Various Artists
Train Don't Leave Me: 1st Annual Sacred Steel Convention
(2001)
Reviewed by Jamie Lee Rake
Listen to enough traditional soul (read: African American) gospel, and you realize there's a wealth of electric guitar talent traveling the Gospel Highway. And a lot of it rocks the socks off a lot of Caucasian hair farmers' antics, with fiery blues-cum-rock riffing and picking that backs up so many old black guys' and gals' heavenward harmonizing.
Folk label Arhoolie Records' Sacred Steel album series chronicles an obscure offshoot of this phenomenon unknown to many white metalheads. There are a couple of small, primarily African-American Christian church denominations down south where the electric steel guitar dominates the worship music. Train Don't Leave Me : 1st Annual Sacred Steel Convention records the first organized festival of church musicians in these two denominations. Though, being church musicians, they would likely balk at being called rock or blues players (just as Roebuck "Pops" Staples denied it of his tasty playing when he was alive), there's no fronting on the rocking bluesiness of so much of what they do, as demonstrated here.
The most obvious example comes in Lonnie "Big Ben" Bennett and vocalist Cherlyn Dixon's apocalyptic "See What The End Gonna Be," the fiercest and most unlikely appropriation of The Beatles' "Come Together" you're likely to hear in this lifetime. Grand old man of the genre Aubrey Ghent's title cut to the collection gives a crash course in the dynamics and jamming experience allowable in these churches' praise time.
There are 12 other examples worth hearing here, along with five other Sacred Steel albums of individual acts and compilations, all worth your disposable hard-earned's. Next time someone grouses about there being no good Christian electric blues being made nowadays, pull out your ticket to this Train.
