Deep River of Song: Mississippi: Saints and Sinners: From Before the Blues and Gospel

Alan Lomax | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (August 17, 1999)
• Original Release Date: August 17, 1999
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Rounder Select
• ASIN: B00000JMD3
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #263,161 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #67 in Music > Indie Music > Blues > Delta Blues

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars essential music for String Band and Blues and more, November 14, 2005

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deep River of Song: Mississippi: Saints and Sinners: From Before the Blues and Gospel (Audio CD)

This is essential music for anyone looking into the traditions of African American music, whether string band, blues, or whatever.

There is so much heritage and so much of the traditional rhythms that have since been smothered out of Black churck music in the interventing years on the religious tunes. There are several of the old Church Rocks and preaching as musical as any song or dance here.

As a string band musician on banjo, guitar, and fiddle, I naturally gravitate to the superb music of Sid Hemphill, Lucius Smith and Will Head in Sledge Mississippi (btw this is the Mississippi Cotton Pickin town that Black CW star Charlie Pride grew up in and wrote the song about). Hemphill is fantastic as a fiddle and a quiller, and this band has a distinct rhythm that no other string band matches.

It should be noted that on the same day that Lomax recorded these string band selections, he recorded a number of selections by the same group playing in a band with quill or fife and drum. You can hear these if you get a copy of the "Traveling Through the Jungle" collection of Black drum band recordings.

It is a shame that nobody has bothered to put all the recordings Lomax and other did of Sid Hemphill, Lucius Smith and their various band mates in 1941 and 1942 and in the 1950s out on one CD and one has to gather different CDS to find them, for example more string band music by this group appears (misplaced in) this series's Black Appalachia recording even though these people were from the hill country of Mississippi and nowhere near Appalachia. Still other string band recordings and solo work by Hemphill and Smith are on David Evan's superb collection, Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi. If you are into banjo Evans collection's booklet, a treasure for anyone into African American traiditional music in its own right, has a great explanation of Smith's banjo style.