Artist: Marie Knight
Album: The Gospel Truth Live
Label: MC Records
Release Date: 3.23.2018
Well, well well. What can be said about this one? Simply superb release, recorded back in 2007 but only now coming to light. Sadly, Marie Knight has left us, passing a few years ago in 2009. One of the now near-legendary blues-gospel guitar-slinging Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s band, Knight worked the blues and gospel music end of the business for many decades. A lady who worked her butt off pushing out some great music throughout her life.
This stunning 20-track release captures Knight at her very best, live, with an appreciative crowd clap-clap-happying alongside, a little bit of gospel chapel essence at the core. Having had the good fortune to catch Marie live in recent years, I know this does indeed capture her spirit. Accompanied by New York sideman, Dave Keyes, on piano—a guy who knows this music like few others—the result is an album that works in a way very, very few can ever hope to achieve.
As might be expected, Knight covers a huge batch of the great Rev Gary Davis’s tracks here—never a bad thing, for my money. But she also swings through gospel classics like “Closer Walk with Thee,” much of Tharpe’s material, and some lesser-known songs from the genre.
This is an essential album, surely an award-winning album of the year. Give it a Grammy, go on. Do it justice.
—Iain Patience
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