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pittsyltucky

Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2008 11:18 pm

*Johnny* Joined: 15 Sep 2006 Posts: 4268 Location: Pigg River District, Pittsylvania County, Virginia

DOMINATION BLUES

Well you’re fighting each other and you think you’re doing well
But your soldiers are marching all the way to hell*
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Well you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

Well it’s ashes to ashes at the final hour**
You’re fighting each other over money and power***
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Well you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

And now you’re proud of your son, he’s gonna do his part
But when your boy comes home, he’ll have a tear in his heart****
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Well you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

Well now you give a beggar a nickel, you give a cripple a crutch
But you know that your charity don’t amount to much
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Well you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

Well now you know you people have no right to fight
You ought to just treat each other right
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Well you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

Now you dominator, come on down from your tower*****
It’s total destruction in the final hour******
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Now you better believe us
I tell you that’s all
Now you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

Alternate lyrics:
* - But you’re sending your soldiers all the way to hell
** - Oh, well it’s ashes to ashes at the final end
*** - When you know well you’re killing each other again
**** - But your boy will come home with a broken heart
***** - Now the great dominator doesn’t have to be clear
****** - Now that he knows that he can run on fear

First performance was on PHC - 2/12/05:
------ = flubbed

GK: I don’t know if you’re going to do this song or not, but I wish you would. Um… I heard you up in the, in your dressing room, you were doing um, that Washington Phillips song that um… (audience laughing) I don’t know where you got that, um, that’s a beautiful tune that comes, um, off an old 78. Washington Phillips, nobody knows who he was exactly – just some, some old, some old singer somewhere who played, uh, some odd little stringed instrument…
WW: Dolceola, I believe they called that…
GK: The dolceola – alright – okay…
WW: Didn’t make too many of those…
GK: And why here’s a dolceola right down there… Mr. Fuqua has one in his, in his hands… This is, um, old song off a 78, resurrected by Old Crow Medicine Show
WW: Actually, this morning it was the Denomination Blues, and by this evening it’s the Domination Blues…
GK: Domination Blues
WW: …and we’ve re-written it.
GK: Alright – okay, okay

Well you’re fighting each other and you think you’re doing well
But your ----- --- ------ all the way to hell
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Well you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

Now you’re fighting each other over money and power
Well it’s total destruction at the final hour
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Well you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

Well now you’re proud of your son, he’s gonna do his part
When your boy comes home, he’ll have a tear in his heart
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Well you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

Well you give a beggar a nickel, you give a cripple a crutch
Well you know that your charity don’t amount to much
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Well you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

Now you’re ----- ----- ----- and you’re ---- ---- well
And you’re ----- each other all the way to hell
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Well you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

Well now your sun and the water won’t keep your money green
All you need’s a little gasoline
That’s all
I tell you that’s all
Now you better believe us
I tell you that’s all
Now you better believe us
I tell you that’s all

_________________
"Johnny get your gun, we'll have a little fun."

pittsyltucky

Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2008 11:25 pm

*Johnny* Joined: 15 Sep 2006 Posts: 4268 Location: Pigg River District, Pittsylvania County, Virginia

DENOMINATION BLUES (Washington Phillips)

As recorded by Ry Cooder on Into The Purple Valley

G......................................................
I wanna tell you people it's a nat'ral fact
...........................................................
Ev'ry man don't understand the bible alike
..............C.........................G...
And that's all, I tell you that's all
.................................D......
'Cause you better have Jesus
.....................G...
I tell you that's all

Well, the denominations got no right to fight
They ought to go on and treat each other right
And that's all, I tell you that's all
'Cause you better have Jesus
I tell you that's all

It's right to stand together, wrong to stand apart
When none will enter heaven but the pure at heart
And that's all, I'll tell you that's all
'Cause you better have Jesus
I'll tell you that's all

Well, the Primitive Baptists they believe
That you can't go to heaven 'less you wash your feet
And that's all, I'll tell you that's all
'Cause you better have Jesus
I tell you that's all

Well, the African Methodists, they believe the same
'Cause they know demonination ain't a thing but a name
And that's all, I'll tell you that's all
'Cause you better have Jesus
I tell you that's all

