|
 In some very real
ways, God Don’t Never Change is Ashley Cleveland’s
first gospel record.
Yes, the new
record is Ashley’s eighth full-length project. Yes, she’s
been plying her trade in the ephemeral corner of the music
world called “Christian music” pretty much from the get-go,
crafting earthy songs with a heavenly message for nearly two
decades. And yes, she’s even recorded an entire album of
hymns, 2005’s Men & Angels Say.
The songs on
God Don’t Never Change – ranging from the Blind Willie
Johnson title track or the Washington Phillips tune
“Denomination Blues” or the echoes of Mattie Moss Clark on
“Going To Heaven To Meet The King” – send Cleveland in yet
another direction.
These vintage
black gospel songs come from a rich history of struggle and
pain, more from open-sky fields than high-ceilinged
cathedrals, and have found their latest voice in a woman
willing to work hard to find her own place within them.
“I’ve always been
interested in other people’s songs,” Ashley says. “These
songs and old hymns, both types of music, speak to such a
specific place in my soul. They’re so much a part of my
life, having grown up in the South, and that music is part
of my heritage as much as the hymns are.
 God Don’t
Never Change was inspired by an NPR “Fresh Air”
interview with Baylor University Journalism Professor Bob
Darden in which he discussed his passion for old obscure
recordings of black gospel music.
“Kenny
[Greenberg, Ashley’s producer/guitarist/husband] and I are
both huge fans of Fresh Air and National Public Radio in
general,” Cleveland says. “So we were each in our separate
cars, and we were listening to an episode where Terry Gross
was interviewing Robert Darden. He has taken it upon himself
to track down old, obscure recordings of soloists and
choirs. Terry was interviewing him and it was fascinating,
and then they’d play little pieces of the music.
“Kenny came home
and said, ‘I heard the most amazing thing on NPR,’ and I
said, ‘I heard it too!’ And he says, ‘You need to make a
record of that music. That’s you. That’s always been you.
Why aren’t you making this music?’
This discussion
about the next stage of Ashley’s musical journey couldn’t
have come at a more opportune time. Veteran music executive
Barry Landis was just entering into a relationship with
industry leader KOCH Records about starting a Nashville
office. Long an admirer of Ashley, Landis reached out to see
what was on her musical horizon.
“When Barry asked
what I had in mind for the next record we told him that we
were thinking about making a black gospel record, and Barry
jumped all over it.” Ashley says, “All of a sudden, we had a
label that said ‘we can get on board with that.’ Once it
became real, I started gathering songs.”
“What was hard
for me was the singing. We’re talking about trying to
recreate a song that Mahalia Jackson sang, and it’s
intimidating. You’re trying to step into some pretty big
shoes,” she continues. “Several of those songs, I bet I went
after those vocals 10 times before I was finally satisfied.
Kenny would say they sounded great, and I’d insist that, no,
it’s just not right, you can hear me thinking.”
“What makes those
songs great for me is just this effortlessness that marked
the delivery of the music. I was trying to get to a place
where I could just forget about it.”
When you listen
back to Ashley Cleveland’s body of work, it’s easy to hear
why countless fans are captivated by the Knoxville, Tenn.
native. Her passionate singing is matched only by her
fearlessness in crafting her music.
That approach has
won her the notice of critics and industry figures alike,
making her the first woman to win a Grammy for Rock Gospel
Album (for 1996’s Lesson of Love) and going
three-for-three overall in that category over the years
(1999’s You Are There and 2008’s Before The
Daylight’s Shot.)
But in a textbook
reversal of the “in that world, but not exactly of it” idea,
Cleveland has spent the bulk of her career walking that fine
line between the Christian and mainstream musical arenas,
drawing the best out of both to create music for her rabid
and steadfast fan base, even when she wondered herself what
would come next.
“Over the years,
I’ve accumulated enough material and enough profile to keep
going,” Ashley says. “We just put these records out
ourselves, and we don’t do anything with it really because
Kenny and I aren’t marketers…we’re musicians. I have enough
of a fan base that they just sort of float along in a tiny
stream and have their life.”
