various / mississippi

Life Is A Problem

Back in stock! According to the liner notes of this fantastic church-friendly blues LP and 7" set the Reverend Utah Smith made a name for himself by rocking out with his congregation, hammering out 12-bar blues whilst swinging about from the church rafters with a pair of angel wings on his back. No wonder church was more popular in the first half of the twentieth century if they had these sorts of antics to entertain them. As the Life Is A Problem album amply demonstrates, the good Reverend isn't the only clergyman with a penchant for raucous ecclesiastical hoedowns. Man of the cloth, Lonnie Farris knocks out the grimy country jams with some heavy slide guitar on the boogie-woogie groover 'A Night In The House Of Prayer', while Sister Ola Mae Terrell knocks out some detuned blues like a proto-Erika Elder on the album's title track. It's hard to work out exactly when some of this stuff was actually recorded (unfortunately the liner notes aren't terribly consistent with dates), but apparently this rocking nun cut six songs for the Columbia label in 1953, and presumably this is taken from that session. The remainder of the first side shifts into a slightly rowdier mode with the Straight Street Group belting out the greasy rock & roll grooves of 'Angels Keep Watching Over Me' and Elder Charles Beck firing off electrified blues solos on the radical evangelistic crowd pleaser 'Rock & Roll Sermon'. There's more of a clean-cut gospel influence on the Crumb Brothers' 'Seat In The Kingdom' whilst Bishop Terry Tills wails out with a garage rock dirge. This guy's an actual Bishop? It's all getting very strange indeed. Can you imagine Rowan Williams blurting out this stuff? Even Desmond Tutu would have a hard time with it. The LP is absolutely loaded up with compellingly weird, unexpectedly hard-rocking juke joint-style stompers that would more commonly be passed off as the Devil's music. This fits right alongside the themed archive materials published by the Dust To Digital label and features quality turns of an equal calibre with any of those playlists. Highly recommended.