Jessy Dixon, singer, songwriter, pianist
March 12, 1938-September 26, 2011
“I’m Too Close,” live 1988
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“I’ll Tell It” (vocals, organ), with Rev. Milton Brunson & The Chicago Community Choir, live, c. early 1960s
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“Nothing But the Blood,” with the Combined Choir of the Omega Baptist Church, recording, 1967
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Though he was already well known in gospel circles, Mr. Dixon reached the mainstream pop-music audience in the 1970s, whenhe collaborated with Mr. Simon on the albums “Paul Simon in Concert: Live Rhymin’ ” (a follow-up to Mr. Simon’s hit album “There Goes Rhymin’ Simon”) and “Still Crazy After All These Years.” The two musicians had met at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1972, and Mr. Simon was impressed with his vocals.
Mr. Dixon and his group, the Jessy Dixon Singers, toured with Mr. Simon for the next eight years. Mr. Dixon also played keyboard with the funk group Earth, Wind and Fire and collaborated with the guitarist Phil Upchurch.
But these were side projects. It was in the gospel genre that he left an important musical mark, releasing 18 albums between 1964 and 2006 — five of them went gold — and touring worldwide until 2001. After his work with Paul Simon, Mr. Dixon built a large following in Europe.
Born on March 12, 1938, in San Antonio, Texas, Mr. Dixon studied classical piano as a boy and started singing as a teenager at the Refuge Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The son of a porter and a seamstress, he went to a local Catholic college on a scholarship but dropped out to pursue a career as a musician. At 17, he was touring and playing black churches in California, Texas and Louisiana.
It was during a performance at a theater in San Antonio in 1957 that the Rev. James Cleveland, the great Chicago-based gospel musician, discovered Mr. Dixon and asked him to move to Chicago. There he became a pianist and singer with Mr. Cleveland’s group, The Original Chimes.
Mr. Dixon told The Associated Press in 1997 that being a young musician on Chicago’s South Side in the 1960s was like getting an advanced degree in blues and gospel music. “Going to church was like going to school,” he said.
• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Lester Young/Charlie Parker birthday marathon
—John Coltrane birthday broadcast
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Traditions in Swing (Phil Schaap, jazz)
—Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)
• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads(Kevin Nutt, gospel) —Airborne Event (Dan Bodah, “electronic noise to free jazz, drone rock to a capella African song”)
—Give the Drummer Some (Doug Schulkind, sui generis, web only)
—Transpacific Sound Paradise (Rob Weisberg, “popular and unpopular music from around the world”)
• WHPK-FM (broadcasting from University of Chicago)
—The Blues Excursion (Arkansas Red)
Don Byron New Gospel Quintet (DB, tenor saxophone & clarinet; DK Dyson, vocals; Xavier Davis, piano; Brad Jones, bass; Pheeroan akLaff, drums), “Precious Lord” (T. A. Dorsey), live, Brazil (São Paulo), 2010
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Last night I heard these folks live at the University of Chicago. Whenever I go out and hear someone, I’m reminded, again, that even (especially?) today, when records and the ’net make more music more available than ever before, there’s no substitute for live music. No recording offers the textures and nuances of a great live performance. (Never, for instance, have I heard a recording that truly reproduces the sounds of a drum kit, much less the interplay between horn and drums.) Not only is there more to hear live, your focus is sharper: you know you won’t have another opportunity to experience these sounds. And when you go to a club or a concert hall, you become, for that night, a member of an ad hoc musical community—something you can’t do sitting in your living room.
Wade Mainer, singer, banjo player, April 21, 1907-September 12, 2011
“I’ll Be a Friend to Jesus” (1936)
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Singing, playing, talking (c. 2004)
Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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lagniappe
What we was playin’ in the ’30s was true country music—no electric instruments, no copyrights. Something’d happen and someone’d write a song about it—nobody owned it, nobody’d know who wrote it. The music just told a story.
