Leo "Bud" Welch (March 22, 1932 – December 19, 2017) was an American gospel blues musician and guitarist who didn't make his professional recording debut until he was 82 years old, by which time he was pretty much the last in a line of vernacular Mississippi guitarists who included R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, and Mississippi Fred McDowell.
Born in Sabougla, Mississippi, Welch grew up on his family’s
farm in the tiny Calhoun County community. His early influences including
listening to the Grand Ole Opry over the radio, and as a teen he learned guitar
from an older cousin, L.C. Welch, with whom he formed a trio together with his
younger brother, Arlanda. At 18, Welch
moved to Grenada, where he played in a group with Alfred Harris and was soon
playing at picnics and parties, working his way up to juke joints and clubs,
playing mostly blues standards with a gospel edge, raw and urgent. Otherwise,
he kept his day job, working over 30
years on a logging crew in the hill
country. The influence of the region he called home, his years of musicianship,
and his well-lived life blended together to create music that was as unique as
he was.
After his conversion to evangelical Christianity, Welch,
like McDowell, Rev. Gary Davis, and Blind Willie Johnson before him, developed
an iconic, raw, hybridized gospel blues. From the mid-‘70s on, Welch was an
established gospel performer in Bruce, leading groups including the Sabougla
Voices and the Skuna Valley Male Chorus and hosting a gospel TV show on a local
station.
Around 1975, when the blues began to wane as a popular music
and the gigs began to dry up, Welch switched his sound to gospel, and took his
blues riffs and Chuck Berry energy into the churches, developing a raw hybrid
style that had the grit and moan of the blues laid under the urgent, passionate
energy of call-and-response gospel.
His music recording career started in 2014, after he was
secretly recorded performing at his manager's birthday party. An offhand phone
call to the Big Legal Mess record label brought him an audition and then a
recording contract. Welch took his striking gospel blues into the studio,
putting it down straight and with no frills, emerging with a debut album,
Sabougla Voices, early in 2014. As part of his deal with Big Legal Mess, Welch
promised the label that if they issued his gospel record, he would cut a blues
album.
He delivered on it with I Don't Prefer No Blues. The set was
produced by Bruce Watson, featured guitar work from Jimbo Mathus, and was
issued in early 2015. After touring the globe, appearing in the European
documentary Late Blossom Blues, and releasing Live at the Iridium (the only
recording to place his gospel and juke joint blues side by side in the same
program), Welch entered the recording studio with producer Dan Auerbach and
sidemen Swift and Michaels. This line-up cut some 30 tracks live from the
studio floor.
Welch fell ill in July, forcing him to cancel many
previously booked appearances. His condition deteriorated and he died at his
home in Bruce, Mississippi on December 19, 2017, aged 85.
Welch once expressed the satisfaction of his late-blooming
career. “I’ve worked hard in the woods, cutting timber, running a chain saw for
thirty-five years, got bit one time by a rattlesnake, but I’m still here. I’m
making more money now than I ever did in the cornfields or cottonfields or
woods, and I’m happy, I’m proud of what I’m doing. And I believe the Lord is
too. The Lord always blessed me to make it over.”
(Edited from Wikipedia, AllMusic & Clarion Ledger)
2 comments:
For “Leo 'Bud' Welch - The Angels In Heaven Done Signed My Name” go here:
https://www.upload.ee/files/9730694/Leo__Bud__Welch_-_Angels.rar.html
1. I Know I Been Changed (1:57)
2. Jesus Is On The Mainline (2:46)
3. Don't Let The Devil Ride (2:45)
4. I Come To Praise His Name (3:05)
5. Walk With Me Lord (2:41)
6. Right On Time (3:25)
7. I Want To Be At The Meeting (2:24)
8. I Wanna Die Easy (3:10)
9. Let It Shine (2:32)
10. Sweet Home (1:25)
Thanks Boppin' Bob for posting this wonderful lp!
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