davis.
A prince of his profession, Davis was treated like a lackey when he made his debut for the American Record Company in 1935. Discovered by a Burlington, North Carolina storekeeper named J.B. Long, he was persuaded to make his first journey north on the grounds that it was primarily "a pleasure trip through the country." He received less for his pains than his colleagues Bull City Red and Blind Boy Fuller, a Winston-Salem protege he had met earlier in 1935 when Fuller's wife Cora came to Durham in search of her errant husband. Long, Davis recalls, "paid the other boys off but he wanted me to wait for mine." After a belated and hardly equitable pay-off (about $40 for 14 sides), he never saw Long again.
Davis was neither jealous of Fuller's greater commercial success nor apt to pull rank on a man whose repertoire he had largely developed. Though he was admittedly "a very poor hand" for socializing, his friendly relationship with Fuller survived the latter's apathy toward his religious discourse. Even today, Davis refuses to pass the kind of doctrinaire judgements on blues so typical of the regenerate bluesman, remarking simply: "Everything that people say is a sin is not a sin." Despite his Baptist affiliations he is essentially non-denominational in spirit and stresses the subjective aspects of his sacred music: "It's just what you let it be. It means just as much to me as it does to you. Perhaps it might mean more to me.... and that's what require me to go further with it."
Although Davis' equivocal rejection of blues material pained early blues critics, who melodramatically attributed it to his blindness, his fondness for spirituals long pre-dated his conversion. "I played 'em in childhood 'cause my grandmother loved to hear 'em", he recalls. His own ministry was never opportunistic by nature and he barely supported himself with the three small churches he founded near Durham, the largest of which attained a total of twenty-eight members. "Nobody could say I married him for his money", his wife Annie remarks, "'cause really and truly he had no money". A devout church-goer, she squelches Davis' minor lapses from rectitude, recruits his guests for revivals, and (with the Reverend) looks forward to the early reopening of his church, which folded over three years ago following the death of its pastor.
Shortly after marrying The Reverend during the Second World Warm his wife obtained a position as a cook with a family in Mamaroneck, N.Y. She arranged for the Traveler's Aid Society to bring him up from Durham, a move he contemplated with some anxiety. "I had never heard nothin' good about New York 'fore I came up here", he says. Once the Davis' moved to 169th Street in the South Bronx around 1944 he began playing for street audiences, "not so much that I liked it bit that's the best I could do." He was lionized by the annotators of his first LP's as a "street minstrel", but notes himself: "I was glad to get away from it (street-singing) 'cause there's too many different kinds of people you meet up with in the street, and it;s not recognized, too.... They call it beggin'; pan-handlin'."
A more satisfactory avenue of employment emerged through the guitar lessons Davis had given informally "ever since I started out playin'." Without advertising ("I let myself be the sign") he attracted a number of fans as students. Yet during the "folk revival" of the Forties and Fifties he received little publicity by comparison with far lesser guitarists of the Josh White and Brownie McGhee ilk. He was content to bide his time, feeling that "it don't take but one match to set the whole world afire." His torch song proved to be SAMSON AND DELILAH; with the royalties from Peter, Paul and Mary's pop version of the piece he was able to purchase his own home in Jamaica about seven years ago.
Despite the continued concert demand for Davis, this album marks his first studio session in some five years. As always, he insisted that his material be accepted or rejected on the basis of first take [sic]. Following his custom of recent years, he performed on a twelve string guitar, which he professes not to favor over six string instrument [sic].
He developed HOW HAPPY I AM in a concert at Lake George, N.Y. several years ago and has favored it ever since; like SOONMY WORK WILL BE DONE [sic], another relatively recent addition, it is played in the key of G. I HEARD THE ANGELS SINGING and CHILDREN OF ZION are both considerably older works. Both are played in a minor key (E) which Davis, in common with romantic aestheticians of the nineteenth century, considers "lonesome sounding." He learned SAMSON from Blind Willie Johnson's 1927 recording IF I HAD MY WAY. The Johnson piece was a traditional Texas spiritual, often sung a capella; the Davis rearrangement is a virtuoso rendition in the key of G featuring his virtually patented techniques, such as plunking a bass string riff with his fretting hand.
The secular songs presented on this album tend to be more sedate and less somber than Davis' spirituals. TALK ON THE CORNER, a piece in G, was a favorite of his pre-preaching days. Although the lyrics and melody of SALLY WHERE'D YOU GET YOUR WHISKEY FROM? [sic] smack strongly of white folk song, Davis describes it as "my origination". Its cadences are similar to the familiar HESITATION BLUES, a piece in C, Davis learned in South Carolina around 1916 when "a fella come through jiggin' it on the piano." The "pie-back" man mentioned in the lyrics is a synonym for a gigolo; the "Jelly Roll" done by St. Peter was a dance of World War One vintage, as was the Hesitation itself. Davis learned WHISTLING BLUES (played with a pocket knife in open D tuning) as early as 1917 but normally disdains bottleneck playing and rarely performs it. Of his version of LOST JOHN he says: "That was blown on a harp long before I was born." He derived his harmonica style from an uncle and took up the instrument long before guitar.
Stephan Calt"
"This is the Reverend Gary Davis' rare final album, containing the last studio recordings (and possibly the last recordings period) which he made over his long and illustrious career. Varying at times from beautifully melancholic and sad to joyously raucous and swinging, it is never anything short of virtuosic and great. This record has gone for a fair amount of money on the internet auction sites, thanks in large part to its rarity, but also because it is so fantastic. I obtained my copy (which is really in superb condition, there is barely any surface noise at all) from an elderly gentleman on the street, and figured what better to do than to share it with the world at large. If you are a fan of folk blues and/or gospel, this record is a must for you."-- SourPix