The Recordings of Rev. Charlie Jackson

Rev. Charlie Jackson stands resolute like a mountain of faith, a Fender Mustang slung by a wide strap over his choir robe. His right hand is on the strings—in his left, a water glass he empties and then uses as a slide. There is no better case for judging a record by its cover.

Two vinyl collections of Rev. Jackson’s live church recordings—the first volume christened You Got to Move and the second, Lord You’re So Good—are the most recent releases on 50 Miles of Elbow Room, a zine and record label run by Adam Lore in Brooklyn, N.Y. Under that umbrella, Lore has released music by avant-garde instrument maker Cooper-Moore; organized concerts of esoteric music in New York; and written about free jazz, reggae and gospel artists—engaging music from the fringes with a personal zeal and scholarly approach.

“I’d been into that strain of gospel music for a while, just getting my feet wet in it,” said Lore, lingering over a Crown and Coke setup at Teddy’s Juke Joint in Zachary, a stone’s throw from some of the backwoods churches Rev. Jackson would have played.

“When putting out the first issue of 50 Miles of Elbow Room, the magazine, I had a release party and the music director of WFMU [a freeform music station from East Orange, NJ] came to the show and brought me a tape of a listener hour program put together by a guy named Kevin Nutt. ‘This guy from Alabama put this show together. I think you’d really like it,’ [the director said]. The first song and last song on the tape were by Rev. Jackson.”

Rev. Charlie Jackson was born in 1932 and by age ten was performing music for friends and at school. He held a number of jobs—field hand, cattle-rancher, even a barber at one point—but playing music in the church was his true calling. Jackson released a dozen or so singles on the Booker label out of New Orleans and on the Jackson label. “Those were things he pressed up as he went from church to church to make a little extra pocket money. He put his phone number on there so people knew how to contact him,” said Lore.

Those recordings are collected on God’s Got it: The Legendary Booker and Jackson Singles, songs ranging from the stomp blues of the title track to the wild lamentations of “Wrapped Up and Tangled in Jesus” to the confessional sermon “Testimony of Rev. Charlie Jackson.” Each is a conduit to the ecstasy some find in the Lord’s service, but they don’t begin to touch the sound produced live in churches on Sunday mornings.

Jackson played his breed of gospel blues at churches all over the Baton Rouge area in the 1970s and later as pastor of St. Raymond Divine Spiritual Church in the 1980s. Lore related, “He liked being an evangelist because sometimes in the church, fifty percent want you and fifty percent don’t. So he preferred going from one to the next.

“His widow Laura Davis Jackson said they would always be going way out in the country, way out, in places where she didn’t know where they were going; and there’d be some little church there that’d heard about Rev. Jackson, so they’d call him up and he’d perform at some service, sometimes a few times a day.”

Lore came to see Rev. Jackson in 2001 and recalled that he was still going strong. “I was only there for a couple of hours on a Saturday; he got two calls from people wanting him to play at this place for this event.”

It was during one of those visits that Lore discovered his mission: “He opened up the cabinets [and] he had a sea of tapes there,” said Lore. “Mrs. Jackson said ‘You can just take one,’ so I was looking there and saw one that looked kinda old and grabbed that. I’ve gone through probably about one hundred hours of tapes now, and that tape was probably the best-sounding tape in the whole thing. I could put out a record just of that tape. [The song] “What a Time,” that opens up the first volume, is from that tape, as is “Morning Train” where he’s hearing the big congregation. So I’m thinking—with that tape in the cassette deck of my car—they must all sound like this!”

“What a Time” starts out with sharp waves of notes from Jackson’s guitar interlaced with whoops and hollers from the assembled worshipers before veering into a blues so raw it might stop the devil in his tracks, building up in a cataclysm of handclaps and exhortations that likely rattled the rafters of the Northside Civic Center in Ville Platte, where this recording is suspected to have been made.

Lore, ever the obsessed scholar, is reticent to give up a favorite; but one particularly touches him. “The last song on the first record, ‘I’ve Done the Best I Can, I Want My Crown’ where he’s … I don’t know where that comes from. It seems like a home recording. It’s very hushed, very quiet. It was a very transfixing moment when I heard that. It was at the end of a tape that was garbled and not a very good recording quality.”

Lore suspects that the recording was produced when Jackson was recovering from a stroke in his forties—the preacher was left without the ability to speak for thirty days. It’s a spare, personal sonic artifact, his guitar but a whisper. “If you listen very closely, you can hear a dog barking in the background at some point. And there’s the way it abruptly stops at the end, too. It’s very dramatic,” explained Lore.

The second volume holds as many treasures, namely a wild, lost studio take called “Stand By Me” (not the Ben E. King standard) salvaged from a broken eight-track tape and “Come Into My Room,” a duet with a singer identified as Brother James recorded during a service at Rosedown Baptist Church in 1974, where many former slaves of Rosedown Plantation became part of the congregation. It also contains the most recent recording of the collection, “I’ve Got a Mind to Live for Jesus,” recorded with his wife Laura David Jackson singing.

Rev. Jackson passed away in 2006. One is left wondering if there are cabinets full of tapes from other gospel blues singers waiting to be discovered. “When you start to get into that gospel thing, it just feels endless,” said Lore.

What separates these records from a lot of archival recordings is the immediacy and informality of them. “These are recordings of a community made by a member of the community. They are not made by a folklorist. They were mementos,” Lore offered. But perhaps they are more than that. Perhaps these are manifestations of that spiritual power that happens anytime someone is really playing something and someone, somewhere, is really listening. 

 Details. Details. Details.
 
 The Rev. Charlie Jackson albums You Got to Move: Live Recordings, Vol. 1 and Lord You’re So Good: Live Recordings Vol. 2 are available by mail order from the 50 Miles of Elbow Room website. 50milesofelbowroom.com.
 
 God’s Got it: The Legendary Booker and Jackson Singles is available from the CaseQuarter label.
 
 You can listen to WFMU online at wfmu.org. Archive recordings of Kevin Nutt’s Sinners Crossroads gospel show can be found online at wfmu.org/playlists/CR.