Bessie Jones with the Georgia Sea Island Singers and others: ‘Get in Union’

What a deep, dark and deliciously sweet slice of American musical history this is. Get In Union is a showcase for Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers along with guest collaborators captured in concert performance as well as less formal settings. The 51 tracks are remastered from 24-bit digital transfers of original tapes made by Alan Lomax in 1959, ‘60, ‘65, and ’66.

Until her death from leukemia in 1984, Jones was the de facto public “voice” of the Georgia Sea Island Singers. Although the troupe had existed prior to the arrival of Mary Elizabeth (“Bessie”) Smith Jones on St. Simons in the late 1920s-early 1930s, the men and women of the Spiritual Singers Society quickly lined up “in union” behind the woman who harbored an overwhelming passion for the art and culture of the Gullah people. With its swinging, staccato rhythms and idiomatic a cappella singing, the music of the Sea Island Singers is a product of an extraordinary evolutionary process, which began more than two centuries ago in comparative isolation on a chain of islands off the Georgia coast. In addition to bringing a strong, resonant mezzo chest voice to the ensemble’s tonal palette, Jones stocked the group’s songbook with an expansive repertoire of folk ballads, children’s play songs, sacred hymns, work songs, shanties, and lullabies, which she had picked up mostly as an itinerant worker up and down the Eastern seaboard.

A good portion of the songs on Get In Union were previously issued in 1961 as part of the Southern Folk Heritage on Atlantic, and a similar compilation from Prestige International called Southern Journey. Among the special tracks on the Tompkins Square release is an excerpt from a meeting between Lomax, Jones, and McKinley Peebles recorded in New York in 1961. A guitarist, singer, and occasional partner of Rev. Gary Davis, Peebles recorded for Paramount in 1929 under the name Sweet Papa Stovepipe. The medley recorded here (“You Got to Reap What You Sow/Just A Little Talk with Jesus”) captures Peebles’ strikingly original personality and style, which wobbles between folk blues and gospel revelry, elevated by Jones’ impromptu harmonizing.

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Other first-time tracks include excerpts from a Newport Folk Festival preview concert featuring Ed Young and the Southern Fife and Drum Corps, Rev. Gary Davis, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, which transpired in Central Park in 1965, organized and emceed by Lomax. Get In Union also includes previously unreleased recordings made during (but not at) the 1966 Newport festival featuring Jones, Mable Hillery and Emma Lee Ramsey, as well as singer and storyteller Janie Hunter who hails from Johns Island, South Carolina. On some segments, listening to Jones tell stories and answer interview question in her loping, distinctly coastal southern cadence and Gullah dialect is equally beautiful, wondrous and compelling as the musical performances.

4 stars