“Goodbye, Babylon”: A Resurrection of Vanished Glory
That White Mule of Sin. Black Diamond Express to Hell. Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Jesus. There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down.
The titles roll out like pulpit thunder, the ghostly rumble of a world long gone: the gospel songs and sermons of America’s rural poor, black and white, from the great outpouring of folk culture that rose in the Deep South during the first half of the 20th century. Emerging in the wake of cataclysmic upheavals – slavery, civil war, industrialization, dispossession, pandemic – these multivarious works together embody a