TBGB Pick of the Week: April 3, 2006

“Walk Around Heaven”
Sweet Betty
From the album Live and Let Live
Music Maker 2006
www.musicmaker.org

“Walk Around Heaven All Day” is a gospel music masterpiece recorded in 1964 by the famous Caravans, though it was really a showcase for the solo vocal prowess of Cassietta George. Four decades later, Duluth, Georgia native Sweet Betty closes her full-length blues CD, Live and Let Live, with a version of “Walk Around Heaven” that she dedicates to her mother, Montine Echols.

While the mood of both versions is of solitary contemplation, Betty replaces Cassietta’s youthful power and passion with a head-shaking world-weariness and a palpable resignation to life’s realities, which one hears even in her concluding exclamation, a tired-sounding “Oooo, Lord.” In other words, Sweet Betty infuses the song with just the right emotion to fit the words, delivering the kind of blues angst that wrecked churches when Dorsey performed his autobiographical “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Producer Ardie Dean captures it all expertly for Music Maker.