myself, so in 2004, some twenty years since the last Highway records, Dennis produced me with Johnny Neel on Harp, also Doug “Blind Willy” Jones on harp, plus Tommy Patterson on Harp, and Chris Anderson on resonator guitar. The CD Back to the Swamp was an autobiographical record that looked back at my time in that swamp called Muscle Shoals Sound. The record started getting me booked at arts venues, festivals, and clubs through- out the South. Now in the
meantime, since 2004, I’ve had songs released al- most annually on Dick Wooly’s King Mojo Records in Atlanta and several compi- lations such as your Gritz Cds. So I figured I needed something new on my own. Doug Jones and his partner, Mark Bush, approached me about leasing one of my songs, “No Holds Barred,” for a new compila- tion on Full Armor Records, a Gospel/Blues label. They also wanted me to write a second song in that genre for the CD. I’d said that I didn’t know if I could, I’d started out in Gospel music and didn’t know if I could grasp the concept of Gospel/Blues for Gospel is about spiritual things and the Blues is secular and often called the Devil’s Music. I did agree to research a traditional “Black Spiritual” that I would re-arrange for the disc. At first I started working on Furry Lewis’s version of the PD song, “When I Lay My Bur-
den Down” that I loved from a Don Nix recording. Later as we actually got to looking at the session, I was asked to look at “John the Revelator,” a song that I use acapella in my classes to teach young students the three parts of a song. Doug had heard me do that version on a live recording that we all did to- gether at the DeKalb Theatre in my home town of Fort Payne. I ap-
proached the song in my mind as if I thought The Beatles might have done it. The guys loved the arrange- ment and that’s the ver- sion to be re- leased on the compilation to be titled Dusty St. James, due out very soon.
Recording those songs got me to thinking
about some kind of recording of my own that would follow up on the Dusty St. James com- pilation. So I’ve written a couple of other songs plus taken the two being released on that compilation and am putting together an EP under my name and on my label, Jackson Highway Records. It’s to be titled Howard, Tell Me What You See using Howard Finster, the outsider folk artist as the inspiration. I’m planning to release the EP early fall. Hope- fully September). The EP will be produced by Dennis Gulley,
engineered by Chris Anderson who will also play acoustic guitars and resonator, harp by Doug “Blind Willy” Jones, and written and vocals my Russell Gulley. I’ll also play some
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