Various - Guitar Evangelists Volume II (1927-1941)

Stunning - some so uncannily incandescent - almost a hundred-year-old recordings of “guitar evangelists”, one of the strongest roots of today’s popular music, as featured on this obscure compilation. Unreal.

When recalling a  visit he made to an early 20th Century fort near Antwerp, eventually used by the nazis as a work camp during WWII, the narrator of WG Sebald’s Austerlitz anguishly realizes that places and objects can’t hold the memories attached to them, and that they are due to fade into oblivion with the passing of those able to recall and tell. Obviously, he then doesn’t mention books or any kind of document (and certainly doesn’t mention records), but concrete walls, wheelbarrows and straw mattresses. I had quite the opposite experience when I came across this compilation of some century old guitar-led gospels recordings, the blissful realization that some objects exhale tiny but strong fragments of past lives.

I haven’t exactly figured out whether carefully carried out sessions like those we can hear on this Guitar Evangelists compilation are stronger testimonies of individualities than field recordings, or if the recording of individuals in familiar settings of theirs adds not only some background information, but also a sense of life in its very physicality - the weight of a body standing or sitting, or the lightness of a movement.

I won’t engage in discussing a subject I know so ridiculously little of, but encourage you to read about this guitar evangelists movement here or elsewhere. Though, no background is needed to delve into these fervently burning songs. (VG+/ VG+)