DAVID GOLIATH: David Goliath's Old Time Gospel Hour

David Goliath

David Goliath's Old Time Gospel Hour

© 2005 Serendipitous Music (825346715025)

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"It was so clear and honest-sounding, no Hollywood put-on, no fake wiggling. Instead of getting you all riled up, no it done something a lot better...something you need ten times more. It cleared your head up, let your draggy bones rest." Woody Guthrie

notes

David Goliath was born and raised in Glacier Washington, the seventh son of an unsuccesful coal miner and part-time preacher. He left his small logging community at 15, hopped a train to Everett, and from there rode out east, toward New York and a future in Wall Street. His formidable talents took him far. In 1932, in the wake of the stock market crash of '29, he founded a talking-picture company whose first film featured the acting talents of a then-unknown performer named Charlie Chaplin. Two years later, his firm was a certified Fortune five hundred company, and David was rich. All this before he was 28.

At thirty, David Goliath left the tumult of the big city and turned his hobby, field recording, into a full-time job. He had read of the audio documentation of Appalachian music by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, and decided to do some personal investigation of the music he found so compelling.

He sold his motion picture company and spent the next three years in the Virginias and Carolinas, hauling eighty pounds of recording equipment in the trunk of his Studebaker and getting to know the fiddling and banjo players of the outlaying areas.

In 1936, anthropologist became artist, and David Goliath began playing the music himself, imitating the players he had personally witnessed first on the banjo, and later mandolin. Somewhere along the way, he discovered a fine singing voice of his own. So in 1942, he recorded twenty songs at a small recording studio in Seattle, Washington with another singer whose name is still unknown. He died shortly thereafter of a weak heart aggravated by excessive Benzedrine use.

Now, sixty years later, these forgotten songs were brought to the attention of Jeff Valentine, a graduate student at the University of Washington. Valentine culled ten gospel gems from these recordings and released them on Blue Light Records, a tiny indie label in Bellingham Washington.

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  • listen to it all the time
    author: Jerri Reynolds

    The sound and the words touch me; I want to know the heart of the one who wrote them. But instead I listen to his music and I, well, I sing along!

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