Pulled three albums tonight from the Rev. Gary Davis. These are ‘The Guitar and Banjo of Rev. Gary Davis”, “Harlem Street Singer” and “Have A Little Faith”. Not a terrible amount to say tonight (it’s been a long day), but they are all great albums. ‘The Guitar And Banjo” disc is particularly interesting though if you haven’t heard anything by him before though. All the tracks are instrumentals and at times it sounds like two or three guitarists are playing. Also interesting to me is that on these recordings, it sounds like they were done with a very close microphone. You can practically hear the pick on the strings – and in many of these songs, he is hitting the guitar hard. So much so that on some tracks it feels like there is actually space between each note of a chord as a result of the time it takes for the pick to get one string going, travel through space and grab onto the next. I don’t know if I have ever heard this much detail in a solo guitar recording before, and it adds a weight to the tunes. His version of Scott Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ is very good, and once I hear his ‘United States March’ it will usually be stuck in my head for a couple hours. ‘Harlem Street Singer’ starts off with ‘Samson and Delilah’, possibly the version members of the Grateful Dead heard before recording it themselves on ‘Terrapin Station’.