Finding that
place where Ashley could give her all within the songs on
God Don’t Never Change meant surrounding her with
collaborators who knew her strengths and could play to them
without any hesitation.
It doesn’t hurt
that Kenny Greenberg is a world-class guitarist, with
credits ranging from Willie Nelson to Etta James to Amy
Grant to the Indigo Girls to Steven Curtis Chapman to Joan
Baez, and every musical point in between. And the fact that
he shares a home and a studio and a complementary musical
brain with Ashley, from the point of her very first record
on, is just a bonus.
“This record just
runs parallel lines to what we had been doing,” Kenny says.
“The last couple of records each had a couple of songs that
were like this, like ‘Precious Lord’ or ‘Your Saving Grace,’
delving into that stripped-down blues kind of thing. It just
seemed the natural thing to do.”
 Adding to that
comfort zone was a band from “incomparable” – Chad Cromwell
on drums, Michael Rhodes on bass and Reese Wynans on B3
organ – all of whom carry equally impressive musical
resumes, and who have played with Ashley and Kenny for
years.
So with the core
of an experienced band in place, along with the invaluable
aid of pianist Gordon Mote, God Don’t Never Change
began to take shape and songs began to emerge, with the help
of friends and fans alike.
“I had a few
songs that I knew I wanted to do, like [the Edwin Hawkins
Singers classic] ‘Joy Joy’ which I’d had since the ’70s,”
Ashley says. “One fan sent me an old radio show from 1959
which features Mahalia Jackson being interviewed by Studs
Terkel and singing. It was so fantastic to find the songs
that I felt like I could really own to the fullest extent.”
Admittedly, it
took a little bit of a move to the side for the longtime
songwriter to shift into song interpreter. “It almost
becomes like songwriting in a way, because I rearranged some
things to fit more what I can do,” Ashley says. “The best
example is the first song on the record ‘My God Called Me
This Morning,’ because I found that on a Fairfield Four
record and it was a cappella. It was magnificent, but I
ain’t the Fairfield Four. When I tried to do it a cappella,
it was pitiful.”
“I loved so much
what this songs says, a tremendous declaration of an
encounter with the living God, so I was determined to figure
out how I could find my own way into the song,” she
continues. “I sat down with my guitar and started going into
different tunings and found this spot where I could own it.
In a way, I collaborated with the song itself.”
For Ashley,
gathering stories about the songs and the people who
popularized them was an equally important part of the
process. “I asked Odessa Settles, whose father Walter was
the member of the Fairfield Four who sang the lead on that
song, if they wrote this, and she said, ‘Oh, no, it’s just
an old field holler,’” Ashley says.
“And then there
was Reverend Gary Davis, who sang “You Gotta Move,” and he
embodies all the darkness and light of any great Old
Testament figure you could possibly think of,” Ashley
laughs. “He could write some pretty low-down blues music,
but then he’d turn around and play these amazing gospel
songs.”
“That tension, to
me, in what little I know about him, is so real and so true
to every human being in the world. He just displayed it a
little more entertainingly.”
As with all music
that deals with The Word, the songs on God Don’t Never
Change find their power in the words.
“With the hymns,
it’s all about the poetry, where with black gospel, there’s
this economy of words. Both types use straight scripture,
but where the hymns will expand on it and the words will
flow, the gospel song will have fewer words but the right
ones,” Ashley says. “You’ve got ‘Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And
Burning,’ which is a straight repetition from the Psalms,
and then ‘see what the Lord has done.’ And you’re finished.
That’s a lot of information in two lines.”
And as she has
become a de facto historian and caretaker of these songs,
Ashley Cleveland has grown in her understanding of how many
of them emerged. “To me the most amazing thing is people
taking horrible pain and loss and allowing something
God-given and beautiful to come of it, as opposed to
succumbing to bitterness,” she says. “These songs speak to
the sorrow in my own soul, and they’re uplifting.”
It’s the work
these songs were called to do, and it’s the work Ashley
Cleveland and so many around her, are happy to help carry
out. |
