Harlem Street Singer: The Guitar Gospel of Reverend Gary Davis

Posted on by Andy Markowitz

Reverend Gary Davis isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and it took the Blues Hall of Fame nearly 30 years to get around to inducting him. Bands don’t name themselves after his songs or name-check him in theirs. But meeting him “was like meeting Elvis,” Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen says in the new music documentary Harlem Street Singer. “Only better. Elvis didn’t finger-pick.”

That reflects the esteem, bordering on awe, with which Gary Davis is held in certain six-string circles. Born in South Carolina in 1896, blind from infancy, Davis made his first axe from a pie tin, played ragtime and blues on corners and in tobacco warehouses, found God, and eventually migrated to Harlem, where for years he eked out a living itinerant preaching, playing spirituals in the streets, and giving guitar lessons. “Rediscovered” by the folk revivalists of the late ’50s and early ’60s, he performed widely and achieved a measure of recognition and economic stability before his death in 1972.

A small measure; his New York Times obit ran all of five paragraphs. But beyond his recordings and scant TV and live footage, Davis left a legacy in the form of an all-star team of guitarists fired by his unique, harmonically complex finger-picking style. (Modern bluesman Bill Sims Jr. says that when he first heard Davis playing, “I thought, there’s two guitarists here.”) Kaukonen, the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, and Ry Cooder are among many who cite Davis as a primary influence, and he tutored future masters like Taj Mahal, David Bromberg, Stefan Grossman, and Woody Mann, who carries the reverend’s teachings forward at his guitar camps and workshops.

Mann was all of 12 when he started lessons with Davis in 1968, and that formative experience was the long-ago foundation of Harlem Street Singer, which Mann nurtured with Trevor Laurence, one of his own former students, at their company Acoustic Sessions, which makes music docs and instructional DVDs. Featuring many of the musicians who prospered under the reverend’s tutelage, Harlem Street Singer pieces together Davis’s little-known story and celebrates his artistry with reverence and affection. It screens November 10 and 20 at the Leeds International Film Festival (of which MusicFilmWeb is a media partner), ahead of which we talked to Mann, who produced the film, and Laurence, who co-directed (with Simone Hutner).

MFW: Reverend Davis’s profile has faded a bit since his death. Do you feel that he really hasn’t gotten his due, compared to some of his contemporaries?

Woody Mann: I certainly do. That’s part of what the film is all about, how Davis was not really just a blues musician. It’s why he didn’t get his due, why he’s not as popular as someone like Robert Johnson. His music was a mixture of blues and gospel. He wasn’t really a blues musician, he was a church guy. And yet at the same time, he influenced more people than a lot of the blues guys, because he was alive and in New York at the time. He influenced a lot of the white musicians on the folk music scene. That’s the story of the movie: how his legacy kind of got lost in the cracks of the history books.

One of the segments I most enjoyed is where you go into the fact that he didn’t think much of most of his contemporaries who were blues musicians.

WM: Back then blues and gospel were sort of good and evil. Blues was bad; gospel, church music was good. And when Davis became a minister he turned his back on the blues and separated himself from that community.

Trevor Laurence: There was also a certain pride he had, I think, in his virtuosity, which could spill over into the way he thought of other musicians. He did think very highly of people like [ragtime guitarists] Willie Walker and Blind Blake. They might not have had a religious message, but he really had a lot of respect for people who played the instrument well.

For a layperson, what was it that made him such a remarkable guitarist? What was he doing that no one else was doing?

WM: He played more melodically. It was more complicated. It was more of a jazz-like approach, more of a complete arrangement. The blues players would accompany their voice, so the guitar was more riff-based. It was more about the lyrics, the drinking, the women, the voice. Davis had a musical approach rather than a blues approach, and I think that’s what attracted a lot of the young white musicians of the time. He was playing ragtime pieces, melodic pieces – guitar pieces that you could learn as a guitar piece, you didn’t have to sing it.

TL: But if you listen to the few tracks that Davis recorded strictly as blues, he could do that too, as well as anybody. I think it was more of a choice. He was playing because of the virtuosity of it and the religion of it. He would do endless variations and syncopations – that’s the virtuosity of it – but he had the message and that was what was important to him. If he wanted to do blues like Robert Johnson or somebody like that, you can hear from those tracks that he could do it just as well.

What did he think of electrified music and rock ‘n’ roll?

WM: I never really asked him about that. I used to ask him about other musicians, and he never had a kind word to say about anybody, but I never asked him about contemporary players. I asked him about people like Blind Lemon Jefferson. He would, like, [groans]. Like Trevor mentioned, he would talk about Blind Blake, Willlie Walker, a few of the ragtime players. Sometimes I’d talk to him about my music, and every now and then I’d say, “I got a gig, playing at this coffeehouse,” and he would sort of say, “Well, when you go to a gig you gotta make sure you get some sleep.” I always got the feeling he was out of touch with what was happening in the contemporary world.

You see him in those images near the end of his life and he looks exactly the same as he did 30 years ago – a guy in a black suit and a black tie, wearing a fedora and, obviously, sunglasses. With a cigarette in his fingers.