Today, in celebration of our second birthday, we revisit a few favorites from our first month.
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If I didn’t have kids, would my ears be stuck, forever, on “repeat”?
Here’s something my younger son Luke, who just started college, played for me recently, after first pronouncing it, with quiet but absolute authority, the best thing this guy has done (already Luke’s learned that what’s important isn’t to be right; it’s to seem right).
Lupe Fiasco, “Hip Hop Saved My Life,” live, Los Angeles, 2008
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And here’s a track my older son Alex played for me a couple weeks ago, before heading back to school.
Dirty Projectors, “Stillness Is The Move”
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Koan for aging parents: What is the sound of a childless house?
(Originally posted 9/14/09.)
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May, 2012
Nobel-Prize-winning economist devises a way to turn faces—images of them, that is—into marketable commodities: the more expressive the face, the greater the value.
March, 2013
Haiti is named one of the world’s wealthiest countries.
Arcade Fire, “Haiti” (Funeral, 2004)
(Originally posted 9/23/09.)
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Performances like this usually fall somewhere between disappointing and disastrous. So many things can—and usually do—go wrong when you take a bunch of folks who’re used to leading their own bands and throw them together onstage. People trip all over each another; flash trumps feeling. But this performance, with Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Paul Butterfield, and (at the end) B.B. King, has plenty of strong moments—some funny ones, too. Listen to Albert bark at Paul:“Turn around!” (0:39) And watch Albert outfox B.B. First he invites him back onstage (4:40) and then, just when B.B.’s about to take flight (5:55), he cuts him off—faster than you can say “wham”—with his own (wonderful) solo. So much for Emily Post.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert King, Paul Butterfield, B.B. King, live, 1987
(Originally posted 9/18/09.)
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If spirit could be sold, New Orleans would be rich.
Rebirth Brass Band, live, New Orleans, 2009
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lagniappe
Brass band musicians are a wild bunch. They’re hard to control. The street funk that the Rebirth [Brass Band]plays definitely isn’t traditional—it might be in thirty years time.
—Lajoie “Butch” Gomez (in Mick Burns, Keeping the Beat on the Street: The New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance[2006])
(Originally posted 9/11/09.)
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Muddy Waters, Saul Bellow, Steppenwolf Theater Company (John Malkovich, John Mahoney, Gary Sinise, Laurie Metcalf, et al.), Curtis Mayfield: a lot of great artists, musical and otherwise, have come out of Chicago in the last 50 years. Among the greatest is this group: the Art Ensemble of Chicago. While the horn players (Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie) got the lion’s share of the attention, what gave their music its juice—what made it dance—was (as you’ll hear) one of the finest rhythm sections ever: Malachi Favors, bass; Don Moye, drums.
Art Ensemble of Chicago, live, Poland (Warsaw), 1982 (in four parts)
Part 1 of 4
Part 2 of 4
Part 3 of 4
Part 4 of 4
(I talk about the AEC in the past tense because, while recordings are still released under this name from time to time, with two key members [they were all “key members”] now dead—trumpeter Lester Bowie [1999] and bassist Malachi Favors [2004]—it just isn’t [nor could it be] the same.)
(Originally posted 9/8/09.)
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Here—with a shout-out to my brother Don, with whom (at the age of 15) I saw the MC5 in Chicago’s Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention (when nobody outside the Detroit/Ann Arbor area [including us] knew who they were)—is an awfully good cover, from what might seem an unlikely source, of one of their “greatest hits.”
Jeff Buckley, “Kick Out The Jams,” live, Chicago, 1995
And here, courtesy, apparently, of the Department of Defense, is (silent) footage of the scene in Lincoln Park on August 25, 1968—the day the MC5 (who appear here fleetingly) played.
(Originally posted 9/7/09.)
