Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis by Ian Zack

Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis by Ian Zack

Author:Ian Zack [Zack, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226234243
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-03-11T16:00:00+00:00


When your heart is filled with trouble inside,

You must always trust in the Lord,

And look to him from the heart and testify.

Carry your burdens with a smile.

Trust in Jesus all the while . . .

For the Lord will carry you through.

He will carry you through with a smile.33

Darling owned an old Victorian boarding house where several of the bookstore’s employees lived on the cheap and where traveling musicians stayed when they came to town. Elizabeth Ratisseau, a feisty Texan who worked at the Sign, ran the boarding house. Michael Cooney, a twenty-year-old living in the attic, wandered by the Reverend’s bedroom one night, and asked to learn “Candy Man,” which Cooney had probably first heard on an Erik Darling LP. Davis obliged, but learning from a blind man wasn’t always so straightforward. “He played it over and over,” Cooney says. “It was nighttime and the bedroom was dark. I should have turned the light on, but I didn’t. And his wife came in and said, ‘Shame on you, Reverend Davis, sitting here with that poor boy in the dark where he can’t see what you’re doing.’”34

After the Davises returned home, Gary headed off the first week of July to play for two weeks in Lake George Village, New York, about a two-hour drive north of New York City. He would be the third performer at the Cosmic Coffee House on Ottowa Street, which had just opened its doors the previous month and was run by two young sisters, Shirley and Joyce Caple, the mayor’s daughters.35

As Davis would later tell a concert audience, it was while sitting out by the lake during his stay that he had a vision for a new song that would become one of his all-time classics. “I had done been all in California, stayed there a whole month and had to come back here to Lake George, New York. And I was settin’ down by the lake one Sunday morning, the sun was shining bright, I was knockin’ on my guitar, didn’t know what I was playing. . . . The words come to me just like that.”36

The song was “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am,” and it contained one of Davis’s most beautiful arrangements, in which he displayed his genius for translating a spiritual feeling onto the fretboard of the guitar. There was something about the unorthodox fingerings he used up and down the neck and the mighty bass notes of his big J-200 resounding against trebly full-bodied chords and plaintive open strings that seemed to make the guitar cry out with the ecstasy of a church chorus as he sang with great passion about his own religious conversion, coming after his mother’s illness and death left him alone:



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