The latest part of the ongoing series chronicling, in no particular order, the greatest 1001 recordings made by Christian artists

All of these songs have bought me something life enhancing, some aspect of truth or hint of hope beyond the adrenalin pumping high of great rock'n'roll or deeper-than-deep soul music. All of these songs have brought me blessing from on high. I hope and pray some will for you.

Andrae Crouch

1. ANDRAE CROUCH (Vocal by Tata Vega) - OH, IT IS JESUS, 1984. From the album 'No Time To Lose', Light.
Black gospel, the roots of so much of what 20th century music has to offer - black gospel, without which we wouldn't have gotten contemporary Christian music and probably wouldn't have gotten the rock beat period. In many ways this track is the quintessential black gospel track because stylistically it straddles old and new, storefront choir and LA 48-track, timeless folk-art and sweet soul music. Mr Crouch is a post war music pioneer particularly for his intuitive ability in wrenching black gospel form out of the stylised holler-and-scream, call-and-response histrionics of much post-war gospel and bringing in multi-track rhythms tracks and funky backbeats thereby paving the way for BeBe and CeCe Winans, Kirk Franklin and all the crossover gospellers we're going to see in the '90s. But Andrae was also a brilliant composer of memorable, congregational praise choruses, with hooks hummable enough to transcend the grotesque division of 'black church' and 'white church.' This song has yet to gain the popularity of earlier praise songs like "Soon And Very Soon" or "Through It All" but is Crouch at his greatest with an achingly lovely anthem, recounting the tale of the sick lady with enough faith to touch the hem of the Lord's garment in her search for healing. Andrae (never the strongest of singers) allows a hand-picked choir to sing the chorus with quivering poignancy. But what takes the rendition up to utterly sublime heights is the lead vocal of Tata Vega. Brilliant albums both soul (Motown) and gospel (Royal Music) have brought Ms Vega scant recognition but here she sings a lead vocal of such swoopingly soulful majesty, her rich contralto purring, growling and octave-leaping in such breathtaking control that the phrase ' soul music' takes on a whole new dimension. Here is hope, joy and deep, deep faith in the healer of bodies and minds, captured in a popular music work of art. No one who hears her could fail to be moved and uplifted.
Tony Cummings

2. MICHAEL W SMITH - SECRET AMBITION, 1987. From the album 'I To Eye', Reunion.
When one thinks of what had gone before of Mike's platinum selling 'I To Eye' album, this classic of contemporary Christian pop/rock becomes even more awesome. A promising but lightweight debut album, successful but rather one-dimensional synths pop second, 'The Big Picture' (which the evangelist Jimmy Swagart had subjected to a blustering attack on American Christian TV) for his third. Nothing had prepared us for 'I To Eye,' an album of such tantalising musical textures that if the lyrics had been less overt Michael would now be peering over mega bucks. As it was, the album went platinum (don't believe those myths about young American Christians always buying dross) and no track motors more than this gem. Listen to the drums, punching and kicking with a life of their own. Listen to that wheezing white boy vocal (never Michael's strongest point but so effective here). Listen to those power chords and undulating synth riffs. Or listen to that most memorable of hooks "Nobody knew his secret ambition/He came to give his life away." Seldom has such holy truth been so effectively thrust into the consciousness of all those who enjoy a good pop hook.
Tony Cummings

3. ADRIAN SNELL - FEED THE HUNGRY HEART, 1984. From the album 'Feed The Hungry Heart,' Myrrh.
It was Cross Rhythms reviewer Rose Taylor who alerted me to the classic status of this one. Like many record buffs enamoured with American music I had in-built prejudice against Brits performing music particularly when they came complete with a classical music grounding (serious music being a field which was until recently a closed album sleeve to me). But here was a track which tore through my resistance to public school accents. With his ability to ease delicate glissandos from the pianoforte, this was a rich and, in a very British way, very soulful track. Maybe it's the haunting solemnity of the melody, maybe it's the power of the lyric, maybe it's the almost Spector-like wall of sound suggested in the production. But however it was achieved this is truly a classic which for me at least, even outstrips the pomp of 'Alpha And Omega'.
Tony Cummings

4. SWAN SILVERTONES - WHEN JESUS COMES, 1957 From the album 'My Rock', Auvidid.
Claude Jeter, leader of the Swans, was one of the greatest voices in the history of music. Lovers of 'gospel quartets' (black male groups often perversely of more than four members) know that. Paul Simon knows that too (after all Mr Simon used Claude on a session and even ripped off an aside on a Swan Silvertones track, "you're my bridge over troubled water", for a title and mega-selling Simon and Garfunkel hit). But even if the Great Pop Public never got to know about Claude, the reissue albums of classic sides the Swans recorded for King (in '47 to '51), Specialty (from '52 to '53) and Vee Jay (from '56 to '65) have ensured that a handful of white, non-Christians can marvel at a voice which could purr as sweet and soulful as the silkiest of soul leads then descent into a rugged, rough-edged growl which would leave a storefront church congregation in apoplexy. Here this sonorous soulful number, composed by Jeter and recorded in 1956 is sung, nearly acappella all the intricate underpinning to the uncanny oohs and ahs to his intuitive harmonizers. It is a perfect piece of black quartet singing.
Tony Cummings

