Blind Boys of Alabama on Christmas Music (Remixed)

I think of this episode of Twelve Songs as a remix, a second pass at the same material with very different results.

In 2003, The Blind Boys of Alabama recorded Go Tell it on the Mountain, an album of gospel and gospel-inflected Christmas music that Omnivore Recordings reissued in 2016. Last season, I talked to the Blind Boys’ guitarist and musical director Joey Williams about the project and how the gospel legends interacted with the musical guests brought in for the album, including Mavis Staples, Tom Waits, and Solomon Burke. He could answer some of those questions, but since some recorded their parts separately including Waits and Chrissie Hynde, there were parts of the story that he couldn’t tell.

That episode is online now, but during the year I found an interview that I had forgotten about with the album’s producer, John Chelew, when the album was released. Since he was a part of those sessions, he could tell stories about Waits, Chrissie Hynde, and George Clinton and the curveballs they threw the group.

With that in mind, I reconstructed this episode. I let the Chelew tape present a new side to the story of Go Tell it on the Mountain, and I went back to Williams to talk about a second Christmas album that the Blind Boys did, Talkin’ Christmas from 2014 in collaboration with Taj Mahal.

The audio of the Chelew recording is not up to my usual standards for the show, but when we talked I didn’t have a podcast or audio use for the interview in mind. It’s the quality I could get from a phone, and I wish I could have talked to Chelew again to get better audio but he died in 2016. I got used to it very quickly and didn’t find it off-putting, and I hope that will be your experience as well.