Reverend Gary Davis has always been at the top of my list of guitar heroes and influences, along with Mississippi John Hurt, Dave Van Ronk, Joseph Spence, and Jean-Bosco Mwenda. I’ve gone through a couple of periods of immersion in his playing, but don’t tend to perform my favorite arrangements, because he was a gospel singer and I’m an atheist, so most of his lyrics don’t work for me.

Up to now, I’ve gotten around that in various ways: posting a couple of his instrumentals, “Cincinnati Flow Rag” and “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl and Playing Guitar at the Same Time“; and a couple of his secular songs, “Candyman” and “Cocaine Blues” (though the latter really owes more to Dave Van Ronk);  and his terrific version of “Samson and Delilah,” which is a story rather than a testimony; and sneaking in a couple of his more explicitly religious songs as a gospel instrumental medley — but this one is a straightforward religious admonition…

…which, nonetheless, I love to play and sing, mostly because it’s showy and a lot of fun. My father never understood my musical tastes and choices — he was generally supportive of my ambition to be a professional singer and player, but his typical response to my shows was to suggest I should try to be more like Pete Seeger — but when he heard me play this at a gig, he came up afterwards and asked how I made the guitar talk. Honestly, that’s not the hard part of the arrangement, but it’s definitely one of the fun parts, and it felt good that he was impressed.

So there’s that, and then a couple of years ago I was thinking about Davis’s chording, which, as noted in a previous post, is a master class in economy of motion, and realized how he was playing the D to G shift that forms the basic background to the first line. (If you don’t play guitar, skip ahead; if you do, check this out.) His basic D shape, which he moved all over the neck, was a barre on the first three strings at the 2nd fret,with his thumb holding down the sixth string, his middle finger on the second string, 3rd fret, and his ring finger getting the fourth string, 4th fret… and he goes from that to the G by just sliding the whole thing up one fret and shifting his middle finger to the third string.

That’s such a beautiful move that it brought the song back into my repertoire — not for performances, but for my own pleasure. And since this project is about the music that lives in my head, here it is. Hope you have half as much fun watching it as I have playing it… and check out Davis’s original, which is a whole ‘nother thing. He was the best.