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"Goodbye, Babylon"

By Chris Floyd
Published: February 10, 2006

That White Mule of Sin. Black Diamond Express to Hell. Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Jesus. There Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down.

The titles roll out like pulpit thunder, the ghostly rumble of a world long gone: the gospel songs and sermons of America's rural poor, black and white, from the great outpouring of folk culture that rose in the Deep South during the first half of the 20th century. Emerging in the wake of cataclysmic upheavals -- slavery, civil war, industrialization, dispossession, pandemic -- these multivarious works together embody a spirit of death-haunted wisdom and transcendent longing, a deep and urgent yearning for liberation, for transformation, for joy and jubilee.

The essence of this profound spirit -- one of the historic peaks of human creativity -- can now be found in "Goodbye, Babylon," a stunning compendium of 135 songs and 25 sermons put together by Dust-to-Digital in Atlanta. For those who know American religious faith only in the hideous guise it takes today -- a degraded goon-show of nationalism, greed, partisan power-lust, wilful ignorance, sexual panic and bellicose self-righteousness -- the collection will come as a revelation. For those of us lucky enough to have known firsthand the last, trailing ripples of that great wave -- to have grown up in enclaves that were still steeped in those cadences, those yearnings -- the work calls us back to a cultural home that has been destroyed, both by the inevitable ravages of time -- and by deliberate perversion at the hands of ruthless hucksters, blinkered extremists and cynical elites.

The collection -- six CDs packaged in a cedar box, with a thick booklet containing background notes on singers and preachers, and full printed lyrics and texts -- was put together by a team of musicologists led by producer Steven Lance Ledbetter. It was actually released in 2003, but is now reaching a wider public, thanks in part to endorsements from the likes of Bob Dylan and Neil Young. The earliest song collected here goes back to 1902, while the latest trickles in on the dying wave in 1960, but the majority were culled from the remarkable quarter-century, roughly 1925 to 1950, that was the heart of American roots music, sacred and secular: the seedbed of the blues, country, soul, folk, gospel and rock-and-roll.

Captured by then-new technologies of sound recording -- in studios, churches, fields and prisons -- then spread by word of mouth through isolated regions or else cast nationwide by big-city record companies and radio stations, these voices limned a vibrant religious faith that was unschooled but heart-subtle, filled with a fiery compassion for others and a bone-deep humility before the fact of one's own sins and shortcomings. It was a faith both individual and universal, centered on the quest for personal salvation, for light in the turbulent darkness of the soul, and on overcoming estrangement from your fellow sojourners in a hard world.

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There was nothing nationalistic in it, no "focus on the family," that money-raising fetish of today's politicized pulpiteers. Nations rose and fell, families could be good or bad: It's the individual who stands alone before God. "You've got to walk that lonesome valley, you've got to walk it by yourself," as the old spiritual said. Neither the family nor the nation were seen as vessels of truth or righteousness.

Today's nationalist Christians often claim descent from the rural-based "old-time religion" represented in "Goodbye, Babylon." And indeed, liberal opponents of the nationalists' repressive, aggressive ideology usually paint them as goobers from the backwoods, knuckle-dragging cretins with a chaw of baccy dribbling onto their overalls. But of course, in reality the nationalist Christians now ascendant are overwhelmingly suburban: clean, comfortable professionals, white-collar workers, political operatives, business owners and government officials. They drive fat cars to glitzy "megachurches," they sit in front of wide-screen televisions and sleek computers feeding their sense of self-righteousness and aggrieved privilege through a multibillion-dollar right-wing media system that flatters their prejudices, titillates them with slavering obsessions about "aberrant sex," deadens them with pallid music lamely copied from commercial pop, and seals them in a carapace of exclusion and hostility.

What has all this slick, garish malevolence to do with the old faith's raw and vibrant beauty? With the street-honed growl of Blind Willie Johnson, the full-throated Kentucky mountain gallop of Brother Claude Ely, the driving, supple rhythms of Roosevelt Graves, or the strange, unearthly sweetness of Washington Phillips? Where is the bursting joy of Bessie Jones and the Sea Island Singers in the dawn-greeting shout "Yonder Comes Day?" The sophistication in the swinging blues of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, jumping to "Strange Things Happening Every Day"? The lonely courage of Rev. Anderson Johnson staring implacable reality in the face with his chilling vision, "Death in the Morning?" You could walk a million miles in the new kingdom of America's Christian Right and never catch the slightest glint of this deep, abiding light.

Of course, the old faith did contain volatile seeds, capable of bearing good fruit or ill. Tend them well, grafting their offshoots onto a wider vision of the world, and you get Martin Luther King; tend them badly, abusing them, starving them, choking them with trash, and you get the bloated arrogance of Jerry Falwell, the simpering poison of Pat Robertson. But in "Goodbye, Babylon," the dross and error that inevitably encumbered traditional faith -- as they encumber all of our limited and provisional understandings of reality -- have been burned away, and only the shining essence remains, as rich and moving and universal as Aeschylus or Mozart. "You don't need no ticket, you just get on board."

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