Bob Dylan may be considered a musical heavyweight, but even legends have to learn their trade from someone.
In Dylan’s case, one of his early influences was a blind singing street preacher, the Reverend Gary Davis, a guitar evangelist who travelled from tobacco warehouses in the rural south to the streets of Harlem with his unique brand of ragtime gospel music.
Peter, Paul and Mary recorded his song and they wanted to give him credit, to give him some royalties [they] asked, “Reverend Davis, did you write ‘Samson & Delilah?'... And he says, “No I didn’t write it. It was revealed to me.” That’s just who he was.
Ordained a Baptist minister in the mid-1930s, he gave up the blues for religious music, moved to New York City, and tasted a few brief years of success with the folk music revival in the late 1950s and 1960s. He influenced musicians like Dylan and Pete Seeger, folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, Donovan, Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead, Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal and Jorma Kaukonen, guitarist with Jefferson Airplane, who rated the Reverend way ahead of The King.
‘It was meeting a big star, it really was,’ he said. ‘It was like meeting Elvis, only better. Elvis didn’t finger-pick.’
Davis taught and one of his students was a young Woody Mann, who studied with the preacher in New York City until the older man’s death in 1972. These days Mann is a renowned guitarist, teacher, recording artist and filmmaker whose documentary film on Davis’ life and music, Harlem Street Singer, opens in New York this week.
Mann couldn’t find a guitar teacher in New York in 1968, so looked up Davis in the phone book. Davis' wife Annie answered, and Mann asked if he could come around. What he found there changed his life.
‘I went to his house and I heard him play, he started playing this big old, this big ragtime kind of music and I just flipped out. I said, “What is that?” And he said, “I just call that ragtime.” And I said, “Can you teach me that?” And he said, “yeah."'
At that stage of his life, Davis no longer played the blues songs that had brought him some early fame, songs like ‘Candyman’ and ‘Cocaine’.
‘I’d always ask him, “Can you play me a blues?”' says Mann in the film. ‘And he’d always say, “Is my wife around?” Sometimes when he didn’t realise it, he’d be playing a blues and she’d walk in and say, “Don’t you be playing that for that boy.”'
Forty years later, Mann decided he wanted the wider world to celebrate the genius of this humble man who recorded his first studio session with the American Record Company in New York City in 1935, and then disappeared for 15 years.
‘I think in terms of the history books, he never really got his due because he really wasn’t a blues singer, per se; he was a gospel singer. So he never really fit into the categories. The blues historians always have the Mississippi blues, the Alabama blues. Everything is codified into the ‘blues tree’ kind of thing and Reverend Davis was always Blind Gary from Carolina. So he was kind of a footnote in the history books.’
As a minister with the Free Baptist Connection Church, preaching came easily to the Davis. Song-sermons like ‘Crucifixion’, with its ragtime arrangement and rapid-fire delivery over the changes, and ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ with its stark warning, hinting at the street life of a guitar evangelist testifying to small crowds. These songs satisfied his spiritual drive but didn’t make him popular in the way of Robert Johnson or Mississippi John Hurt.
‘His music wasn’t that kind of sexy blues music,’ says Mann. ‘It was more gospel and he preached a lot during his music, and that wasn’t something audiences wanted to hear outside the church. Plus his guitar playing was very complicated and so wasn’t easy to imitate.’
Read more: The gospel according to Bob Dylan
Things started to change with the folk revival of the late 1950s. Pete Seeger put Davis on his radio show and the folk set in New York City discovered him. He was invited to hootenannies and became a fixture in the Greenwich Village music scene, revered by the younger generation of folkies like Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Dave Van Ronk and Peter, Paul and Mary.
It was the young folk trio, in fact, who materially changed Davis’ life by recording his gospel sing ‘Samson & Delilah’ (re-titled ‘If I Had My Way’) on their debut self-titled album.
‘Peter, Paul and Mary recorded his song and they wanted to give him credit, to give him some royalties and give him some money, and when they were at the lawyer’s office and they sat around and asked, “Reverend Davis, did you write ‘Samson & Delilah’ recorded by Peter Paul and Mary?” And he says, “No I didn’t write it. It was revealed to me.” That’s just who he was.’
Released in 1962, the folk album unexpectedly shot to number one in the States. Royalties from that recording helped Davis and his wife move off the streets and into their own house for the first time in their lives. It was the start of a brief period of success for the blind gospel musician.
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It was also a time when, according to Mann, Davis over-recorded.
‘So many times he’d be tired and his guitar would be out of tune and he was an old man and so there’s a lot of records out there where he’s not at his best form.'
Offered money, he would sit down and make a recording. Not all were good.
‘I think the ones in the early ‘60s when he was in his prime like “Harlem Street Singer”, “Guitar and Banjo”, “A Little More Faith”, anything that was recorded in the early '60s,’ recommends Mann.
‘If you have to pick one, get “Harlem Street Singer”, which is the name of the film and that was recorded in New York City. That’s his classic tune where he’s really in great form, got a lot of energy, singing really terrific, his guitar-playing is unbelievable. I would recommend that.’
Davis died in 1972. By then he had inspired a new generation of singers and guitar players through his festival appearances and recordings. At the heart of his appeal was the fact that he’d lived the life he was singing about. He sang with the voice of authenticity, and faith, and people of all ages responded to that.
‘I have no children but I’ve got many sons,’ he once declared, and among them can be counted Mann, the student turned teacher who never forgot the singing street preacher who changed his life.
The documentary film ‘Harlem Street Singer: The Reverend Gary Davis Story’, screened selectively in Australia earlier this year. Woody Mann’s album ‘A Tribute to the Reverend’ has also just been released.
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