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This previously unheard concert recording made in April 1965 in New York is an astonishing record of the music of the inimitable Bessie Jones, John Davis, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, legendary country blues singer and guitarist Mississippi Fred McDowell and Mississippi cane fife player Ed Young. Its significance is also due to the connection between the Georgia Sea Island Singers and the Civil Rights Movement, in which they were active participants, and to their enduring influence on folk music today.
The Georgia Sea Island Singers came to prominence across the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s for their performances of Gullah Geechee spirituals, work songs and children’s songs from the secluded African American community on St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia. Most of the singers were born and raised on the island and were ancestors of enslaved Africans who had toiled on the island’s cotton plantations. The island’s remoteness meant that the African American population had retained much of their ancestor’s language and culture, including dancing and music. American collector Alan Lomax first heard the singing of islanders in 1935 and returned in October 1959 as the penultimate stop on a two-month southern field-recording trip, accompanied by Shirley Collins. Bessie Jones, who had moved to the island from mainland Georgia in the 1930s, was a singer who stood out for Lomax, and he went on to record her in 1961. The rest of the group of singers who became the Georgia Sea Island Singers soon arrived in the U.S. and became – led by Jones and John Davis – immersed in the U.S. folk scene.
A couple of weeks before arriving in St. Simons, Lomax and Collins spent three days in Como, Mississippi. Having noted the demise of the fife-and-drum music elsewhere in the region, Lomax was happily surprised to come across brothers Ed and Lonnie Young carrying on the tradition. Significantly, whilst in Como, the two collectors were found by Mississippi Fred McDowell at the invitation of Lonnie Young, his neighbour. Shirley Collins wrote about the trip in America Over the Water: “Towards dusk a slight figure in dungarees and carrying a guitar appeared out of the trees and walked into the clearing….By the time he’d finished his first blues, we knew we were in the presence of a great and extraordinary musician.”
Friends Of Old Time Music presented a series of 14 concerts in New York between 1961 and 1965 (Smithsonian Folkways released a compilation from the concerts in 2006); the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Ed Young was the penultimate concert. Lomax introduced the concert rightly reflecting some of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement but also somewhat naively imagining broader changes: “We’re going start with a song that symbolises the way we all feel now. We’re on the road to world peace, and freedom, and integration”. The singers, driven by Bessie Jones’ tambourine, sing Travelin’ Shoes, a civil rights song, with Jones singing the call to the group’s harmonic response, giving it a sense of urgency and resolve.
Drums were an effective means of spreading rebellion from plantation to plantation, so much so that they were banned in the 18th century, and the enslaved instead used their hands to replicate the different pitch levels of the talking drums. The singers give the audience a short workshop on different handclapping rhythms, although they have trouble keeping up when the rhythm becomes more elaborate. Halfway through, Ed Young adds intricate lines on his cane fife, and the overall sound is not unlike the recordings of Madagascar’s flute master Rakoto Frah. One of the most moving performances is The Buzzard Lope dance, performed to the song In Dat Ole Fiel’. The song records the appalling practice of leaving enslaved Africans in an old field when they died rather than being accorded a proper burial. Bessie Jones sings the verses in her distinctive, powerful voice while the rest of the group responds with a nuanced chorus of the song’s title, handclapping adding to the rhythm of John Davis’s solo dance steps.
Bessie Jones’s incredible singing is showcased on Sink Em Low, a work song she wrote based on her recollection of seeing, as a child, chained black prisoners in striped prison uniforms. Her step-grandfather told her that ‘Sink ’Em Low’ meant to ‘shovel way down in the dirt and throw it high’, which was the advice the older prisoners gave the younger ones to avoid punishment. Jones’s performance is formidable, and rather than call and response, the other singer’s attendant harmonies of the same lyrics add a less strident counter to the forceful, somewhat menacing lead. Mississippi Fred McDowell performed some songs solo, including Going Down to the River and Shake ‘Em on Down, just some added tambourine on the second song. Both demonstrate what a brilliant country blues player he was, in his singing, his guitar playing and his song writing (the first song is his, the second is credited to Buka White).
I Heard the Angels Singing is a St. Simons Island spiritual; here, a remarkable spiritual/blues combination as Mississippi Fred McDowell accompanies the singers, his signature slide intertwining perfectly with Mable Hillery’s aching lead vocal. Ed Young begins Chevrolet on his fife, with tambourine and handclapping rhythm, before he and singer Emma Ramsey deliver a swinging duet on a blues song recorded by Memphis Minnie in 1930, which Young had recorded with his brother Lonnie for Lomax in 1959, and which Tay Mahal recorded an electric version of on his classic Happy Just To Be Like I Am 1971 album.
Georgia Sea Island Singers member Mable Hillery was particularly active in the Civil Rights Movement, participating in freedom-song teach-ins. She introduces Marching on the Mississippi Line, a song she wrote and sang as a duet with Emma Ramsey, by talking about feeling ‘a little guilty about the people marching in Mississippi and Alabama because I can’t be there with them.’ She says, ‘If I can’t march, I can sing’, and her song combines biblical and contemporary political themes, mentioning Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., President Lyndon Johnson and other prominent politicians of the time. Hillery also sings an entirely convincing blues, Don’t Ever Leave Me, accompanied by Mississippi Fred McDowell on guitar, McDowell singing a verse later in the song. The following year, Hillery left the Georgia Sea Island Singers to follow a career in singing blues, unbelievably, given her evident capabilities, with only limited success.
While the mostly group performances of Georgia Sea Island Singers, on which they shared lead vocals, are remarkable enough by themselves, there is still something magical about the many and varied collaborations with the singers being joined variously by Mississippi Fred McDowell and Ed Young, all sounding spontaneously in-the-moment and nimbly bringing together their very different regional African American traditions. There were no individual stars – the whole is imbued with a shared, democratic performance ethos. Listening to this powerful and vital well-preserved record of exceptional performances at a critical moment in American musical and political history feels almost like being there.
The Complete Friends Of Old Time Music Concert – Bessie Jones, John Davis & The Georgia Sea Island Singers with Mississippi Fred McDowell & Ed Young (2024) Smithsonian Folkways
Buy The Complete Friends of Old-Time Music Concert at Proper Music or Bandcamp
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