Customer Reviews

Gospel Blues & Street Songs

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This is an important album by two of the key musicians in the Piedmont blues guitar style.

Pink Anderson is best known for the three excellent Bluesville albums he recorded in 1961. Apart from four tracks in 1928 with Simmie Dooley, the only other recordings Anderson made prior to then are the first seven tracks of this CD, recorded in May 1950 by Paul Clayton, who came across Anderson playing in a medicine show in Charlottesville, Virginia. Anderson is in peak form here, stronger than in 1961, playing fine slide guitar on "John Henry", singing the blues "Every Day of the Week", and comic songs such as "I've Got Mine" and "He's In the Jailhouse Now". Great entertainment.

Gary Davis was a virtuoso guitarist in the Piedmont style who abandoned blues in the mid 1930s in favour of evangelical gospel songs, which he performed with great fervour in a voice that could be heard above heavy traffic and with superbly dynamic guitar accompaniment. These performances, from 1956, find him in electrifying form. He recorded many of these pieces again in the 1960s for Bluesville and others, but this session is hard to beat.

Strongly recommended.

I am new to country blues and I really love this CD. As a fan of folk music the Pink Anderson songs are a real plus as well as the wonderful intensity of Rev. Gary Davis. I was worried that it would be more "Gospel" and not so much "Blues" but Davis' "Gospel" songs are filled with his powerful blues guitar playing. How someone could pick these songs out just using two fingers is beyond me.

Great performances by Pink Anderson, specially: John Henry and The Ship Titanic; but best of all; Greasy Greens. The Reverend Gary Davis is so great that he'll single-handedly convert any delta blues holdovers to the piedmont style at first hearing.

I got a copy of this album thanks to my interest in Pink Floyd (Which Anderson incidentally named) and I was astounded.
There was something magical about the music.

I fell immediatly. The songs (Though traditional) "glued" themselves to my mind in a way that no 2001 pop song could.

And now I go around humming songs that were recorded in 1950.

This combined with the unlikely parallel to the Brittish Rock Band Pink Floyd turned out to be the biggest surprise (Musically) that I've ever experienced.

All thanks to a man called Pink Anderson

I got a copy of this album thanks to my interest in Pink Floyd (Which Anderson incidentally named) and I was astounded.
There was something magical about the music.

I fell immediatly. The songs (Though traditional) "glued" themselves to my mind in a way that no 2001 pop song could.

And now I go around humming songs that were recorded in 1950.

This combined with the unlikely parallel to the Brittish Rock Band Pink Floyd turned out to be the biggest surprise (Musically) that I've ever experienced. And that's at age 23!

All thanks to a man called Pink Anderson