Pitchfork
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Producer and label owner Henry Stone, who passed away last August at the age of 93, was the kind of mythic record label executive who turns up midway through music biopics, or as the "other guy" in countless photos of famous artists. He regularly shared cognac at his house with James Brown; he recorded a young Ray Charles; he singlehandedly put Miami on the map with his early '70s label TK Records; and made a star of a worker in his warehouse named Harry Wayne Casey, whose KC & the Sunshine band scored disco hits like "That's The Way (I Like It)" and "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty" for TK. Just as impressive as his business smarts was his restlessness: though TK was Stone's primary concern, he also oversaw a fleet of smaller independent labels, each of which had a different stylistic focus, but were all loosely linked to R&B.
One of those labels was Gospel Roots, which Stone founded in 1976 with Timmy Thomas, who had himself scored a hit four years prior with "Why Can't We Live Together", a song that has had a particularly big 2015. Like all of Stone's ventures, Gospel Roots quickly amassed a sprawling discography, releasing 50 LPs in just three years. Part of this was owed to the label's canny structure—rather than shelling out for recording and production, Stone snapped up pre-existing gospel masters from regional artists and simply pressed and distributed them through Gospel Roots. According to the extensive notes included with Christians Catch Hell, Thomas rarely met—or even spoke to—the artists whose work he was commissioned to promote. The label expired just three years after it was founded, without scoring a single notable hit.
That backstory makes Christians Catch Hell—a collection of 18 tracks from the Gospel Roots label—seem like yet another in a long line of barrel-scraping reissues of "lost classics," but the music it contains transcends record collector arcana, providing instead a snapshot of the underexplored intersection between disco, funk, and gospel. Despite its fiery title, the prevailing themes on Christians are joy, empathy and compassion; in nearly all of them, salvation and Divine love are contrasted with societal ills. On the loose, New Orleans-style R&B of the Fantastic Family Aires' "Tell Me", vocalist Rachion Conigan asks repeatedly, "What is this world coming to?" describing fractured families and global catastrophes as the band vamps balefully behind him. Later, in "The Color of God", they attack racism, describing God as being "a natural color," existing above toxic, man-made prejudice. Like "Tell Me", the music that accompanies it is a slow walk, full of teardrop guitar licks and heartbeat bass lines.
By contrast, Pastor T.L. Barrett's swooping "After the Rain" comes on like Talking Book-era Stevie Wonder, with big, clanging piano ringing out behind Barrett's fervent reassurances of God's enduring love. And "On Jesus' Program", by the Original Sunset Travelers, is a kind of twilight doo-wop number that edges its way forward slowly, with an unidentified lead vocalist spilling his honeyed tenor over deep-set, creeping music. There are fragments of hundreds of styles on Christians: the wacka-wacka disco guitar on "For the Children", the twinkling cocktail lounge funk on the sweeping "Said It Long Time Ago", and late-night Quiet Storm vocals on the praise number "Spirit Free", which gracefully blurs the line between spiritual and romantic love. Christians subtly connects all of these genres, indicating passages from one to the other while also gesturing toward their common source in gospel music. More than being a simple celebration of obscure artists, Christians is instead a kind of roadmap, tracing the byways that lead from one style to another.
At times, it could do with a bit more heat. With few of the tracks operating above mid-tempo, it begins to sag slightly as it goes on. Fortunately, it snaps back into focus with the late arrival of the title track, a smoky, agonized blues number powered by the impassioned vocals of Rev. Edna Isaac and the Greene Sisters. In the liners, Isaac describes crying while writing the lyrics, and every ounce of that pain turns up in her delivery. Unlike the rest of the record, which presents religion as a rescue, "Christians Catch Hell" focuses on the difficulty of having faith, and the oppression from friends and spiritual forces that accompanies belief. "People who are non-Christians/ Throw stumbling blocks in your way," she cautions, "Satan chooses his disciples/ Puts his seal on them to do his ways/…But I'd rather be a Christian/ And stay with the Lord every day." Like all of the songs on Christians, it didn't turn its singer into a star on par with, say KC & the Sunshine Band. But the conviction of the performance and the clarity of the lyrics suggests that perhaps earthly acclaim was beside the point.
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016