Sœur Sourire (The Singing Nun) "Avec toi"

Sœur Sourire
(The Singing Nun)
Her Joy, Her Songs
LP
(Philips, 1963)

In the early 1960s, Jeannine Deckers, aka Sœur Sourire aka The Singing Nun aka Luc Dominique aka King Diamond, lived and worshipped at the Fichermont Convent in Waterloo, Belgium. Jeannine liked to write songs and play them for the other sisters on her acoustic guitar, so the convent decided to let her record an album's worth of her compositions. As unlikely as it seems, the song Dominique became a huge hit single on both sides of the Atlantic.

After her initial success, however, things went downhill. Her second album, Her Joy, Her Songs, did not match the first in terms of popularity, and, in 1965, the convent announced that her singing career was over. In 1967, however, she left Fichermont and reemerged as Luc Dominique, under which she recorded at least two albums, I Am Not a Star. and Dominican. Her final release, as far as I know, was a 1982 disco version of Dominique.

At some point, the Belgian government decided she owed an extraordinary sum in back taxes, for the money made from her early, hit records. She had given the majority of her earnings to the convent, but did not have receipts. In addition, the convent apparently did nothing to exonerate her. Perhaps because she had recorded a song in praise of birth control, La pilule d'or (The Golden Pill), or perhaps because she was living openly as a lesbian with her long-time partner Annie Pécher? I honestly do not know. Despondent over their debts, Jeannine and Annie committed suicide together in their apartment on March 19, 1985.

Once again, I've cheated a bit with this entry. That's my copy of her second LP in the photo above, but it's in lousy condition, so I pulled my favorite song from it from a wonderful, two-CD compilation I have called Best of Sœur Sourire. It has all the tracks from The Singing Nun, Her Joy, Her Songs, and I Am Not a Star., plus the disco version of Dominique and a bunch of tracks from who-knows-where. Unfortunately, the liner notes are scant (and straightwashed), with no indication of the sources for any of the songs.

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The original Dominique

Let's disco!

The Trees Community "I Will Not Leave You Comfortless"

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The Trees Community
The Christ Tree
CD boxset
(Dark Holler • Hand/Eye, 2007)

When I read the booklet that came with the quadruple disc, deluxe reissue of the 1975 album The Christ Tree by The Trees Community, something jumped out at me immediately. The last paragraph of the mini-bio of group founder and leader William Shipen Lebzelter states

. . . he contracted an incurable disease. He was gone so quickly that no one knew quite what had happened. He was just 44 years old when the Lord took him from us.

The time frame for his death would've been the 1980s, and incurable disease sounded suspiciously to me like a euphemism for AIDS. Hmmm . . .

Late one night a few months ago, I finally decided to Google Shipen to see if my suspicions were well founded. I found group member Katherine Shishonee Krupa's blog, Seven Story Bus: The Story of the Trees Community, which covers the history of the group. Though she wrote nothing about his death, Shishonee did write a fair amount about Shipen and fellow founding member Philip Ariel Dross's homosexuality and some of the challenges it presented both to the group and to outsiders.

As I read random blog entries that night, I started crying. The homosexuality of some group members was so clearly important in their history, yet the booklet completely straightwashed them. About Ariel's leaving the group and falling in love with the man with whom he spent the rest of his life (to the best of my knowledge), the booklet simply says, After four years with the group, he moved back to his home state of Florida where he found the love of his life.

All that aside, the album is absolutely wonderful, no matter one's religious affiliation or lack thereof. The Trees Community's approach to music making was a unique take on folk music with what we would today call world music instrumentation. There are gorgeous vocals, mellifluous melodies, and striking dashes of avant garde experimentalism. Today's song is from their 1973 cassette album A Portrait of Jesus Christ in Music, which takes up most of disc two of the box set. The piece was re-recorded for The Christ Tree, but in a radically different version.

Merrill Womach "Sweet, Sweet Spirit"

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Merrill Womach
Merrill Womach in Quartet
LP
(New Life Records, 1977)

When I saw this album in the used bin at Tower Records in Atlanta, I thought the text was in Cyrillic. After pulling it out for a closer look, I discovered it was actually a gospel album from the mid/late 1970s by a guy from Spokane, WA, resting place of my nine-year-old appendix.

According to the liner notes:

Widely known for his unique vocal achievements in sound, Merrill is the first one to produce multiple stereophonic recordings. Through a series of delicately performed recordings of his own voice singing the various parts, he has produced duets, trios, quartets and even a 42-voice precision male chorus. Accompanying Merrill in many of his concerts are taped symphony orchestration backgrounds which are the result of years of research and development.

In addition to being a master of recording technique, Womach was also the victim of a fiery plane crash on Thanksgiving Day, 1961, just over seven months after my parents got married. This is the cause of his horrific facial scarring. Yes, it's not a horror movie makeup job; the poor guy actually looked like that.

As would be expected, nearly the entire album is graced with the sort of instrumental backing one might expect on a Caucasian gospel album of the period: dreadful. This particular track, however, is completely a cappella, albeit severely multi-tracked. I actually quite like it.

Krzysztof Penderecki "Velincanija—Psalom 50"

Krzysztof Penderecki UTRENJA, The Entombment of Christ LP (RCA Records, 1971)

I first (knowingly*) heard the music of Krzysztof Penderecki when a buddy of mine who worked in a record store sold me a used copy of Penderecki Conducts Penderecki Album 2 that they'd just gotten in stock. The first piece, Capriccio for Violin and Orchestra, was probably the most violent sounding bit of classical music I'd yet heard, and I became an immediate fan. That piece (same recording, even), along with several of his most famous, including Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, is available on this excellent dbl-disc set on EMI. Today's piece, however, is the second section of his longform choral work, UTRENJA, The Entombment of Christ. To the best of my knowledge, it has only been recorded three times, and this is the earliest of those. From what I've read on-line, most people consider this to be the finest version, even though the second part, The Resurrection of Christ, was not included. The full work was first released in 1973 as a gorgeous, dbl-LP box set on Philips. I have that, too, but that recording is readily available on CD (albeit with a hideous cover) from the Polish label Polskie Nagrania. The CD is from the late 1980s, though, so the sound quality may just be crap; I honestly do not know. There's also a recent recording available on the budget Naxos label; I have not heard that one, however. *I later discovered I'd already heard his music in (appropriately) horror films such as The Exorcist and The Shining.

The Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band "Blow That Horn"

The Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band
The Gospel Album
CD EP
(Family Owned Records, 2007)

I love bargain bins. Even more, I love free bins! My favorite local record store has both and I discovered the Big Damn Band via the free bin. I found a promo copy of their album Big Damn Nation and thought it looked interesting, I flipped it over and saw it was produced by Paul Mahern, formerly of Indiana hardcore legends the Zero Boys. It went home with me and turned out to be a nifty country-blues sorta kinda thing. Rev. Peyton sings and plays slide guitar (well, dobro), his wife Breezy plays the washboard and their cousin Aaron plays a tiny drumkit 'n' a five gallon bucket.