Artist:     Gee's Bend Quilters

Album:     Boykin, Alabama: Sacred Spirituals of Gee’s Bend

Label:     Dolceola Recordings

Release Date:     2.15.2019

96

BUY DIGITAL

BUY PHYSICAL

I like to listen to a very eclectic mix of music, so when I saw this one I knew I had to hear it. If authentic gospel music is your jam, you will enjoy this as much as I did.

First, the story of Gee’s Bend, Alabama (officially known as Boykin). Just southwest of Selma, Gee’s Bend is an isolated, rural community of about 700. The area is named after Joseph Gee, a landowner who came from North Carolina and established a cotton plantation in 1816 with his 17 slaves. In 1845 the plantation was sold to Mark H. Pettway and this name still remains predominant in the county: many members of the community still carry the name, including the four ladies who sing on this album. After emancipation, many freed slaves and family members stayed on the plantation as sharecroppers. In the 1930s much of this area was sold to the Feds through the Farm Security Administration, and those organizations set up Gee’s Bend Farms, Inc., a pilot project cooperative-based program intended to help sustain the area’s inhabitants. The government sold tracts of land to the families of the bend, thus giving the Native and African American population control over the land, which at the time was still rare. In 1962 the ferry service was eliminated, further isolating the town. The quilting tradition in Gee’s Bend goes back beyond the 19th century, perhaps influenced in part by patterned Native American and African textiles. The quilts have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. In 2003, more than 50 quiltmakers founded the Gee’s Bend Collective, which is owned and operated by the women of Gee’s Bend. (PBS won an Emmy award for the video: https://vimeo.com/50174695)

While working on the quilts, the four ladies, Mary Ann Pettway, China Pettway, Larine Pettway and Nancy Pettway sing traditional spirituals acapella, the way they learned from the many ladies who came before them. The recordings were created with a portable reel-to-reel Ampex 601 and a ribbon microphone, as they sang and quilted. It’s a beautiful, soulful sound, pretty raw with a very low production values. Don’t look here for perfect songs and precise singing, this is on the fly and meant as a testament to their spirituality. Don’t have time to go to church? This is the next best thing.

—Laura Sedor