ALBUM REVIEW: 1965 Concert Recording Finds Georgia Sea Island Singers Connecting With New Audience

The Complete Friends of Old Time Music Concert by Bessie Jones, John Davis, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers with Mississippi Fred McDowell and Ed Young opens with legendary ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s assurances that integration and world peace were imminent.

The condenser mic didn’t pick up what the mostly white audience thought of Lomax’s well-intentioned, if naive, introduction to the 1965 concert in New York City. He stood with singers whose coastal Georgia remoteness had allowed their Gullah Geechee music to develop with less white interference than that of many other Southern Black communities. Onstage, too, and lending some star power were cane fife player Ed Young and country blues guitarist Mississippi Fred McDowell.

The folk revival had given these musicians a broader platform, but they remained Black Americans living under Jim Crow’s long shadow. This concert, now presented in its entirety as a Smithsonian Folkways release, documents the sheer force of their musicianship — plus moments of cringe here and there as white academics interpreted their work rather than hearing it.

Georgia Sea Island Singers (photo from the Lomax Archive)

“My God is a rock in the weary land / weary land / in the weary land,” the Sea Island Singers sing in the Peter Davis-led “My God Is a Rock.” “He’s shelter in the time of storms.” In the gospel number’s chorus, the singers create rich, forceful minor chords. Nonverbal melodies and countermelodies back the verse. Beyond that, there’s little more than clapping and tambourines. Some songs also include McDowell’s acoustic slide guitar and others feature Young’s fife, yet every track on this Sea Island Singers recording feels fully realized. Deceptively effortless polyrhythmic clapping drives “Let my Children Go.” Bessie Jones leads a driving, ecstatic “Sign of the Judgment.”

“Let me buy you a house and home / if you do something for me,” Ed Young sings in his poppy, playful “Chevrolet.” “I don’t want your house and home / you can’t do nothing for me,” Emma Lee Ramsey replies in the song’s back-and-forth. It’s a swinging barebones R&B number, secular and sultry. Elsewhere, McDowell’s slide blues can be languid and spacious like “Going Down to the River” or upbeat and danceable like “Shake ‘Em on Down.”

The Complete Friends of Old-Time Music Concert has the stylistic range of a sampler and surprising sonic fidelity for something recorded 59 years ago through a single microphone. What that mic captured was the interplay and chemistry as a stage full of accomplished musicians took turns stepping to the front.

The Complete Friends of Old Time Music Concert by Bessie Jones, John Davis, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers with Mississippi Fred McDowell and Ed Young is out June 14 via Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.