Gospel artist Washington Phillips has been shrouded in mystery for decades. The east Texas musician recorded only 18 songs at a makeshift studio in Dallas in the late 1920s. A handful of dedicated audiophiles have pored over his music. But for the most part, Phillips is unknown to mainstream listeners.
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He was an odd character and an outsider. To get by, Phillips sold herbal remedies and ribbon cane syrup from his cart. But his passions were religion and music.
“[He] didn’t have a church of his own and he was not recognized by any of the key denominations. He would go around to the churches — sometimes they would let him preach,” remembered Nealy. “He was just different. He was unique, he was artistic. But at that time, we had no appreciation for the artistic ability.” — kut.org
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'Denomination Blues, Pt.1' (1929)
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What exactly is a manzarene? Modern internet scholars attempt to answer that question here and here.
The ever-diligent Mr. Corcoran has now thrown a new wrench into the mix! He has discovered another possibility: a huge custom fretless zither that Washington Phillips built himself!
Phillips even named it: the “Manzarene.” The brief article is from the Teague (Texas) Chronicle, Nov. 8, 1907, and is a wonderful find (if one ignores the casual racism). The only detailed clues it reveals are that it was homemade and it was large: about 2 by 3 feet in size and 6” deep! Playing with two hands was also mentioned, as one would expect for a giant fretless zither.
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The one thing the newly-discovered Manzarene convinces me of is that this ingenious musician was capable of continually creating simple but effective – and musically rich – fretless zithers by any means necessary – from scratch, from cannibalizing pianos, from completely re-configuring production zithers, and building more from salvaged parts. All he really needed were a few simple tools and new steel strings when required.
At various times, Washington Phillips played a giant homemade box zither, a secondhand Phonoharp and gizmo-less Celestaphone that were possibly assembled into some giant super-zither, and at least one, but possibly multiple, additional homemade zithers, smaller and eventually played with just one hand. — harpguitars.net
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'Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There' (1928)
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One of the founding fathers of American gospel music, Charles A. Tindley wrote “Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There” in 1916. It started making the rounds in black churches, and gospel-blues artists and guitar evangelists began recording it for big-city record labels, who would send representatives around the country to collect and record “race music” to then press into 78s to market to African Americans.
One of the earliest recordings of “Burden” is by Washington Phillips (1880–1954), a singing farmer-preacher from Simsboro, East Texas; it’s one of eighteen sides he recorded for Columbia Records from 1927 to 1929. He sings it to his own “novelty accompaniment,” as Columbia credited it—a custom instrument he built by reconfiguring two fretless zithers, restringing them and giving them a unique tuning pattern. He played it with both hands and called it a Manzarene, according to a recently discovered Teague Chronicle article from 1907. Musicologists have marveled at the flowing, harp-like sounds his invention enabled and have been unable to reproduce it with any kind of exactness. — artandtheology.org
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'Denomination Blues, Pt.2' (1929)
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
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