WM: [Laughs] Exactly. He was consistent – he dressed the same, he talked the same, he never complained about his life, he never complained about being poor. He never once complained about walking the streets. And when he had some success at the end of his life, he didn’t change at all. It wasn’t this bitter story about he was getting old and he wasn’t recognized. He was very content with who he was, with himself as a teacher, and he didn’t really care about what was going on in the pop world and the record world. He seemed like a man at peace, which is unusual for someone who had that hard a life.

What made him such a good teacher?

WM: To me what made him a good teacher was his patience. And his earnestness with trying to teach me a song. He wouldn’t let me leave until I’d learned it [laughs]. He would say, “Here’s how it goes,” and he would play a phrase, and I would play a phrase, and he wouldn’t move on until I got it exactly. It would go back and forth and it would take hours, and he would sit there patiently. I was a kid, and I was very – how should I put it? – I wanted to learn, and I wasn’t necessarily polite to him all the time [laughs]. He just sort of shrugged it off and said, “Let’s learn.”

You do a seminar called “The Lessons of Reverend Gary Davis.” Have you been able to apply those lessons to what you impart to your students, or try to impart?

WM: Absolutely, yeah. The overriding lesson I learned from Davis was, learn the music but also be able to improvise. I think that’s one of the things in his lessons that I teach my students: let’s learn his music, but let’s understand the music so you can improvise within it. Because Davis would constantly change what he did. He would teach me a song, and then I’d go back the next week and he would change it. That’s part of it, which is the difference [from] learning blues as museum pieces where you’re learning it exactly off the record.

After you studied with Reverend Davis, you studied at Juilliard. How did the more academic method of instruction contrast with or complement the living room lessons that you had with the reverend?

WM: Learning music at Juilliard was good, because I learned a sense of structure. It gave me an understanding of the music. But in terms of learning the guitar, it was night and day. Davis was hands-on learning. At the time I didn’t really understand what I was learning with Davis, I just mimicked him. It was in retrospect, as I got into it with him, that I understood what he was doing. In Juilliard, it was very much just learning the theory of music.

This would have been in the’70s. How much ice did it cut with people in that environment that you had studied with someone like him? It’s still not at the time yet where a lot of those musicians were recognized as the virtuosos they were.

WM: They didn’t know him at all. It was zero. The guitar wasn’t even recognized in school, even classical guitar, at that time. It was like two different worlds, and that’s why I dropped out of school. They knew nothing about Davis, nothing about the approach or the music, they didn’t understand blues, or even jazz at the time. When I went to Juilliard it was strictly a classical education. With Davis it was more personal, it was more homey, it was more family – it was more musical. That’s why it was easy to learn from him, because I felt like part of the family.

Trevor Laurence (left) and Woody Mann

His relationship with the students is a big part of the film. Was that built into the DNA of the film from the beginning, or did that develop as you were telling Gary’s story?

TL: It’s sort of an automatic part of the film, because the relationship naturally comes up in the interviews. We did make an effort to highlight it, because it is a recurring theme. It just seems that whoever we talked to it, they all had this special feeling about Davis, like he was part of their family.

WM: Everybody talked about him with love, what a great teacher he was, and how his music was so great, and so different from anything they’d heard at the time. It wasn’t just folk music, it wasn’t blues, it was sort of this ragtime, stride piano approach of early jazz.

Not to romanticize his disability, but do you think the fact that he was blind affected the way his style developed, contributed to it being so unique? That he couldn’t see how other people were doing it?

TL: There is truth to that, but there’s also the truth that because of his disability, he spent a lot of his time with music. Not having lessons in a way that allowed him to play just like somebody else made him, probably, search for new techniques. But I also think it is just – he was blind, he couldn’t do the type of work that most people did, so he got to spend a lot of time with his instrument, trying to mimic what he heard in church, and probably what he heard anywhere else.

WM: That’s a good point. Also, he played the streets. Because of that he did develop a certain way of holding the guitar, a certain way of playing with volume, just out of necessity. Playing in church, not electric guitar, having to have the music reach the congregation – so his whole style was, play very loud, very percussive.

TL: It seemed to me that he really had some sort of a vision. Most players, when they’re developing, are really trying to sound like someone else. They’re trying to mimic people. His style was very unique. He was really the first to do what he’s doing. It didn’t really come directly from anyone.

WM: It’s a classic American story of how an artist gets lost because he doesn’t fit into a neat category. That, to me, is one of the compelling reasons to make the movie. I have a pet peeve about blues history because everything has to fit into a category, and if it doesn’t they sort of dismiss it. That’s why I’m glad that in the movie, people are just singing his praises.

Click here to buy tickets for Harlem Street Singer at the Leeds International Film Festival (I’ll be moderating a Q&A with Mann and Laurence after the November 10 screening) and here for more MFW coverage of movies playing at the fest.


2 Responses to Harlem Street Singer: The Guitar Gospel of Reverend Gary Davis

  1. Buzz Vineyard says:

    i just found out about you. i’m a guitar maker ,and have been playin for 50 years thanks for the footage of rev. gary davis what a giant

  2. Joe Arnold says:

    Have just ordered the film and am very excited to get it. First learned of Rev Davis over 30 years ago and have worked very hard to learn some of his style. Have also heard many covers of his work, but without a doubt the Empire Roots band has done a masterful job, and I can imagine Gary Davis in heaven just smiling and swinging to their album, Just downloaded that album today,
    Love it!

Leave a Reply


Connect with Facebook

