JIMMY WITHERSPOON – FEELIN’ THE SPIRIT

One of the great blues singers of the post-war period, Arkansas native, Jimmy Witherspoon (1920-1977) had a slew of hits around 1950, with the most famous being a version of Bessie Smith’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do”. By the mid-fifties, however, Witherspoon’s career had begun to languish, as the “jump blues” style began to go out of fashion. However, Witherspoon’s appearance at the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival restarted his career and exposed him to a new generation of record-buying fans. Feelin’ the Spirit, released in 1959, hoped to capitalize on Witherspoon’s newfound popularity (particularly with white audiences) by bringing traditional African-American Spirituals into the national arena. While songs like “Deep River” and “Every Time I Feel the Spirit” would have been well-known to any African American church-goer at the time, they were not known among white audiences. Interestingly, Witherspoon chose the popular “Randy Van Horne Singers” (who famously provided the theme songs to the Flintstones and the Jetsons cartoons) to sing backing vocals here.