Gospel Blues

Gospel blues is sacred music played in the language of the blues: sermons, Bible narratives and testimony delivered over twelve-bar harmony, slide guitar and blues phrasing. Its founding figure, *Blind Willie Johnson*, recorded intense slide-guitar evangelism for #Columbia# in the late 1920s, while *Washington Phillips*, *Sister Rosetta Tharpe* and the *Rev. Gary Davis* carried variants from street corners and storefront churches to concert halls. The style supplied gospel music with much of its instrumental vocabulary and fed technique and repertoire back into secular blues and rock.