Past Programs
Blues - 2008
Guitar Evangelists
24/10/2008
Street musicians or buskers are usually at the bottom of the musical pecking order but you might be surprised to know there's a long and proud tradition of musical street preachers, guitar evangelists, who mix blues and gospel with some fierce guitar playing. This week we'll hear from some of the best including the Rev. Gary Davis recorded live in the early 1960s, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe from 1947. As well, there's the new generation of blues artists like Ruthie Foster raised in an African-American Baptist church. And on the comeback trail, a woman who started her career jamming in New York City's Greenwich Village with street preachers like Rev. Gary Davis and guitar prophets like Bob Dylan. I'm talking about Maria Muldaur.
To finish, a young blind guitar player from north eastern Arnhem Land, but an evangelist not for Christianity so much as for his own indigenous traditions. Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu is from the Yolgnu people and he sings in language about sacred places in the landscape and about the ancestral beings that originally shaped and named the Yolngu homelands.
