Patty Griffin, Downtown Church
I just purchased Patty Griffin’s latest album. I’m enjoying the first listen as we write. It’s a gospel album, recorded with a fantastic line up of singers in the Downtown Presbyterian Church on 5 Ave in Nashville.
“Both of my parents were very religious,” she says. “My father spent time living as a Trappist monk. It was a very Catholic life that I lived as a child. Spiritually I’m a mutt, at this point. All the imagery of those teaching is in me, it’s in my blood, and it continues to show up and inspire different things. A lot of people think this is too basic to think, too bleeding heart liberal to think, but we’re all looking for the same stuff.”
That said, Downtown Church isn’t all the same stuff. Like Patty’s previous six albums, it is stylistically diverse, focusing not only on the black gospel tradition but on the white Southern gospel songs of Hank Williams and Alfred G. Karnes (one of the dozens of artists not named Carter or Rodgers who were recorded by Ralph Peer in Bristol, TN during the late 1920s), and one beautiful nod to Hispanic gospel traditions. Alongside, happily, two Patty Griffin originals (she wrote more), and a closing hymn attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.
Read more about the album here.
