How To Get To Heaven in a Box (Review of "Goodbye, Babylon")

For all its myriad peculiarities—some glorious, others odious—there is perhaps nothing in American culture so uniquely powerful and problematic than our relationship to religion. Ours is a nation which claims to be founded “under God” yet simultaneously bars Him from every approaching our government, and to this day nine out of ten Americans claim a faith in some form of divinity, with literally hundreds of sects espousing various ways in which this spirit may or may not exist. No matter where on the spectrum of belief one chooses to view it from, America’s relationship with religion proves consistently flummoxing to comprehend: ask Michael Newdow, the atheist outraged at the aforementioned “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance; then ask Roy Moore, the fundamentalist Christian judge who wishes to erect an ornate statue of the Ten Commandments in front of his Alabama courthouse.

Goodbye, Babylon, a stunning collection of American sacred music released by a fledgling Atlanta label called Dust-To-Digital, does not concern itself with attempting to untangle these paradoxes, and it’s for precisely this reason that the marvelous wooden box takes its place among the most important collections of aural Americana to ever bless our ears. Goodbye, Babylon is biblically epic in size—five full discs of music, plus a sixth disc of recorded sermons—and spans nearly forty years of musical history, from as early as 1923 up until 1960. The set is Dust-To-Digital’s maiden release, and it’s hard to imagine a more auspicious beginning, let alone such a terrifically important one. A good percentage of the hours upon hours of joyful noise found within the beautiful cedar box that houses the sextet of discs (as well as two clumps of raw cotton) has never before been available on CD, as Dust-to-Digital’s crack team of archivists and engineers painstakingly transposed much of the material from ancient 78s. The final product is a powerful reminder of just how inexorably steeped our greatest contribution to world culture—our musical tradition—is in our fiery peculiar religiosity.

In fitting with the numerous contradictions of American religion, gospel music actually took its roots from nowhere near a church, but rather from the primal isolation of the revival meetings of the Second Great Awakening. Contemporaneous to Emerson’s famous proclamation that “nature always wears the colors of the spirit” and the Transcendentalist movement of American spirituality (though thoroughly independent from it, as many revivalists were most certainly illiterate), the early-to-mid 19^th Century saw the explosion of a curiously fanatical religiosity in the American South. Revivals were the periodical conventions of this movement, and were often explicitly held as far from any trappings of civilization as possible, as one’s proximity to nature was believed to be directly related to one’s proximity to God. These meetings were often interracial, and impoverished whites and blacks would gather for days on end in a virtual carnival of righteous worship. Due to the widespread illiteracy, there were no need for prayerbooks or complicated recitations; one would often just sidle up to one’s neighbor and pick it up as they went along. This sense of communalism was never more prevalent than in the music of the meetings, during which people would scream, shout and quite literally “raise some sand,” and the joyous simplicity of the songs coupled with the exuberant vocal quality necessitated by the outdoor settings (gospel music is many things to many people, but it is never quiet) conspired to form an entirely holy ruckus unlike anything heard before.

And, of course, we’re still hearing it today, in most any music that’s ever been labeled as American, from blues to country to jazz to bluegrass to rock ‘n’ roll. Goodbye, Babylon’s greatest virtue is not its size nor its shape—though both are remarkable—but rather its incredible breadth of material, which will surely dispel any stereotypes of gospel music being tied in any way to gender, geography, or especially skin color. “She’d sing Thy Servant’s Prayer and crackers and niggers be shouting everywhere,” said Alex Bradford of Arizona Dranes, whose piano and stirring voice can be heard on three of Goodbye, Babylon’s tracks, and the collection never allows us to forget that gospel was always an art form both enjoyed and performed by whites and blacks alike, in an array of styles so dizzyingly diverse that to attempt to categorize them on racial grounds would be so woefully inadequate it barely warrants discussion. In a part of the country and in a period of time where laws were explicitly constructed to separate Americans on grounds of race, the music never stopped raging, and one need only listen to how closely Henry Owens’ tenor on the all-black Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet’s “Rock My Soul” resembles that of a young Elvis Presley (who would have been all of three years old at the time of the record’s 1938 release, yet who undoubtedly grew up in a family that would have owned scores of Golden Gate records) to realize how inescapable the racial integration of gospel was.

In the end, any attempt to write about a collection of such magnitude—both musically and historically—as Goodbye, Babylon ultimately becomes a Sisyphean endeavor, nearly as difficult as writing about God. Too much involvement in specifics seems to sacrifice the meaning of the whole, while focusing solely on the whole leads only to broad generalizations so trite they’re almost inaccurate. Dust-To-Digital has done America and the world a tremendous service, and the love that went into this set demands to be heard. Sam Phillips, legendary founder of Sun Records, once famously said of R&B and gospel music, “this is where the soul of Man never dies.” Goodbye, Babylon provides immovable evidence that indeed, it never shall.

Originally published in Block, October 2004