Well, people that jump from church to church
You can bet their conversion don't amount too much
And that's all, I'll tell you that's all
'Cause you better have Jesus
I tell you that's all

Well, you can to your college, you can go to your school
But if you ain't got Jesus, you'se an educated fool
And that's all, I'll tell you that's all
'Cause you better have Jesus
I tell you that's all

_________________
"Johnny get your gun, we'll have a little fun."

pittsyltucky

Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2008 11:28 pm

*Johnny* Joined: 15 Sep 2006 Posts: 4268 Location: Pigg River District, Pittsylvania County, Virginia

Great little history on Washington Phillips and the Dolceola controversy:

EXHUMING THE LEGEND OF WASHINGTON PHILLIPS
by Michael Corcoran
From the Austin Statesman, Dec. 29, 2002
Myth #1: The Texas gospel pioneer died at the Austin State Hospital in 1938.
Myth # 2: He played the dolceola, a rare keyboard instrument.
The mystery begins the first time you hear the flowing gospel of Washington Phillips, whose entire recorded output consists of 18 songs recorded from 1927- 1929. His sweetly-sung Christian blues, bathed in a celestial haze of notes from an instrument that sounds like a child's music box, stand out amongst the work of guitar evangelists and street corner Scripture-ites of the era. Phillips' sacred porch songs provide evidence of a higher power, for how could man alone create music for the angels? After his five sessions in a Dallas studio, where he'd been summoned by Columbia Records field recorder Frank Walker, Phillips faded back into obscurity. Ry Cooder led a slight revival in 1971, when he covered Phillips' "Denomination Blues," and newer bands, such as Austin's Knife In the Water, have interpreted his moralistic lullabies for the art rock crowd. For the most part, however, Phillips is virtually unknown except to a cult of rabid musicologists, who revel in the mystique of the man who emerged out of nowhere as a fully-formed artist and just as quickly disappeared. The liner notes to his only American CD "I Was Born To Preach the Gospel" (Yazoo) provided a bit of biographical info in 1991, reporting that the singer was admitted to the Austin State Hospital on Guadalupe St. in 1930 and died there of tuberculosis eight years later. That would explain why he never recorded after 1929. The All-Music Guide, a favorite Internet reference source for music critics, repeats the information, taken from the death certificate of a Washington Phillips of Freestone County, as does Amazon.com. But it turns out that it was another man of the same name, from the same place, who recorded in Dallas.
The "real" Washington Phillips returned to the farming life in the black settlement of Simsboro, content to play for neighbors and churchgoers until 1954, when, at age 74, he died of head injuries suffered from a fall down the stairs at the welfare office in nearby Teague. I didn't know about this case of mistaken identity in November, when I stood over a grave on the old "colored" side of the Austin State Cemetery off 51st. St., thinking that I'd found the final resting place for the man who helped create gospel by putting religious lyrics to 12-bar blues. "It's gotta be this one," said Dave Roup, the hospital's director of maintenance, who led me out to the site. "We know that #1692 died in early December '38 and #1694 died in April '39." The information on the death certificate, which said he'd been buried at the state cemetery Jan. 2, 1939, placed Washington Phillips at grave #1693. Later that day, Roup called with some interesting news. It turned out that the body had been exhumed the day after it was buried and taken back to Teague, about sixty miles east of Waco, by brother Sim Phillips.
A few days later, I was making the same trek. According to the liner notes, the parents' names were Houston Phillips and Emma Titus Phillips, which gave me some place to start. Before I left, I sent a few emails to historians of Freestone County (also the home of 1920's blues legend Blind Lemon Jefferson) and soon received a phone call from Wilbur Titus of Fairfield, whose grandfather was Emma Titus' brother. Wilbur had traced the Titus roots from the slave depots of the Caribbean to South Carolina then to Arkansas and finally to Fairfield, Texas in 1852. What's more, a daughter of Sims Phillips lived in the area. A volunteer with the Freestone County Genealogical Society, meanwhile, emailed me to say she'd found that a Washington Phillips was buried in the Cotton Gin Cemetery near Teague. This search was going too easily, I thought. The main challenge would be to find out how an uneducated black man from rural East Texas managed to get his hands on a dolceola, a strange keyboard instrument produced in Toledo, OH from 1903-1908 and marketed as a portable grand piano. The "novelty accompaniment," as it was called on Phillips' record labels, was identified as a dolceola in the '60s by noted British musicologist and author Paul Oliver, who said he got the info from a Columbia exec. Through the years, the dolceola (less than 50 exist today), has been such a part of Phillips' lore that modern Memphis dolceolist Andy Cohen said, "Without Phillips, the instrument would be completely forgotten today." Until Cooder tinkered with a dolceola on 1970's recordings, Phillips is believed to be the only artist to ever record with the instrument. I needed eye witnesses, friends or relatives around in the 1920's who could recall Phillips playing a keyboard instrument, 16" wide and 22" long and weighing about 15 pounds.
Born in 1921, Sim's daughter Joyce Phillips Busby may have recalled her uncle playing such a contraption, but her daughter Portia said she had Alzheimer's and wouldn't be much help on the story. I wanted to talk to her anyway. "You doin' a story on my Unca Wash? He was a gospel singer?" she said, when I found her in the dining room of a nursing home in nearby Mexia. "He could sing that gospel so purty," she said and a spark came to her. "And wudn't no one could play the piano like Unca Wash." She measured a square on the table about the size of a dolceola and started miming a keyboard player. Did he call that a dolceola? I asked. "Why don't you ask him yourself?" she said. "He's home right now."
Still on the trail of the wrong Washington Phillips, the one who died at the state hospital, I found his nephew Cleo Phillips in Oklahoma through directory assistance. Born in 1940, he never knew his uncle, but he said he did have a cousin named Wash who used to preach and sing a bit. "He had this trick," Cleo said, "where he'd eat a fish like a sandwich and spit the bones out the side of his mouth." Cleo gave me the number of his sister Annie Mae Flewellen, who lived in California. When I asked her if she remembered anything about her uncle, the gospel singer, she also corrected me. "You mean my cousin Wash. He's the one who sang." Flewellen says she remembers her father going to Austin to bring back the body of his brother when she was a young girl. "I never knew him. They said he drowned in a water tank." But she had lots of memories of Cousin Wash. "He used to dip snuff, right, and when I was small I'd always ask him if I could have some," she recalled. "So one time he finally gave me a little pinch and showed me how to spit it out, but I just went to the floor. Passed out cold." Giving snuff to a child? That didn't sound like the Bible-thumper who preached good parenthood on "Train Your Child." But, then, a lot of things didn't make sense in the Washington Phillips story I was pursuing. For instance, how was it possible that someone could record eight masterfully played and sung tracks in one day in Dec. 1929 and then be sent to a sanitarium eight months later? I returned from my first visit to Freestone County without finding a single person who knew Wash Phillips, the son of Houston and Emma, as the singer who recorded a few '78s. Three days later I would find what I hadn't been looking for: eyewitness evidence that Washington Phillips, the gospel pioneer, was not the one who died in Austin in 1938. It was a Monday night at 9 p.m., borderline cutoff for cold calling, but while looking over my notes, I saw that I hadn't yet talked to Wilbur Titus' cousin Virgil Keeton, who used to sing in a gospel quartet. Since he's also related on the Phillips side, he could be a good source, I thought. "I think he's sleeping," said the voice on the other end of the phone. "Wait, I hear him stirring. Virgil! Come get the phone." After a couple minutes came a tired hello. "Oh, yeah, I knew Wash Phillips, the gospel singer" he said, when I told him what I was calling about. "He used to live in Simsboro with his mother, my Aunt Nancy. He used to play this harp-like instrument that he made himself. Sang like a bird, man." Born in 1920, Keeton said he first saw Phillips perform in the mid-'30's ("I was a teenager") and visited him and his mother in Simsboro regularly. Virgil and his wife Jewell said they last remember seeing Phillips a couple years after they married in 1946.
