Reverend Gary Davis - The Ellen Stekert Tapes [LOST RECORDINGS FROM 1951]

As promised, here is the complete tape of Reverend Gary Davis playing at his home in 1951, which was recently discovered in Ellen Stekert's archive. This is the first time these recordings have been released publicly, and also the earliest home recordings that exist of Gary Davis. If you'd like to support Ellen and the release of material from her archives, please consider buying her music on Bandcamp: https://ellenstekert.bandcamp.com/. Ellen, who recently turned 90 years old, is working very hard to make these incredible artifacts available to the public.

I remastered these recordings as best I could, but they still sound a bit rough. Even so, they are quite clear for being over 70 years old. We are very lucky they survived all these decades.

If you are interested in the story of how these recordings came to be, here is Ellen's fascinating recollection of "discovering" Rev. Gary Davis on the streets of New York and following him back to his apartment to record him with her high school friends:

"How did this tape get into my 'archive' of tapes that I’ve dragged through a long life of folksongs? I am not certain, but I think it was recorded one day in 1951... when a group of us insinuated ourselves into a sedan meant about four fewer of us along with Dick Hatch’s treasured recording machine. Crowded it was, and a foreshadowing of how the day would go.

We met Gary Davis in the Bronx as he was returning home from singing in the streets of the city. He invited us all up to his apartment. It was almost as small as Dick’s car. We piled into the living room space, moving the one large table in the middle to one wall, giving anyone coming into the room only space to crawl under or squeeze past it.

Gary played, and played. Even though he sang mostly church songs, it made little difference to us — his playing, the 'music,' was right out of the traditions of street singers and blues players. He had been working all day, but he loved playing, and he was amazing. How in the world, I wondered, could one person do all that on a single guitar? How could he get that running base and also the melodies (in harmony, to boot) on the upper strings?

To me, he was a phenomenon. His music offered glimpses of other places I realized I had to visit and understand.

A few weeks later, Dick gave me this tape you hear now. He knew I wanted to listen to that day again. I never imagined that the next time I would see Reverend Gary Davis in person would be in 1962 at the Swarthmore Folk Festival, when he and I would share a two-part concert.

I saw Davis mesmerize other musicians; he became a much-respected player in the early days of the Folksong Revival in NYC, but he might have been just a bit too early for the time major black musicians took to the Revival Stage. It was a very white world, those early days.

I kept this tape with others I treasured, and escaped to another world of 'entertainment,' complete with egos, stars, rumors, and a jargon all its own. The years of education I received in that other world, the world of academia, were hardly more profound than the education I received living through, and re-listening to, Reverend Gary Davis’ music from that one crowded day in the Bronx."

-Ellen Stekert

TRACKLIST:
0:00 - Twelve Sticks
2:14 - Tryin' To Get To Heaven In Due Time
4:22 - Thank You Jesus
7:50 - You Got To Move
10:40 - I Believe (with wife, Annie Wright Davis)
15:56 - Soldier's Drill
21:36 - Conversation
22:15 - I Belong To The Band