Slide Guitar Gospel (1944-1964)

Document’s Slide Guitar Gospel provides listeners with a glimpse into an unusual and oft forgotten corner of African American spiritual music. Sometimes billed as ‘sacred steel’ this style features small ensembles led by a lap or pedal steel guitarist, an instrument more often associated with honky-tonk and traditional Hawaiian music than with gospel. This collection contains work by two slide guitar evangelists, The Reverend Utah Smith, who played slide in a frenetic style that recalls the heavily amplified experiments of contemporaries like the Great Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Lonnie Farris, whose eerily minimal interpretations of gospel classics like “It’s No Secret What God Can Do” and “Peace In The Valley” provide a meditative counterpoint to the Utah Smith’s fuzz drenched testifying. Prior to their collection on this volume both of these artists had been almost entirely forgotten. (Smith has recently been the subject of a comprehensive retrospective entitled I Got Two Wings. Listeners intrigued by Smith’s material here would do well to seek it out.)