Last week, as the full horror of New Orleans hit me, I received an advance copy of King Britt Presents: Sister Gertrude Morgan.
Sister Gertrude was a painter, a singer, a street minister, and a bride of Christ. She walked the French Quarter of New Orleans for more than 20 years, dressed in a nurse’s outfit, spreading the word of the Lord. In 1968, she cut an album, called Let’s Make a Record, featuring only her voice and tambourine.
Ropeadope Records president Andy Hurwitz approached producer King Britt about transforming Sister Gertrude’s raw and primitive music into something new. The results are not dissimilar to what Moby achieved on his Play album from 1999, but Britt’s production is looser and more organic.
These are songs of hope and redemption. These are songs that try to raise us up.
I am posting two tracks: “New World in My View” and “Precious Lord Lead Me On.” Every time I listened to them over the past five days, images of the devastated Gulf Coast filled my head. Sister Gertrude, dead for 25 years, provides a soundtrack of healing for a world of sorrow.
Robert Russa Moton was the head of the Tuskegee Institute in 1927, at the time of the Great Mississippi Flood that year. He was appointed by Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to head a commission that investigated abuses against blacks in the aftermath of the flood. Moton allowed himself to be used and abused in hopes that he might have an influence, which he was never allowed. In a draft report from June of 1927, he wrote:
We were interested in a song that these people sang in the levee camps — that the flood had washed away the old account. They felt that the flood had emancipated them from a system of peonage… We are strongly convinced that something ought to be done permanently to relieve the hopeless condition under which these people have lived all these years. They ought not to be permitted to go back to this hopeless situation… if there is rehabilitation.
(Quoted in Rising Tide)
There are two prominent belief systems in New Orleans: Catholicism and voodoo. The common connection is that both believe in life after death. Let us hope a new world — a better world — rises up from this destruction.
(Learn about Sister Gertrude Morgan’s art here and here. Listen to the original tracks here. Read about the production of the new Britt tracks here. The album King Britt Presents: Sister Gertrude Morgan comes out today.)
Sister Gertrude – New World in My View — BUY
Sister Gertrude – Precious Lord Lead Me On — BUY