Early Gospel Singers – T

Taggart was born in Abbeville, South Carolina, and by 1910 attended South Carolina Institute for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind in Spartanburg. By 1917, he was living and working as a musician in Atlanta, Georgia.

He married and moved to Chicago before 1921. He made his first recordings in 1926, for the Vocalion label. These were among the first recordings to be made of a so-called “guitar evangelist”. His recordings of religious songs under the name Blind Joe Taggart included “The Storm Is Passing Over”, “I Will Not Be Removed”, “Take Your Burden to the Lord”, and “I Wish My Mother Was On That Train”. As well as recording solo, he recorded duets with his wife Emma, and also recorded with James Taggart, presumed to be his son. Some of his recordings have been cited as having “traces of some of the earliest [blues] musical styles to have ever been recorded”.

As an itinerant blues performer, he was helped to and around venues by the young Josh White. According to White, Taggart was “tricky, nasty, mean”, and something of a fraud because he had partial vision rather than being completely blind. Records suggest that he wore one artificial eye, but had some sight in his other eye. According to record collector John Tefteller: “The labels knew they could sell more records by putting the word ‘Blind’ before the artist’s name… Black people were considered inferior. It was awful. They were being recorded, almost exclusively, by white producers. I don’t know if these singers really wanted to call themselves ‘Blind’ or not. Probably not.”

Taggart recorded secular blues songs under several pseudonyms, for different labels, including Paramount and Decca. The question of whether he was the performer credited as “Six Cylinder Smith” is unresolved. Eugene Chadbourne has commented: “When a bluesman assumed another name, the reason was not some kind of schizophrenia but usually an effort to do extra recording outside of a contract that had already been signed under one name. In the case of Taggart, he may have recorded secular blues numbers under the name of Smith, because in his former performing identity he was known as a gospel blues singer in the style of Blind Willie Johnson.”

Taggart’s last commercial recordings were issued in 1934. He remarried in Chicago in 1943, and made a religious test recording for the Presto label in 1948. He died of uremia in Presbyterian-St Luke’s Hospital, Chicago, in 1961, at the age of 68.

Source: Wikipedia

“I Will Not Be Removed”,

“Take Your Burden to the Lord”,

“I Wish My Mother Was On That Train”

Terrell eventually went commercial and recorded several sides for Columbia Records. Her spiritual fervor remained intact in the studio, which made for some of the most moving recordings of the Delta blues and gospel genres. Many of Terrell’s songs, namely “The Bible’s Right,” find her playing guitar with open D tuning (referred to sometimes as Vestapol tuning), and a slide. On other songs, including “Life is a Problem” and “How Long,” she utilized cross-note tunings to convey messages of hope through the lens of unwavering faith.

When the 1960s folk revival gave new life to the careers of various practitioners of African American gospel, Terrell’s talents and contributions went largely unnoticed. What a missed opportunity, as Terrell’s gospel music would’ve sounded at home on the same festival stages as the Staples Singers or Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Terrell’s music and ministry remained obscure through the final years of her life. An article by musicologist and author Bruce Nemerov for NPR covered the time he was asked by a music publisher to find Terrell and deliver royalties owed her from an off-Broadway play featuring “God’s Little Birds.” Nemerov’s search ended at a Conyers, Georgia nursing home, where Terrell spent her final years. She passed away in 2006 at age 95.

As an overlooked talent representing the musical approaches of pre- and post-War blues, the late Sister O.M. Terrell deserves to finally be remembered as a Southern blues and African American gospel innovator and legend.

Willing to cross the line between sacred and secular by performing her inspirational music of ‘light’ in the ‘darkness’ of the nightclubs and concert halls with big bands behind her, Tharpe’s witty, idiosyncratic style also left a lasting mark on more conventional gospel artists, such as Ira Tucker, Sr., of the Dixie Hummingbirds. While she offended some conservative churchgoers with her forays into the world of pop music, she never left gospel music.
-Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Rosetta_Tharpe)

Itinerent singers of The Church of God in Christ (COGIC).

You’ve Got To Move

The song was recorded in December 1945 or January 1946 as “You’ve Got to Move” by the Two Gospel Keys, who were Emma Daniels (guitar and vocal) and Mother Sally Jones (tambourine and vocal), for Jubilee Records, and, although it was assigned a release number of Jubilee 2503, it does not ever appear to have been issued on Jubilee.

Disc Records of New York bought the Jubilee recordings from Jubilee and issued four sides in December 1947, including this release of Disc 5066. The excellent spiritual performance features the duo’s frevent, fast preaching vocal, as they declaim that, no matter your situation in life, successful or humble, the Lord will decide your fate of when you will die:-

The song was later recorded, amongst many others, by Mississippi Fred McDowell as “You Got to Move” on the album You Gotta Move [1965], but as a slow, evocative slide guitar blues rather than the previously prevalent fervent spiritual style of the song’s recordings. It was perhaps most famously recorded by the Rolling Stones on their album Sticky Fingers [1971], their version following Mississippi Fred’s arrangement.