The Bible’s Right. Sister O. M. Terrell. Columbia. 1953.

  An infectious, perverse joy brightens Sister O. M. Terrell’s record of Pentecostal admonishment from 1953. Tickled by our human failing to observe even the simplest precepts of Christian dogma, Terrell sings with an otherworldly exuberance that fails to qualify as symptomatic of a full blown psychosis if only because the spirit of Christian fundamentalism at the heart of her performance still contains an iota of hope for the possiblity of human salvation. Accompanying herself with solo acoustic guitar, Terrell creates a rhythmic blues frenzy fashioned to celebrate the eternal damnation of souls who’ve chosen to live in exile from God’s supposed saving grace. A member of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, Terrell had been practicing entire sanctification—the belief in a form of spiritual perfection achieved through the renunciation of one’s carnal instinct—since her conversion into the Holiness Movement at age eleven after a tent revival meeting in Atlanta in 1922. Thirty one years later, Terrell made her only recordings, a collection of sides for Columbia Records   on which you hear evidence not so much of Christian humility but of the triumph of the post-religious Freudian ego, as well as an overload of spiritual impurities like personal obsession, mental illness, and religious fanaticism. O. M. Terrell’s The Bible’s Right is one example of how the twentieth century religious experience was once absorbed into the secular culture of pop commercialism, that is, shorn of its authoritarian propensity to assail the democratic legislature with its viral capacities intact. The record is unsettlingly alive with both the raw power of personal expression, and a shrill, dark ages wail reminding us of the United States’ running history of embracing bigoted hysteria. Its sense of danger doesn’t fade with the run out groove. From the 2003 Dust-to-Digital 5 CD box set Goodbye, Babylon

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