At the Freestone County Clerk's office the next day, I searched death records from the late '40s until I came up on the date Sept. 20, 1954 and saw the name George Washington Phillips. According to the death certificate, he was born on Jan. 11,1880, which means he was 47, not 36 as previously believed, when he made his first recordings. Just as Virgil had said, Phillips mother's name was Nancy (Cooper). His father's name was Tim Phillips. Next stop was the Keetons' house, where Virgil had just returned from his weekly cancer treatment in Temple. He demonstrated, with a thumb-plucking motion, how Phillips played the strings on his instrument. Showed a picture of a dolceola, Keeton said, "No, that's not it." Through the Keetons, I found 85-year-old Earl Phillips, a second cousin of the gospel singer, who now lives in Denver, Colo. He said that although he heard that Phillips used to play "an organ-type thing that some white folks gave him," the only instrument he ever saw him play had strings that he strummed. Flewellen recalls that "Cousin Wash" used to play her family's piano with great skill, but none of the other witnesses I interviewed described Phillips playing anything besides a stringed instrument. Nell Blakely, who grew up in Simsboro near Phillips' 30- acre spread, said he played "a homemade banjo that he laid down flat." Another former neighbor, 62-year-old Durden Dixon, said Phillips strummed a "box-like instrument he made himself out of the insides of a piano." Then there's the photo. In 1983, a researcher came across a Jan. 14, 1928 issue of the Louisiana Weekly containing a picture of Phillips holding two zithers, which look like autoharps and are played in a manner consistent with Keeton's recollection. Still, some Phillips fans maintain that only a dolceola could make the heavenly accompaniment found on Phillips recordings. "I'm 100% sure it's a dolceola," said Memphis producer Jim Dickinson, who played the "completely illogical instrument" on Ry Cooder's "Crossroads" soundtrack. "The way it sounds like part of it is going backwards- that's a dolceola. You can also hear the (keyboard-activated) hammer action in a couple places," he said. Is it possible that Phillips played a dolceola in the '20s, but then lost it or broke it and switched to a "harp-like" instrument in the '30s? But what about the 1928 photo?
The debate has even carried over to academia. At the 1991 International Conference of African American Music and Literature in Belgium, Dutch musicologist Guido van Rijn ended a lecture on Phillips with an argument for the dolceola theory. "It's just crazy." said Yazoo honcho Richard Nevins, who produced the Phillips CD reissue. "My ears are telling me that he's plucking the strings. It sounds like a zither to me. Then, lo and behold, along comes that picture of him holding the zithers in the studio and some people are still saying he played a dolceola."
Ex-Simsboro resident Doris Foreman Nealy finds it curious and somewhat amusing that musicologists would be giving lectures or arguing over details about her neighbor Wash almost fifty years after his death. "He was what they called a 'jack-leg preacher,'" she said. "He didn't have a church, so he'd kinda roam the town looking for someplace to preach. In Simsboro, we had a big picnic every June 19 and Mr. Wash would always start it off with a song. But none of us kids knew he ever made any records." He belonged to the Pleasant Hill Trinity Baptist Church in Simsboro, but May Nella Palmore, 82, of Teague recalled Phillips also preached and performed at the "sanctified" St. Paul Church of God In Christ. "His singing really fit in with that crowd," she said. "He had such a strong, powerful voice." The Keetons said they last saw him doing the devotion at St. James Methodist Church in Teague. "I am born to preach the gospel," he used to say, "and I sure do love my job." That Phillips was well-versed in the varying beliefs and customs of different churches is evident in "Denomination Blues," his most famous song via covers by Sister Rosetta Thorpe (who renamed it "That's All") and Cooder. Coyly denouncing hypocrisy in organized religion, Phillips mocks six different black denominations before launching into the verse: "You can go to college, you can go to school/ But if you ain't got Jesus, you a educated fool." That theme carried over to other Phillips material, including "The Church Needs Good Deacons," with its lines about church leaders running around on their wives. The lyrical bitterness, perhaps born from too many Sundays waiting to be called while less-pious men hogged the pulpit, didn't seem to apply to a musical career that never took off. "He knew he had talent," Keeton said. "But he was just ol' Wash Phillips, you know? Don't nobody get famous from Teague." He was known more for his mule cart, from which he sold homemade ribbon cane syrup, than for a handful of records that gave him a blip of recognition many decades ago. But where the memories of the man fade, the musician's work is stuck in time, vibrant and eternal. "Without knowing much about him, I feel that his recordings tell his story," said Knife In the Water guitarist Adam Blount, who became aquainted with the songs six years ago when the grieving father of a friend gave him a Phillips tape and asked if he knew anyone who could play that kind of music at the funeral. "His music is so simple, yet highly-developed to the point that it's almost psychedelic," Blount said. "You can hear the essence of a true artist, creating against all odds."
