Music » Box Set Christian & Gospel Music

Release Date: 2000-09-12, Audio CD, Bmg / Elvis

If the bazillion packagings and repackagings of Mahalia Jackson's music confound you and you don't know where to start, this expertly compiled, carefully annotated double-disc box set is for you. Jackson wasn't just gospel music's first international superstar--she was among its earliest adherents and inventors. Working with the great composer and former blues singer Thomas A. Dorsey in the late 1930s, Jackson gave a distinctly blues-trained, jazzy sass and grace to Dorsey's material and the other hymns and spirituals she sang. More than any other performer, she helped to define gospel music itself as a transcendent, rootsy, melismatic, and heady spiritual sound. Culled from her sides for Columbia in the 1950s and 1960s, some of the arrangements in the set are not ideal and may sound quite a bit dated, but that voice shines and soars and dives straight to the center of your heart. Whether backed by a simple organ or piano or with full studio accompaniment, Jackson's booming, instantly recognizable contralto is indescribable, exciting, and forever a wonder to behold. And if you think that's an exaggeration, you don't own this record. --Mike McGonigal

Release Date: 2002-07-02, Audio CD, Word Entertainment

This four-CD set of 19th- and 20th-century African American sacred music was initially released as a compnaion to the 1995 Peabody Award-winning radio series of the same name produced by National Public Radio and the Smithsonian Institution. With extensive notes by Bernice Johnson Reason, who conceived and compiled the series, these recordings honor the rich sacred music tradition created and sustained within the African American community, from which so much contemporary American music draws its inspiration.

No Description Available.
Genre: Soul/R&B
Media Format: Compact Disk
Rating:
Release Date: 21-JAN-1997

Release Date: 1998-08-18, Audio CD, Sony

Considering the tremendous role that family has played throughout his life, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that Ralph Stanley would persevere in music following his brother Carter's death in 1966. Not only did the younger Stanley choose to carry on (at the age of 40) the tradition of the Stanley Brothers, he was able to build on it. The Clinch Mountain Boys circa 1971--Stanley, Curly Ray Cline, Roy Lee Centers, and Jack Cooke--already ranked among the elite ensembles in bluegrass before Stanley added the talents of young bucks Keith Whitley and Ricky Skaggs. This glorious four-CD box is at once a celebration of Stanley's return to peak form and a thorough and thoroughly rewarding investigation of this classic period in Clinch Mountain Boys history. All facets of this band are revealed: breakneck traditional fiddle and banjo tunes, scintillating a cappella gospel harmonies, rousing live cuts from their 1971 Japanese tour, old-time favorites from the Carter Family, and, of course, a full slate of Stanley Brothers classics. If anything, Stanley's own mountain whang became even more spine-shivering as time passed. --Marc Greilsamer

Array

Release Date: 1997-12-23, Audio CD, Tooth & Nail Records

Array