5. DENIECE WILLIAMS (with Philip Bailey) - THEY SAY, 1983. From the album 'I'm So Proud' CBS.
If Philip Bailey wasn't the man of God he is he could be excused for being a little miffed when they handed out the Gospel Grammy to Deniece for her duet with Sandi Patti on this song. Four years earlier he and Deniece had recorded the definitive version of the gospel ballad (tucked away on the secular album 'I'm So Proud'). It is a version, which leaves the Deniece/Sandi version sounding pallid and contrived by comparison. The backing track on both versions was all but identical, a moody ballad built on a series of haunting couplets with a sweet soul shuffle in the rhythm stops it getting too stentorian. Niecey's voice was the same too, that spine-tingling musical instrument which can launch awesome notes into the stratosphere with the purity of a lark. What is different is Mr Bailey. Where Sandi over emotes in white girls getting soulful mode, Philip is every inch Deniece's equal in stunning ascent into dog-whistle territory, his falsetto soaring to soul heaven. The extended vamp on the close gave both of them plenty of room to swap acrobatic phrases of assurance that Christ is alive. Breathtaking.
Tony Cummings

6. KIM HILL - SNAKE IN THE GRASS, 1989. From the album 'Talk About Life', Reunion.
Surely one of the most percussive tracks ever recorded on which no drums are heard. Much of the stunning effect is courtesy of a brilliant arrangement by Brown Bannister, which wraps a set of staccato cellos around Kim's strummed, acoustic. Against this riveting backdrop Kim takes her full and throaty contralto voice, cranks it up an octave and goes for broke on a series of liberties with the bluesy melody line that only the supremely confident would attempt. The lyric too, by Wes King, was fine. "We're gonna reap what we've sown/Cause His light shines on our darkness/But what really troubles me/Is what the seed may be when it is grown/ Hide beneath the weeds/Like a snake in the grass."
Tony Cummings

7. ZOE - T M AND THE MANTRA (DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW), 1976. From the single, New Pax.
They don't come obscurer that this. I've got this on a promo 45. Did Zoe ever do an album? And who are they? Only Gary Paxton (the owner of New Pax and the zany character who wrote "Alley Oop" and "Monster Mash", who became a Christian and ended up producing the early Don Francisco albums) knows the answer. But whatever their stakes as one-flop-wonders Zoe (pronounced Zoa) certainly left an attention-grabbing track for posterity. If I tell you it's basically a mid-tempo Jesus music song with a decidedly country tinge you'll probably wonder why the rave. But perhaps not if I tell you that the song begins with a burst of sitar and develops into an explicit denouncement of transcendental meditation with the question, "do you really want to know who's gotten in you?" The answer comes in the climax, "Here's a clue" says a voice and the song suddenly changes to 'The Exorcist' theme and shudders hellishly to a close. As effective a warning against spiritual malpractice as has ever been conceived by a group of pop musicians.
Tony Cummings

8. BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON - DARK WAS THE NIGHT, COLD WAS THE GROUND, 1927. From the album 'The Soul Of A Man', Snapper Music.
Back in the '20s they called them 'jackleg preachers', singing evangelists, part beggar-part minister, ragged itinerants who'd preach on street corners to anyone who'd listen and who sang to get a crowd and make a meagre living. Most lived and died obscurely but some got recorded and one, this one, now rests in a blues singer's Hall of Fame (if such a thing existed). Not that Blind Willie was a blues singer. That was 'devil's music' fit only for bars and whorehouses, Willie stuck to holiness hymns and self-composed songs - blunt metaphors of hard times and spiritual transcendence. He sung them in a voice so gravelly it sounded like he was about to cough up coke and played a bottleneck guitar from which searing blue notes slid and slurred around his guttural exhortations to get right and get God. Of all his many unforgettable, crudely recorded, sides this remains possibly his greatest recorded at his first session back in 1927. Wordless, and with moans - wrenched from his pained soul, backed by torrid guitar licks it is an utterly eery sound, revived once by rock man Ry Cooder, but best left to a creative master who made a timeless gospel blues classic.
Tony Cummings

9. VINEYARD MUSIC (vocal by Kelly Willard) - OH LORD HAVE MERCY ON ME, 1986. From the album 'You Are Here", Mercy.
Praise and worship is a notoriously difficult ministry to capture on tape. For many years the vast majority of praise and worship albums fell into the recorded-live-somewhere-in-a-tent zone of aural mush or the seamlessly smooth MOR-choirs-and-strings type pioneered by California's Maranatha! Music. The distinct musical limitations of both can drag down the most anointed of worship songs even after the prophetically pioneering worship songwriters (Graham Kendrick, Dave Bilbrough, etc) had elevated the best worship songs of the '80s out of the trivial banalities of the early years of the charismatic renewal. Recording these songs was for years a problem though. Songs which must be relatively simple to fulfil the function of congregational singing, need a great deal of skill in arrangement to make them interesting while the temptation to record them sung by a crowd, either a genuine congregation (live) or session singers (MOR) lead to musically dull recordings. The pioneers in breaking the mould of dull worship albums was John Wimber's Vineyard series. Although later recordings tended to revert to the dull MOR-chorus approach a la Maranatha, the early Vineyard albums were classics of their kind with the backing track arranged and produced with at least a bit of a contemporary pop sensibility and lead singers who were not bogged down with unison choruses. This is a gem, a simple plea for God's mercy sung by one of the most haunting and most underrated voices in Christian music, and one of the pioneers of Jesus music, Ms Kelly Willard. A gem.
Tony Cummings

