This is another classic from the Reverend Gary Davis, with some interpolations of lyrics from Shirley Caesar and the Caravans. I’m not a Christian, but I love both recordings, and would love to see more attention paid to Davis’s connections with other Carolina gospel singers. He was, of course, one of the greatest blues and ragtime guitarists — and this post is headed into some guitar nerd stuff — but he was also a terrific gospel singer in a deep local tradition. His repertoire included songs that were famously performed and recorded by the region’s greatest gospel quartets; another striking example is the song he called “Get Right Church,” which was a major hit for the Sensational Nightingales as “Morning Train” — and that group’s lead singer, Julius Cheeks, was from Davis’s home area and may even have been a distant relation.

The song itself is a bit of a mystery. Davis recorded it in 1960; the Caravans recorded it two years later, and their record credits it to James Herndon, who worked with them as an accompanist and composer — but although it surely is much older, I have so far found no trace of it before those recordings. If anyone knows more, please get in touch and let me know. (There’s an email contact link on my web page.)

This song was Caesar’s first hit as a young member of the Caravans, one of the greatest female quartets, issued as “I Won’t Be Back” on an album of the same title. In Anthony Heilbut’s brilliant survey of
the music’s golden age, The Gospel Sound, he referred to it by an alternate title, “Sweeping Through the City,” and wrote that it remained the most popular number in her live shows, quoting her saying, “The new numbers are selling but the stick is still sweeping.”

I learned Davis’s version in the 1990s, during a particularly deep period of immersion in his music — it was one of many, and I’ve already posted a bunch of pieces I worked up in that period, including “Samson and Delilah,” “You Got to Move,” a gospel guitar medley, “Cincinnati Flow Rag,” and “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl and Playing Guitar at the Same Time.” At that time, I got the rudiments, but I didn’t really understand his style until I spent a few months hanging out with Ernie Hawkins, who studied with Davis and knows his style more intimately than anyone on the planet.

Ernie pushed me to play with just the thumb and index finger of my right hand, showing me how to get Davis’s distinctive rolls, and pointing out the brilliant economy of his chording. I’ve gone into this subject before, and this piece uses the same basic chords I outlined in my post for “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl,” as well as the elegantly simple move from a partially barred D shape to an A7 shape (in this case, with the partial barre on the 7th fret, so the chords are G and D7, followed by a G7 played in Davis’s trademark C7 shape with the thumb coming around the neck to fret the 5th and 6th strings).

I got most of that from Ernie, and modified this a bit more in recent months, after noticing that Davis virtually always used his thumb to get the 6th string bass root of his G chord in first position, even when he was playing something simple like “Candyman.” My post on that one uses a regular first position G chord, but I’ve kind of fallen in love with the idea of using the thumb there, which leaves you free to reach way up the neck — which, unsurprisingly,  was a favorite move for Dave Van Ronk, another acolyte of the Reverend, who used it to fine effect in “St. Louis Tickle,” “Midnight Hour Blues,” and numerous other pieces. (Van Ronk used the thumb-bass G even more consistently in his many drop-D pieces, for example “Blood Red Moon.”)

I don’t have much more to add, except that I’ve undoubtedly revised the lyrics in all sorts of unintentional ways, and in keeping with an ongoing effort to sing in my own voice, intentionally switched from “I won’t be back no more” to “I won’t be back anymore.” Some people may think that’s silly, but that’s how I normally say the phrase and I’ve previously quoted Martin Carthy’s remark that if you believe in a lyric, you should sing it like you believe it, not like you’re “play-acting.” I don’t actually believe the Christian sentiment of this one, but it’s a moving and powerful image and I see no reason to undercut it by putting on a fake accent — especially a Southern Black accent that, when adopted by a norther white urbanite, has echoes of blackface mistrelsy. It isn’t just minstrelsy, of course; most of my favorite singers were from the South and I used to sing pretty much everything in that accent, just as many British rockers sing in American accents. Still, I’m trying to get closer to my own voice, and although I still hear some of that accent when I listen back, I’m working on it.