1. Murder's Home
"This fantastic box of holy ruckus is the greatest anthology of antique Southern sacred song and oratory ever assembled. Packaged like a pioneer-family heirloom -- in a cedar case with a nineteenth-century etching of the Tower of Babel on the lid -- Goodbye, Babylon is six CDs of blues hymns, hillbilly hosannas, choral thunder and hellfire sermons from the 78-rpm era. Some of the most important figures in American music testify here...
But much of this suffering and faith is the poetic invention of lesser-known men and women, white and black, who intimately knew heavy labor and poverty. On Disc One, bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson and J.E. Mainer's Mountaineers, a white string band from North Carolina, both sing of life after death with the heated urgency of men for whom life on earth held few rewards. In 1930's "Memphis Flu," Elder Curry and his Mississippi congregation turn local news -- a deadly outbreak of influenza -- into a galloping lesson on the democracy of God's wrath...
Goodbye, Babylon also disproves the old rock & roll maxim that the devil has the best tunes: God owned many of them first. In "Down on Me," Eddie Head and His Family provide a sanctified 1930 blueprint for Janis Joplin's '67 version; the female street singers Two Gospel Keys fire up the godliness in "You've Got to Move," later covered with more devilish flair by the Rolling Stones. And the Rev. J.M. Gates puts a grim spin on Christmas in his 1926 sermon "Death May Be Your Santa Claus," which became the title of a Mott the Hoople song. God truly works in mysterious ways." — David Fricke, Rolling Stone
(from Dust To Digital)
