Lordy, lordy. David Childers has got religion. Anybody familiar with Childers’ work won’t be surprised to discover that his worship style is not the head-bowed, on your knees variety, however. Childers is more of an Old Testament type of guy — a two-fisted, snake handling prophet, shouting praises to the sky with a double handful of rattlers writhing in his grip.
Hellfire and redemption are recurring themes in Childers’ work. He was ruminating on those issues on ’06’s Jailhouse Religion and on ’07’s Burning In Hell — rasslin’ with demons from his past in a no-holds-barred death match. “My mama usta beat my ass,” he roared in “Mama,” the opening cut from Burning in Hell. “And if I cried she beat it twice / she didn’t like me too well / My mama was a devil out of hell,” he bellows, as the Don Juans punch out a menacing rockabilly framework behind him.
Childers may have an evangelistic streak in him, but he ain’t preachy. These are more gut punches than entreaties — he’s just telling it like it is, deal with it or not, but you’ll sure as hell listen when he lays it out for you.
The new disc — Serpents of Reformation — starts out with a sinister rendering of the traditional “God Is God.” Jimmy Vivino covered it recently on Levon Helm’s last release, The Midnight Ramble Sessions, Volume 3, but his bluegrass version rattles along jauntily, whereas Childers’ stomps along like monks in a chain gang chanting a work song while slinging a sledgehammer for Jesus.
There are a couple more traditional offerings, but Childers’ originals are the meat in this sacred sammitch. This offering is more mellow than most of his previous work, and he’s actually singing on some of the cuts instead of biting off hunks of lyrics and hurling them back in a guttural roar.
But, it’s as a lyricist where Childers really shines. “Fear not the fact that living is dying / Don’t be scared of becoming what was,” Childers advises on “Don’t Be Scared.” But, the song is not just a song about dying; its a love song that Childers says merges the physical and spiritual worlds. After dancing to the Jesus music, he steals a kiss on the back porch, telling his beloved, “I could never imagine a lover as kind and as wise to my ways / As you with eyes like an ocean that follow me every place.”
“How Bout You” sounds like it was recorded in a country church nestled in some Appalachian hollow, Childers dropping in with a bullhorn to preach some amplified praise to the hardscrabble congregation.
A country drone with a marching band tempo and what sounds like a blacksmith hammering on an anvil for percussion, “Jesus Set Me Free” could have come from his Overmountain Men period.
The folks in South Carolina
They want to keep their slaves
They made a declaration
For to keep it that a-way…And it seems they want to drag
All the rest of us along
Well I ain’t got no slaves
And I ain’t wanting any
Jesus came to set us free
And I don’t want no slaves.
Childers and his son Robert co-authored the chilling murder ballad, “Cain and Abel.” It’ s got a Bo Diddley beat and a swampy, Tony Joe White-like guitar propelling the menacing account of the first murder:
Cain slew Abel with a stick and a knife
After the fall of Paradise
Don’t do no good to call the cops
they just ride by and smile and wave.
But Childers doesn’t just throw up his hands at the dire situation, offering a no-nonsense solution to ongoing violence: “The killers keep coming / Let ‘um shoot each other down.”
Childers is everything an evangelist should be: warm, open, and honest, telling the gospel truth while entertaining his flock with celestial matters in a down-to-Earth way.
Grant Britt
