Rev. Charlie Jackson: Oxford American Music Issue

I have an article in the current issue of the Oxford American about the Reverend Charlie Jackson, a gospel singer from Louisiana. This is the Oxford American's Ninth Annual Music Issue, which is (as always) dedicated to the music and musicians of the American South (a definition the editors interpret as broadly as possible). There aren't many places to find intelligent writing about popular music, but the OA is a reliable one -- and it's supplemented with a thoughtfully-compiled CD.

Instant gratification is available to less patient readers in the form of two video clips of Jackson performing on an Irish television show, I'm guessing in the 1990s. One of the clips features Jackson singing a version of "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus" -- a song I discuss in some detail in my article (and below) -- with an ill-suited backup band that has no idea how to keep time, and a vocal quartet that sounds nice, if a little out of place. (Be forewarned: the song begins two minutes into the clip, after Jackson has endured a painful interview with his extremely condescending host.) There is also a clip of Jackson playing "Morning Train," solo, and an mp3 of one of his 'live' cassette recordings.

All of these performances are good, but none can match the work on God's Got It, a recent compilation of 45s recorded by Jackson in the 1970s -- available on CaseQuarter, a record label started a few years ago by Kevin Nutt. Nutt lives in Alabama, where he produces a radio program for New Jersey's WFMU called "Sinner's Crossroads" (click here for an MP3/podcast -- "Sinner's Crossroads" is well worth hearing).

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"My mother is a fish."
--As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

As I was writing about "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus," an idea occurred to me that never found a place in the article . . . about the song's plausible connection to the standard "Catfish Blues," and its familiar refrain (I wish I was a catfish, swimmin' in the deep blue sea . . . have all you women fishin' after me), which has appeared in various forms over the years, under various titles: first as "Jim Jackson's Kansas City Blues," recorded in 1928 by Jim Jackson and, later that year, as "Kansas City Blues" by William Harris; as "Catfish Blues" by Robert Petway in 1941; "Deep Blue Sea Blues" by Tommy McClennan, also in 1941; finally as "Rolling Stone" by Muddy Waters in 1950, before becoming "Catfish Blues" again when Jimi Hendrix recorded it in 1967 (and so on . . . ).

The Rev. Jackson's "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus" does not include the familiar refrain about women, and is performed in a different style -- but it retains the singer who wishes he was a fish, and who imagines himself being caught, reeled in, and submitting to a fate of ecstasy and oblivion. Of course Jackson's vision is of a spiritual, rather than earthly, oblivion in which ecstasy must be preceded by pain and remorse -- to the exclusion of fleshly indulgence. I can't help wondering, then, if the Reverend's song was a pious (even self-righteous) retort to the rambling, rolling stone ethos of the comparatively lackadaisical secular guitar-picker . . .