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If influence were compensable, Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones—a huge influence on Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, Eddie Kendricks (Temptations), Al Green, even Paul Simon (who took inspiration from a line in the Swans’ “hit” “Mary, Don’t You Weep” [“I’ll be a bridge over deep water if you trust in my name”] when he wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water”)—would have, when he passed earlier this year at the age of 94, died a wealthy man.
When he leaves the house [in NYC], he whistles his favorite tune, ‘What A Friend We Have In Jesus,’ while greeting the assorted neighborhood junkies and prostitutes who knew him mainly as sometime manager of the [Hotel] Cecil. ‘What’s new, Jeter,’ they ask. ‘Nothing new, nothing good, just thank God for life up here with these heathens and muggers.’
—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good New and Bad Times(1971)
• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Lester Young/Charlie Parker birthday marathon
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker]) —Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)
Ever feel like, each day, you understand less and less?
Davis Sisters (with Jackie Verdell), “We’ll Understand It Better By and By,” live (TV broadcast), early 1960s
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lagniappe
reading table
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.
I am a big admirer of her [Szymborska’s] work. I have read everything she has written, and I keep coming back to it. She is a very witty poet and she has greatly helped me to enjoy life. She exactly fits my definition of an artist. Who shouldn’t only have profound insight and a sharp mind but also remember that his obligation is to entertain the reader. And this is exactly what she does.
• WKCR-FM(broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Traditions in Swing (Phil Schaap, jazz)
—Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)
—Raag Aur Taal (Various, Indian music)
Few performances, in any genre, pack this much punch.
Brother Joe May & Jackie [AKA Jacqui] Verdell, “You’re Gonna Need Him After A While,” live (TV broadcast)
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lagniappe
[Brother Joe May was] the most powerful male soloist in a day when gospel singers had the greatest voices in America.
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. . . Aretha Franklin’s delivery has Jacqui [Verdell] stamped all over it . . .
—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1975 ed.)
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I considered . . . Jackie Verdell . . . one of the best and most underrrated soul singers of all time. It was through Jackie that I learned the expression, ‘Girl, you peed tonight,’ meaning you were dynamite. Several nights Jackie sang so hard she literally had a spot or two on her robe from peeing. Singing far too hard, I also peed here and there in the early days; I quickly realized no one should sing that hard.
—Aretha Franklin (in Aretha Franklin & David Ritz, Aretha: From These Roots [1999])
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This clip, I just learned, is included in a recent Sam & Dave DVD, The Original Soul Men, in a part called “The Roots of Sam & Dave.” (As one review notes: “Sam Moore was supposed to be Sam Cooke’s replacement in the Soul Stirrers, after Cooke made his historic decision to pursue pop music. But then Moore saw Jackie Wilson, and everything changed.”)
Delois Barrett Campbell, whose subtle phrasing and silvery soprano helped define the sound of the Barrett Sisters, a prominent Chicago gospel trio featured in the 1982 documentary “Say Amen, Somebody,” died on Tuesday in Chicago. She was 85.
The cause was a pulmonary embolism, her daughter Mary Campbell said.
Ms. Campbell, the eldest of the Barrett Sisters, initially caught the attention of the gospel world in the 1940s when she became the first soprano to join the Roberta Martin Singers and sang lead on their 1947 recording of “Yield Not to Temptation.”
She and her sisters, Rodessa and Billie, formed a group in the early 1960s that recorded on the Savoy label. They enjoyed modest hits with “Jesus Loves Me” and “I’ll Fly Away,” but real fame came with “Say Amen, Somebody,” which exposed them to a new generation of listeners and an enthusiastic European audience.
“That film put them on the map, and, in a way, Lois became the symbol of Chicago gospel,” said Anthony Heilbut, author of “The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times.”
Delores Barrett was born on March 12, 1926, in Chicago, where she grew up on the South Side. She and her sisters sang at the Morning Star Baptist Church, where their father was a deacon and their mother sang in the choir, directed by their aunt, Mattie Dacus.
