Search - Gary Davis :: Gospel Blues & Street Songs

Wonderful guitar.

B. D. Tutt | London, UK. | 03/31/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"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."