Are You Washed In the Blood of the Lamb. Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters. 1927. Gennett.

 Writing in 1973, Susan Sontag observed, “Believing that the images they sought came from the unconscious, whose contents they assumed as loyal Freudians to be timeless as well as universal, the Surrealists misunderstood what was most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable, mysterious—time itself. What renders a photograph surreal is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past….” The same should be said about recorded music. I’m not under the impression that there was more evidence of madness in our country a century ago than there is today, I only assume it has a different…quality. Time has made it surreal, by which I mean that when I consider a case of madness today it’s always as a theoretically manageable medical condition. For obvious reasons, it’s impossible to think of the past in this same way. What keeps me returning to this version of the 1878 Elijah Hoffman hymn is the tone of near hysteria I hear in Da Costa Woltz’s singing voice, delivered without irony. It’s difficult to tell if Woltz is expressing an unrestrained believer’s joy or if his hymn is a humorless, wild-eyed declaration of faith. Applying secular standards to a quixotic, centuries-old obsession with salvation is the surest method I know for properly isolating its disturbingly alarmist cold fusion energy, that plangent, scream-in-darkness dissonance that can also be heard in The Black Angel’s Death Song’s two guitar and viola accompaniment. Both songs probe the unresolved nature of our attachment—sometime religious, sometimes mundane and sometimes simply mad—to our conduct in the face of mortality, in metaphors so extravagantly vivid they purge the lyric of the conceit of divinity altogether, leaving only the core truth of mystery to strike deeply at the chord of human experience. And often. From the 2003 Dust-to-Digital CD box set Goodbye, Babylon.

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