Yet another of JSP's exhaustive budget-priced box sets of public domain recordings,
Spreading the Word: Early Gospel Recordings provides just what the title promises, 105 tracks' worth of traditional African-American gospel recordings from 1926 to 1950. Listeners who know their history will already be familiar with some of the material here, such as the complete 16-song oeuvre of the Dallas-based blind mestiza singer/pianist
Arizona Dranes that opens the first of these four discs, but much of this material will be new to all but the most devoted collectors of the style. Rarities like
Luther Magby's strangely jaunty organ showcase "Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit,"
the Holy Ghost Sanctified Singers' "Jesus Throwed Up a Highway for Me" (a song that '70s AM radio enthusiasts will note sounds startlingly similar to
Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime"), and Sister Mary M. Nelson's scarifying "The Royal Telephone" sound great next to more familiar songs like George Washington Phillips' idiosyncratic country blues-derived two-part single "Denomination Blues." The liner notes are sketchy, understandably so given the casual circumstances under which many of these songs were no doubt recorded, and it must be said that even a decent remastering job can't do much when your source material is coming from rapidly deteriorating 78s, but
Spreading the Word: Early Gospel Recordings is of interest to musical and spiritual historians alike. [JSP reissued the collection as four separate, single-disc editions in 2006.] ~ Stewart Mason