For a long time, the only thing there was to know about the gospel singer Washington Phillips is that there wasn’t much to know. Born in Texas in 1880, Phillips recorded a total of 18 songs between 1927 and 1929. Two of these songs were lost. The remaining 16—light, dreamy, paranormally gorgeous—were issued two at a time on 78-r.p.m. records, the precursor to the modern LP, then trickled out on vaguely anthropological collections like Negro Religious Music Vol. 2 or Screening the Blues. It wasn’t until 1980 that Phillips’ was given his own dedicated release, and then on a small label run by a high school English teacher in the Netherlands.
Until now—and this is invariably the heart of Phillips’ story, at least as it’s usually told—people couldn’t even agree on what instrument Phillips used to accompany himself. Some said it was a zither, a narrow stringed box about the size of a laptop. Others said it was an obscure keyboard called a dolceola, in part on account of the Columbia Records’ scout (and Phillips’ producer) Frank B. Walker, who referred to it as a “dulceola.” In the early 1980s, a researcher at Tulane University named Lynn Abbott found a picture of Phillips in the Louisiana Weekly holding what looked like two zithers Frankensteined together, confirming only that whatever it was Phillips played, nobody had seen it before or since. In any case, this is what it sounds like: a small music box playing in a large, resonant cave, playful but indistinct, like dandelion fuzz loosed on a spring breeze.
Recent research by the tireless Phillips chronicler Michael Corcoran reveals that Phillips called his instrument the Manzarene, giving rise to the title of a new digitally released collection from the Georgia label Dust-to-Digital called Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. As mentioned, there are only 16 known Phillips recordings in existence. Though remastered here, they have been released a few times before, including on a still-available Yazoo Records compilation called The Key to the Kingdom. (One version of Phillips’ songs, an LP by the Oregon label Mississippi Records, has a cover obstinately depicting Phillips sitting at a dolceola. Some myths are too beautiful to let go.)
What I personally find remarkable about Phillips’ music is how gentle it is. Here is the American servant of a Christian God who never shouts, never growls, never beats his breast or stomps his feet to prove just how strong the spirit is within him. If early rock-and-roll borrowed the hysterics of gospel and turned them into an expression of sex, Phillips’ delivery—measured, conversational, disinterested in the Buddhist sense—is something I hear in ambient and new age music, or in the transcendent reticence of a songwriter like Bill Callahan, who appears to touch God not by reaching out but leaning back. My favorite song here is “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today” because it sounds like he really doesn’t know. My second-favorite is “Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There” because it sounds like he has. No other gospel musician has come as close to convincing me that Jesus’ love might not stress me out.
Ninety years on, with decades of exhumations of gospel and blues behind us, Phillips is still an anomaly. The same 1927 trip during which Frank B. Walker first recorded Phillips, he also recorded Blind Willie Johnson, the Dallas String Band, Lillian Glinn and a handful of other artists who sound more or less like musicians playing music in the 1920s. Even Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground),” an unprecedented recording that appears to capture a ghost crying inside a milk bottle, sounds like the Platonic ideal of a style that has become familiar. Phillips’ music remains weirdly without lineage or context, a sound unto itself.
The blues is built on apocrypha and myth. It cannot be conveniently subjected to the demystifying rigor modern standards demand without being somehow denuded. You cannot—and maybe, to some extent, should not—fact-check the blues. And yet being black music made during the era of American slavery, institutional and beyond, it seems right as a matter of moral, even reparational course to read the stories of people like Phillips—a free black man who lived on acreage his father, uncles and grandfather bought after emancipation, and spent his Juneteenths slow-cooking a hog on the nearby church picnic green—as fully and precisely as possible.
Phillips did not, as it had often been reported, die in an insane asylum, but after falling down a flight of stairs in a government building in Teague, Texas. You can see a picture of this staircase in the liner notes for Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams. It is narrow and wooden and takes a sharp bend to the left about ten steps down. As ambivalent as I am about the mystery of his instrument being “solved”—and as insistently as I feel that explaining what he made his music with will never bring us any closer to the wonder of how—I am startled by the sight of these stairs: So tactile, so ordinary. The greatest mystery (of course) is that Phillips made this all on Earth.
