Gospel Davis

Bessie Jones, John Davis, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers gained wide renown during the 1960s and ‘70s for their powerful performances of traditional songs from the African American Gullah Geechee community on St. Simons Island, Georgia. Most in the group were born and raised on St. Simons, and could trace their ancestry to the enslaved West and Central Africans who worked on the island’s cotton plantations. Throughout the ‘60s, the Georgia Sea Island Singers were prominent voices in the civil rights movement, bringing hundreds of years of Black musical tradition to bear on a pivotal time in American history. This previously unheard recording captures their complete Friends of Old Time Music concert of April 1965, at which they were joined by legendary bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell, cane fife player Ed Young, and folklorist Alan Lomax, who acted as emcee.

Aretha Franklin is one of the giants of soul music, and indeed of American pop as a whole. More than any other performer, she epitomized soul at its most gospel-charged. Her astonishing run of late-'60s hits with Atlantic Records "Respect," "I Never Loved a Man," "Chain of Fools," "Baby I Love You," "I Say a Little Prayer," "Think," "The House That Jack Built," and several others earned her the title "Lady Soul," which she has worn uncontested ever since.

Before becoming a bandleader, pianist/organist/composer Lonnie Liston Smith made essential contributions to important recordings by Roland Kirk, Pharoah Sanders, Gato Barbieri, and Miles Davis. After founding the Cosmic Echoes, he issued six influential electric albums for Flying Dutchman between 1973 and 1977 – including Astral Traveling and Visions of a New World – that established him as a jazz-funk innovator. Between 1978 and 1980, his four Columbia outings – including Exotic Mysteries and Love Is the Answer – consciously stitched together funk, disco, and smooth jazz. After a spiritual awakening, Smith spent the next two decades recording for Dr. Jazz and Startrak Records, through 1998's Transformation. Following that, he turned to session work for 25 years. He started recording under his own name again with Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge on 2023's Lonnie Liston Smith JID017.

Thirteen hours of unreleased and ultra-rare music. The Eternal Myth Revealed is a 14 disc docu-biography of Ra's life and career, from his birth in 1914 up to 1959. In addition to his own music, it includes music he was influenced by, and a lot of stuff he may or may not have had a hand in as arranger, vocal coach, pianist or something else. Sun Ra's output was as prolific as Ellington's, and discographers have had nightmares and arguments attempting to document it accurately.

The resulting 2 box set, unlike any other available today, groups together the main vocalists in the story of jazz from the first half of the 20th century. Each of these 20 CDs offers in more or less the same proportion, the purest of African-American song with gospel and blues singers, from truculent Ma Rainey to majestic Bessie Smith, sophisticated Sarah Vaughan to popular Louis Prima, the folk-related tones of Charlie Patton to the honeyed voice of Frank Sinatra.