A woman from a small farming community in the state of Georgia, Bessie Jones was one of the most important traditional singers of the mid-20th century. Her accordion-playing grandfather, Jet Sampson, was enslaved as a child before the American civil war. He lived to 105 and taught her the songs of his times, which Jones was so determined to share with future generations that she travelled 1,000 miles to ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s New York flat in 1961 and told him to record her.
Jones sang at the Poor People’s March on Washington in 1968, in Carnegie Hall in Manhattan, and at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration. She died in 1984. In 1998, her vocals from the song Sometimes were sampled on Moby’s single Honey. Moby thanked Lomax on the liner notes, but not Jones: “I wrote Honey in about 10 minutes,” he boasted. Get in Union, a remastered collection of her recordings from 2014, was out of print until early June, when the Lomax Archive uploaded it to Bandcamp with nine new tracks and all proceeds benefitting the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s legal defence fund. It shouldn’t be sidelined or silenced any more, but played and played again.
The 60-track anthology includes a cappellas and spirituals with the group that Jones joined, the Georgia Sea Island Singers. All sing from the gut, clear and warm. Jones sings O Death straight-backed, speeding up, asking straightforwardly to be spared. Her version of folk standard John Henry, about an African-American steel driver who died after working too hard, is powerfully slow, drawing you into his last moments.
The harmonies elsewhere are thick and contagious. They weave magnificently around the polyrhythmic clapping on Walk Daniel; on Got on My Traveling Shoes, they’re ecstatic in their surrender. There’s a sense of soft determination throughout, including on Sometimes. “I’m going over here,” Jones sings near its end. Her backing singers laugh in approval. It’s up to us to go with them.
This month’s other picks
Andrew Tuttle’s Alexandra (Room40) is a gorgeous, pointillistic portrait of his eastern Australian homeland. His dappled banjos and guitars with reverb-laden electronics bring to mind heat haze and still lakes. Minnie Birch’s You’re Not Singing Anymore (self-released) unpacks folk songs normally sung, often to bawdier lyrics, on football terraces. A bit of roaring welly would be welcome in-between her wistfulness on John Brown’s Body and Blaydon Races. Snowgoose’s The Making of You (Glass Modern) sees old Soup Dragon Jim McCulloch, plus other Glasgow indie glitterati from Teenage Fanclub and Belle and Sebastian, doing a Pentangle. The occasional bossa nova flourishes are lovely, as is the easy-on-the-ear Anna Sheard.