Phillips had some success with his first '78, "Take Your Burden To the Lord" b/w "Lift Him Up That's All," which sold just over 8,000 copies in 1928. (An average Bessie Smith record at the time would sell about 10,000.) Then came the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The scouts and field recorders stopped coming from New York in search of raw talent and the labels instead focused on making more refined records which would comply with the escapism sought by a dire populace. In the 1920's, Texans such as blind Pentecostal pianist Arizona Juanita Dranes of Dallas and Marlin's Blind Willie Johnson, whose classic compositions have been covered by Led Zeppelin ("Nobody's Fault But Mine") and Eric Clapton ("Motherless Children") were spicing "Negro spirituals" and songs of praise with barrelhouse piano and slide guitar before anyone else. But the innovative recordings from Texas suddenly stopped. Like Phillips, Dranes made her last recordings in 1929 and Johnson never stepped inside a studio again after April 1930.
How Phillips spent the first 47 years of his life remains a mystery. A brilliant instrumentalist, we know he spent much of his early years playing music. Did he receive any formal training or was he self-taught? And what was his relation to the Wash Phillips who was 11 years younger and died 16 years sooner? The two men named Washington Phillips are buried in the Cotton Gin Cemetery in the countryside six miles west of Teague. But an hour-long search could only locate the tombstone of the Phillips who died in the Austin State Hospital. That the Washington Phillips who was gospel's great disappearing act would take his eternal nap in an unmarked grave seems about par for this course in music history. Durden Dixon is one of the few blacks still living in Simsboro. "They knocked down all the houses and put together these big ranches," he said, waving his arm across the horizon. From '44- '54, a young Dixon lived down the road from the man he described as "kind of a hermit." Sometimes the old man would bellow neighborhood boys away from his dewberry bushes. Other times he'd invite them up to his porch, where he'd pull out his homemade instrument and sing. Dixon didn't know Wash Phillips made records, so as he rode shotgun to show me where Phillips used to live, I played him "A Mother's Last Words To Her Daughter," a song about shirking temptations to become a child of God. Dixon's face lit up. "That's Mr. Wash all right," he said, in full-beam delight. "I remember he used to sing us that one." The shack is gone, but Dixon showed me where it used to sit, about 20 yards in from the road. Aside from a few bottles of Coor's Light discarded under a tree, the land seemed untouched in the 48 years since Phillips was called home. There are old pieces of tin and some rusted buckets. There was also a little brown bottle, half-buried where the porch used to be. When I picked it up, emptied the dirt and showed Dixon, he laughed. "That's his snuff bottle, man." The next day an appraiser at Rue's Antiques confirmed that the bottle once held Garrett's snuff circa the early '50s. What do you know, Annie Mae Flewellen's 74-year-old memory was on the mark. If there's anything the story of Washington Phillips has told me, it's that sometimes what's true and what's false comes from where you least expect it. The great musician Wash Phillips didn't die in the nuthouse. And his instrument almost certainly was not a dolceola. The legend lessens with the mundane facts. It's comforting to know, however, that the singer who has affected so few people so profoundly, didn't live out his last few years in mental torment, but surrounded by the people who respected him for who he was. "Leave it there, oh leave it there," he used to sing in his sweet tenor of the truth. "Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there." Sometimes it can be as simple as that, knowing when and where to let go. Sometimes 18 tracks is the whole shot and you accept that and go on living the life you sing about in those songs.

_________________
"Johnny get your gun, we'll have a little fun."

GumboStu

Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2008 2:10 am

*Irish Stew* Joined: 03 Oct 2007 Posts: 3666 Location: Joe's Cornfield

Nice work, ~tucky

This page is interesting, too

Washington Philips

_________________
Walkin' the line between faith and fear.

pittsyltucky

Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2008 2:24 am

*Johnny* Joined: 15 Sep 2006 Posts: 4268 Location: Pigg River District, Pittsylvania County, Virginia

way to add to it, Stu - that's good stuff!

_________________
"Johnny get your gun, we'll have a little fun."

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