The sisters developed a high-pitched, close-harmony style influenced by the Andrews Sisters, with Delores’s light, ringing soprano, which had a semi-operatic quality, anchoring the group’s sound.
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While a senior at Englewood High School, Delores was recruited by the Roberta Martin Singers, a seminal group from the Pilgrim Baptist Church that was known for its stellar roster of lead male voices, notably Robert Anderson and Norsalus McKissick. She continued to perform with her sisters as well.
In 1950 she married the Rev. Frank Campbell, who changed the spelling of her first name to conform to her nickname, Lois. In addition to their daughter Mary, of Chicago, she is survived by another daughter, Sue Ladd, also of Chicago; her sisters, Rodessa Barrett Porter and Billie Barrett GreenBey, both of Chicago; four grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
In 1962, when the Roberta Martin Singers were on the verge of breaking up, Ms. Campbell re-formed the trio with her sisters, who had gone on to rear children and pursue their own careers.
The group became a fixture on the Chicago gospel scene, appearing often on “Jubilee Showcase,” a local television show that featured the nation’s top gospel groups in the 1960s and ’70s.
The trio often recorded pop ballads like “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and Dinah Washington once urged Ms. Campbell to follow in her footsteps and make a career as a crossover artist.
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The group’s stirring performances of “The Storm Is Passing Over,” “(I Don’t Feel) No Ways Tired” and “He Has Brought Us” in “Say Amen, Somebody” gave the sisters a second career. They appeared on “The Tonight Show” and began touring internationally to great acclaim.
The well of Chicago gospel runs so deep it sometimes seems bottomless.
DeLois Barrett Campbell and The Barrett Sisters, “The Storm Is Passing Over,” live, 1982 (Say Amen, Somebody)
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lagniappe
[DeLois Barrett Campbell and the Barrett Sisters’] harmony is special, probably the best in female gospel.
—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1975 ed.)
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DeLois Barrett Campbell & The Barrett Sisters
The O’Neal Twins
The Clark Sisters
The Louvin Brothers
The Delmore Brothers
The Stanley Brothers
The Everly Brothers
The Beach Boys
The Bee Gees
Kate & Anna McGarrigle
The Jackson Five
The Isley Brothers
The Neville Brothers
The list goes on, and on, and . . .
(Originally posted 1/3/10.)
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Today at 3 p.m., at a church on Chicago’s south side (First Church of Deliverance, 4301 S. Wabash), hundreds of gospel music lovers (including me) will gather to celebrate the birthday of this group’s lead singer—it’s her 84th.
DeLois Barrett Campbell and the Barrett Sisters
“No Ways Tired,” live, 1982 (Say Amen, Somebody)
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“Fly Away,” live
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lagniappe
Chicago, gospel’s Mecca and Vatican, remains the one city where traditional singers comprise a community, and retain a small but steady audience.
—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (6th ed. 2002)
(Originally posted 3/4/10.)
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At last Sunday’s (wonderful) 84th birthday celebration for DeLois Barrett Campbell, roses graced the altar—a gift from longtime friend Aretha Franklin.
DeLois Barrett Campbell and the Barrett Sisters, live, “He Has Brought Us,” 1982 (Say Amen, Somebody)
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lagniappe
And then we being blood sisters, I always say that gives our harmony a special edge.—DeLois Barrett Campbell
That girl [DeLois Barrett Campbell] can make a song so sweet you want to eat it.—Marion Williams
—Quoted in Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (6th ed. 2002) (Heilbut was at last Sunday’s birthday celebration.)
(Originally posted 3/21/10.)
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This afternoon, at 3 p.m., hundreds of gospel fans—from all over—will gather, once again, at a church on Chicago’s south side (First Church of Deliverance, 4315 S. Wabash) to celebrate her (85th!) birthday.
DeLois Barrett Campbell & the Barrett Sisters, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” live, 1983
music clip of the day 