Various Artists – Fire in My Bones
December 24th, 2010
Complied by Chemical Imbalance and Yeti publisher Mike McGonigal, Fire in My Bones is a thoroughly combustible set of Raw and Rare and Otherworldly African-American Gospel. We’re talking no less than 88 tracks sprayed out over three CDs exhaustively crammed full of blazing post-World War II church music. The bulk of the material spans from the 1950s through the 1970s, with a handful of tracks from the ’80s and ’90s and even one from 2007. My favorite cuts tend to be early ones–the more raw and low-fidelity, the better! Take Elder Beck’s fiery, wild and wooly “Rock and Roll Sermon” (1956), for example, which preaches against the “moral decay” that the newly-emerging rock music wrought upon young people. Ironically, Elder’s performance is just as raucous as that of the rockers. Or Sister Ola Mae Terrell’s gloriously out of tune guitar strumning and soulful throat wailing that make “How Long” (1948) light a fire under your ass. Nathaniel Rivers simply stabs the stale, sweaty air with some seriously scalding singing on “The Wicked Shall Cease From Troubling” (1973). And that’s only three out of 27 tracks on disc one!
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