Blues & Spirituals / Hymn Hustler

This latest double album release provides a window into the artistry of the Rev. in the early aughts (2000s). These albums were first handmade by the Rev and burned and printed from his own computer. They have now been remastered by Grammy award winning David Glasser and restored to a new found glory with a beautifully redesigned package that captures the amazing artwork. Here for the first time these albums have been mass produced on CD and made available digitally in their full fantastic form. The Reverend's songwriting and spirituals will soothe your sorrows and his country blues and soul-folk grooves will heal your hurting.

Blues & Spirituals, released in April 2001 as the Rev’s first official full-length album, was primarily recorded at M&I studios in NYC, where the Rev was working as a studio assistant helping to record albums with legends like Houston Person, Mark Murphy, and Ernie Andrews, and receiving free studio time for himself in return. With just guitar, vocals and a few harmonica overdubs the Rev shows us a man in search of his true troubadour voice through covering traditional spirituals, jazz standards, rock classics, and creating some heartfelt expressions of original blue-eyed soul.

Hymn Hustler provides the next chapter in the Rev’s discography, released in February of 2003. The album includes some accomplished slide guitar, traditional blues tracks, more mature self-penned songs, a bunch of grooving band accompaniment, and psychedelic sound effects from the Rev’s home studio at the time. Filling in the gaps in the back catalogue some of these tracks have been overdubbed and added to other releases, but its fascinating to hear the album as it was originally imagined, and also in the context of the evolution from one album to the next here on this latest release.

Back when tigers used to smoke the Rev regularly haunted the front room of Tobacco Road in New York City with a solo set of music almost every Sunday afternoon at 4:20pm. Here during these unsung days he was able to hone his craft and performed many of the songs that appear on the albums, ‘Blues & Spirituals’ and, ‘Hymn Hustler.” Like a cross between a sacred psychedelic clown and a serious storefront preacher, the Rev stared down mortality and courted redemption with rhythm and melody. Sitting on his amplifier in the corner of that hippie hangout, his acoustic guitar and voice echoed blessings for that internationally known little counterculture musical mecca in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. Tuning into the timeless with just a song sometimes the spirit would descend and it was as if the Rev and his audience would levitate right off the earth.

Reverend Freakchild is an individual for whom theologians and psychologists do not have an adequate category, but the real Bluesman, far from being a simple entertainer, provides a similar social and cultural role as the preacher, the way finder, the fire keeper, or the shaman (spiritual healer). With the art of song the true player of the blues pierces the veil between life and death, past and future, and the seen and unseen. Furthermore, rather than merely being an intermediary between realms and making meaning of this life, the one who works with the consciousness of the blues is an agent of a co-created causal nexus or a supernatural superimposed omnipotent prime mover proving purpose. They then often transcend that appearance emptiness and fulfill the role of psychopomp; guiding the audience through not only a descent into death, but a witness to the worlds of lived experience of terrestrial sorrows and the phoenix of healing formless joy. Paradoxically, it is this chthonic journey into the shadow self that creates the possibility of an enantiodromia: the psycho-spiritual emergence of its opposite; a transformative realization of the larger perspective of connection to an interdependence of all reality and the ever elusive vision of the promised land of peace.