Biography
The traditional spiritual "When the Saints Go Marching In" has long been linked to Louis Armstrong and the New Orleans jazz tradition. Preservation Hall in that city even posts a notice that its ensemble will perform the piece in exchange for a fifty-dollar gratuity, while all other numbers cost only ten dollars each. A single hearing of Blind Willie Davis's rural gospel or Delta blues rendition, cut for Paramount's "race" series in the late 1920s, can erase any memory of the Dixieland treatment—an impressive feat. Little is known about Davis himself, yet his sides belong to the earliest wave of gospel releases. They have since appeared on numerous collections of pre-war Black gospel and sanctified singing, among them the Revenant anthology Raw Pre-War Gospel, 1926-36. Listeners drawn to blues also prize the recordings for their intrinsic power, apart from any sacred setting. In the manner of Blind Willie Johnson, Davis supplies gritty vocals and incisive guitar work that satisfy any devotee of the idiom. His bottleneck technique stands apart from the norm; the thumb-picking approach is markedly unorthodox, resembling a reversed version of patterns favored by other Mississippi Delta guitarists. Davis appears to have played with greater speed and agility than many peers, resulting in dense overlays of strumming and picking that bristle with detail. The pronounced blues sensibility in his performances further strips the gospel material of exuberance. The track "I Believe I'll Go Back Home" on the Revenant collection illustrates this quality through its plaintive exchanges between voice and slide, supporting the view held by certain critics that the roots of gospel lie more in sorrow than in rapture.