At the Weekly Standard, Matt Labash looks at a new compliation of gospel music and does a bit of comparison with CCM

THERE ARE ALL SORTS OF GRAND THEMES running through Goodbye, Babylon: deliverance and judgement, mortal expiration and eternal salvation. Many secular critics haven’t quite gotten past the buckets of blood, alluded to in songs like the one by Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters, a 1920’s string band, who ask “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” Or there’s the number by Ernest V. Stoneman–Thomas Edison’s favorite hillbilly artist–who, along with his Dixie Mountaineers, sing, Oh, the blood of Calvary’s brow I can see it flowing now. But to the church-steeped whose ears are already acclimated, it’s standard Sunday-morning viscera.
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The more striking leitmotif is the blindness. The collection boasts Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Roger Hays, Blind Benny Paris and his blind wife, Blind Alfred Reed, Blind Joe Taggart, Blind Mamie Forehand, and no less than four Blind Willie’s (Davis, Harris, McTell, and Johnson)–the last of whom was blinded when his stepmother threw lye in his eyes during a fight with his father. And that’s just the artists with “blind” monikers. There’s also blind Roosevelt Graves and Brother (his brother wasn’t blind, but only had one eye), and blind Jimmie Strothers (found by John Lomax in a Virginia State prison, where he presumably came to Jesus after murdering his wife with an ax). So fashionable was it to be a blind gospeler, that it is said Blind Joe Taggart wasn’t even blind, he just had cataracts. And then there was blind Arizona Juanita Dranes, an influential gospel singer who once traveled from Chicago to Texas with a note of introduction that read, “Since she is deprived of her natural sight, the Lord has given her a spiritual sight.” Even nonbelievers have to give God points for consistency: He sticks with His blind people.

Such physical impairments are a keen reminder that this is hard music made by hard people–singers to whom grace did not come cheaply, and who are not big proponents of today’s prosperity-gospel, Prayer-of-Jabez type rhetoric.