In addition to the 16 newly remastered songs, “Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams,” includes a new biography by Michael Corcoran, a former music critic who scoured the hot plains of East Texas, hunting down details. Last month, though, Dust-to-Digital, an Atlanta label that specializes in unearthing rare and early recordings, cleared the cobwebs of myth and supposition, shedding welcome light on Phillips’ mysterious life. He was “gospel’s great disappearing act,” said his biographer. It was thought that he died insane in 1938, paranoid and haunted by divine revelations. The melodies Phillips strummed on his lyre-like instrument mellow the prophetic condemnations, like a soapbox preacher standing next to a carousel ride.Īfter recording 18 songs (two are missing), Phillips faded into obscurity. “Washington Phillips tells that Old Time Religion,” Columbia announced in advertisements, even though his lyrics castigated established churches, a rarity for gospel records. His first moved more than 8,000 copies, a nice number for “race records,” as they were called at the time. The producer Columbia Records had sent down from New York was baffled by the man’s contraption, cataloging it simply as a “novelty.” But Columbia liked Washington Phillips’ songs enough to record him five times from 1927-1929, in sessions that produced some of the era’s most beautiful and beguiling gospel music. Nearly 90 years ago, a peddler and part-time preacher arrived at a makeshift recording studio in Dallas carrying a strange instrument and a fierce aversion to spiritual hypocrisy.
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