Sometimes you have to listen to husband-wife art rock duos and review Jimmy Buffett concerts, but other times this rock critic stuff can be pretty cool. Just the other day, for instance, I called a number in Chicago and Mavis Staples picked up the phone. You have to understand that Freedom Highway, the gospel/folk album […]
From “Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music” (TCU Press) by Michael Corcoran When Arizona Dranes, blind and broke and a little wary, took a train from Fort Worth to Chicago in June 1926 to record for OKeh Records, there was no assurance that anything would come out of the trip. “Please understand that […]
On the morning of April 18, 1906, a headline on the front page of the Los Angeles Daily News screamed of “Weird Babel of Tongues” heard from a “New Sect of Fanatics Breaking Loose” at a former livery stable at 312 Azusa St. in downtown Los Angeles. The reporter described a racially mixed congregation, which […]
By Michael Corcoran In July 2001, I received this Amazing Gospel CD in the mail at my job at the Austin American Statesman. It’s an unauthorized British compilation of 1920s American gospel music that would would end up playing a big part in my slow transformation from cynical/ abrasive music critic to deep-digging historian. A […]
The rocker, the singer-songwriter, the guitar hero all sprung from this holy trinity, who recorded before any of the more celebrated Mississippi Delta deities. And yet, because they played gospel, not the more collectable and researchable blues, Arizona Dranes, Washington Phillips and Blind Willie Johnson had been woefully bypassed by musicologists and historians until recently. […]
Leaving the troubles of this world and going home. But not before leaving a piece of his soul.
Listen while you read Houston’s Don Deadric Robey — half black, half Jewish, all gangster — beat Berry Gordy by ten years to become the first African-American record mogul. A gambler and a hustler, he did not get there by playing fair, but Robey put out some of the greatest gospel, R&B and rock and […]
When Jack White of the White Stripes announced at Stubb’s Austin in June 2003, “It’s good to be in Texas, the home of Blind Willie Johnson,” you can be sure that few on hand had ever heard of the gospel blues singer/guitarist who pioneered a ferocity that still lives in modern rock. The first songs […]
By Michael Corcoran From “Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music” (TCU Press) When Jack White of the White Stripes announced at Stubb’s Austin in June 2003, “It’s good to be in Texas, the home of Blind Willie Johnson,” you can be sure that few on hand had ever heard of the gospel blues singer/guitarist […]
New York Review of Books calls Manzarene Dreams “the authoritative new edition of Phillips’s music.” Creative Loafing (Atlanta): This was the cover story by Chad Radford.“When Phillips died, a secret history of pre-war gospel blues was born; a mystery shrouded in speculation and mistaken identity. But through the legwork and dedication of semi-retired Texas music […]
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