10. STEVE TAYLOR - WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SIN? 1982. From the album 'I Want To Be A Clone', Sparrow.
Since his devastating debut with his gob-smacking six-track mini-album Steve Taylor flourished for a while as Christendom's enfant terrible though the cold shoulder that the Christian Music Establishment has shown towards this most thought-provoking of rockers and the incomprehension dished out to him by many Christian audiences during his 'I Predict 1990' tour, show the Church has sadly a long way to go in learning to deal with a prophetic satirist. All Steve's album's are good, though if he has a fault it's his increasing tendency to big-budget over-production which give his albums a parity with non-Christian Big Rock Buck opuses but which tended to deflect attention away from his rapid-delivery lyrics. For it's Steve's lyrics which bristle with the blackest of humour and the most telling of brickbats which were the singer's greatest asset. A miniscule budget meant that 'I Want To Be A Clone' had a raw, garage rock sound full of thrashing drums and booting sax while the lyric on "Whatever Happened To Sin" was stunning. Never has theological liberalism been so adroitly savaged: "A Christian counsellor wrote, quote/It's the only human choice ahead/If you can't support it/Why don't you abort it instead/He said you pray to the sky/Why when you're afraid to take a stand down here/'Cause while the holy talk reads like a bad ad lib/Silence screams you are robbing the crib/Say it ain't none of my business huh/A woman's got a right to choose/Now a grave-digger/Next you pull the trigger/What then?/ Whatever happened to sin?"
Tony Cummings

As published in CR2, 1st July 1990
11. STREETLIGHT - HOW COULD YOU SAY NO? 1984. From the mini-album 'Streetlight', Sparrow.
I remember sitting in a radio studio trying to record a country music programme for a short-lived Christian radio station. I'd pulled this out of some dusty corner of my collection because the station had no country gospel albums to speak of. As its eerie, utterly haunting tones echoed from the studio monitors all conversation stopped and the engineer leaned across to deliver the ultimate accolade... "what a voice!" What a voice indeed. A desolate, mournful, impossibly nasal instrument which wrenched every inch of pathos from a most haunting ballad which asks how could anyone ignore Christ's sacrifice, set against Appalachian Mountain-style harmonies. Later that voice would be 'discovered' by America's contemporary Christian music industry and Julie Miller briefly metamorphosized as a Cyndi Lauper-style rock gospeller. Julie even recorded a new version of this part-composed number on her solo debut 'Meet Julie Miller'. But this is the classic rendition, blessed with the ability to move even those whose tastes don't normally run to country music pathos.
Tony Cummings

Dion

12. DION - THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE, 1983. From the album 'Inside Job', Dayspring.
To my ears Dion Dimucci has always been able to sing R&B better than nearly any white boy I've ever heard. His whining, slurred delivery made riveting doowop music (I'll never forget his definitive version of the Drifters' "Ruby Baby"). When he got heavily into smack and all but disappeared from the Big Time, many fans regretted his passing. But then in the '80s there he was bouncing back, born again of the Spirit of God and producing on this debut gospel album one of the greatest testimonies-in-song ever. Backed by a laid-back band with some of the bluesiest Hammond this side of Memphis and a guitarist who could show Knopfler a lick or three, Dion ran through his life...playing stickball on the streets, calling girls dirty names, being cool at the candy store, until darkness descends. But then he finds the One who can make sense of his dizzy kaleidoscope of memories. "Over my shoulder and back through the years/I can see my Father's eyes in my memory/Jesus died upon the cross/All was won and nothing lost/Oh how the truth will set you free." Dion's finest musical moment.
Tony Cummings

13. GRAHAM KENDRICK WITH REND COLLECTIVE EXPERIMENT - THE SERVANT KING, 2013. From the album 'Worship Duets', Integrity.
On balance, Graham deserves his reputation as one of the great composers of worship songs. Surely no church in Britain has failed to have been enriched by his ministry. On record of course it's a different story. Possessing a corncrake of a voice with decidedly suspect pitching and recording numerous album whose budgets would have been inadequate if they'd been demos has meant Graham is ill served by albums - his genius being encountered through songbooks rather than recordings. The 'Worship Duets' albums puts the worship veteran with many modern worshippers including Irish folk rockers Rend Collective Experiment. The result brings out all the haunting majesty of Kendrick's song.
Tony Cummings