Good Lord (Run Old Jeremiah)
Austin Coleman, with Joe Washington Brown (1934). Excerpted from "The 50 Songs That Gave Birth to Rock and Roll"
This recording was captured in 1934 and compiled for release in 1942, but in reality it sounds like something much older. There’s a good reason for that.
Many of the forms that we’ve encountered on our journey through rock and roll pre-history so far—blues, gospel, boogie woogie—share common ancestry in the Transatlantic slave trade. With the mass arrival of African slaves in the West Indies and the United States, so too arrived a rich and varied musical tradition.
Among the features which sharply differentiated African music from the Western classical tradition were its emphasis on rhythm over structure, on passion over formality, on unbridled vocal exchange over carefully orchestrated choral arrangements.
Many of these features crossed the Atlantic and became what we refer to in retrospect as slave spirituals. Perhaps most important to our discussion was a tradition called the “ring shout”.
During the occasional respite from their work in the fields, slave communities would steal into the woods, gather in circles, and perform these sacred, ecstatic call-and-response musical rituals, typically for many hours.
The ring shout tradition persisted even as the primary religious medium for most American slaves became Christianity. The content of spirituals turned toward the Bible. The context of community gatherings became the church.
Chanting also remained an important and therapeutic part of life for cotton sharecroppers, chain-gang inmates, and other post-emancipation laborers. But there are few recordings that capture the frenzied and otherworldly intensity of the ring shout like this 1934 recording from Austin Coleman, accompanied by Joe Washington Brown.
Part of a collection procured by legendary father-son musicologists John and Alan Lomax, this field recording is a window into the slave spiritual tradition. And it is, perhaps, as pure in form as anything available to our ears.
Indeed, the recording not only closely mirrors the musical form from its earliest days of slavery, but its furious rhythmic pace and insistent chanting tell of its African origins.
Its call-and-response format also prefigures gospel tradition and soon thereafter, rock and roll floor-shakers like Ray Charles “What’d I Say” (1959) and the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” (1959) .
Take away its anthropological implications, and this recording, which is attributed to two otherwise unknown musicians, is simply one of the rawest, most raucous, and most unhinged musical performances this side of Iggy Pop.
See the full list of 50 Songs that Gave Birth to Rock and Roll