Let's Make A Record - Sister Gertrude Morgan

Even in New Orleans, a city known for its tolerance for the exotic and eccentric, Sister Gertrude was impossible to ignore.

For more than twenty years she roamed the French Quarter, dressed in a nurse's uniform -- her mission was to heal the sinners; the Word of God was her medicine. Planted at some street corner, she shouted or sang the Gospel through her megaphone and kept time with a tambourine -- or, more accurately, battered Time itself with rhythms that intensified as the spirit took her.

She sang the old praise songs but more often she extemporized sermons around themes that she would chant again and again -- "I Got the New World in My View," "I Am the Living Bread," "God's Word Will Never Pass Away" -- as her tambourine rattled and snapped. She admonished everyone within earshot to surrender, right then and there, to the Lord. Some did. And nobody, not even those in a more leisurely pursuit of salvation, forgot her.

It's been a quarter-century since Sister Gertrude Morgan breathed her last. Yet far from the city she'd left behind, her name is being spoken again, and in the most unlikely circles.

Since February 25 this year her paintings -- technically primitive, with bold colors and totemic figures -- have drawn crowds into New York's American Folk Art Museum. Cultural arbiters have scribbled their praise. Describing her pictures as "painted epiphanies" and "hugely endearing," Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times advised readers that "you don't have to be religious to appreciate the inborn eloquence … You only have to accept that painting, when it comes from the heart and is so clearly genuine, can lift the soul." N. F. Karlins, writing for Artnet magazine, more succinctly called it all "terrific."

\But as its wonders spread to bookstores and coffee tables in William A. Fagaly's hardcover folio book Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan, and as the works themselves ship from New York later this year to the New Orleans Museum of Art and to Chicago's Intuit Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in 2005, Preservation Hall Recordings reminds those who once heard her summons to repent, and those who came too late to hear her at all, that there was power in her voice as well as in her paintbrush.

Let's Make a Record reveals Sister Gertrude Morgan in all her power. Recorded in a bare bones setting, with only her tambourine and the Holy Spirit at hand, these fourteen tracks -- not quite songs, not quite sermons -- stir the soul more deeply than most musicians could manage when playing together. But there's a story behind these performances, one that traces back to Sister Gertrude's remarkable life and to the ties that would bind her to a pivotal figure in the history of Preservation Hall.

Sister Gertrude
"Let's Make A Record"

Sister Gertrude Morgan: Vocals, Tambourine

1. Let Us Make a Record (trad.) 2:40
2. Way In the Middle of the Air (Trad.) 2:42
3. I Got The New World In My View (Trad.) 4:35
4. If You Live Like Jesus Told You (Trad.) 1:42
5. He Wrote the Revelation (Trad.) 1:25
6. Take The Lord Along with You (Trad.) 2:34
7. The Gift of God is Eternal Life (Trad.) 4:55
8. Power (Trad.) 4:56
9. I was Heard from the Wound in his Side (Trad.) 1:34
10. Take My Hand, Lead Me on (Trad.) 2:37
11. I am the Living Bread (Trad.) 3:07
12. New Jerusalem (Trad.) 2:24
13. Gods word will Never Pass Away (Trad.) 1:22
14. Power (Trad.) 2:10

Recorded Live in the Prayer Room New Orleans, La.

Recording engineer: Ivan Sharrock
Producer: E. Borenstein
511 Royal Street, New Orleans La.
Remastering: Benjamin Jaffe and Parker Dinkins @ Master Digital January 7th, 2004.

Special Thanks to Sasha Borenstein

Preservation Hall 726 Saint Peter Street, New Orleans LA. 70116
504-522-2841