Various Artists: Goodbye, Babylon : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Who says the devil has all the best tunes? Six discs of smashingly great gospel music from the 78-rpm era 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, including the Carter Family, the Louvin Brothers, Blind Willie McTell and the pioneering gospel composer Thomas A. Dorsey. In a 1949 radio broadcast, Hank Williams sings a prophetic spiritual, "I'll Have a New Body," three years before his own earthly chassis gave out. The Stanley Brothers transform an African-American spiritual, "Standing in the Need of Prayer," into bluegrass church: silvery picking and sweet-mountain-air harmonies, with a revival-meeting jump in tempo at the end.

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. The spoken intro to "Down on the Old Camp Ground" -- "[a] coon shout by the Dinwiddie Colored Quintet" -- shows, however, that in 1902 there was equality under God but none in the record business.

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.