Album Notes

I Believe in Angels Singing is an anthology of twenty-five songs remembered from the era of the Underground Railroad, recorded at homes and churches in eastern Ohio and West Virginia during the spring and summer of 1996.

As producers we are hopeful that such a compilation of music with images from the slave experience would provide a special vantage point from which to better understand events leading up to the American Civil War. The Underground Railroad is a profoundly important movement in United States history about which little has been written, though much is still remembered. We feel that, in this new millennium, this may be the most essential missing chapter of our nation's history, because it suggests a model of how people struggled together across racial lines, risking lives and livelihood to oppose the unspeakable wrongs of slavery.

The title, I Believe in Angels Singing, is taken from the words of Neilda Pitts recollecting older people singing as they picked cotton in a large field near her childhood home. Sister Pitt's performance of "Soon I Will Be Done with the Troubles of this World" opens the tape. Other performers include her mother, Bertha Tolliver, along with Ethel Caffie-Austin, John Jackson, Ken Jacobsen, Phil Wiggins, Emma Perry Freeman, Verta Cooper and the Northern Kentucky Brotherhood.

Ethel Caffie-Austin, with her huge and rich voice and free flying piano style, has toured Europe and is know as West Virginia's Queen of Gospel Music. She teaches at the Augusta Heritage Center at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, WV during the summer. The late John Jackson also toured widely and was renowned for his profound Piedmont Blue style. Here he plays banjo, guitar and sings a song learned from each of his parents.

Phil Wiggins of the Internationally known Cephus and Wiggins Piedmont blues performing duo gives us his own original, exquisitely rendered, impassioned mouth harp appeals in pursuit of freedom.

Along with these well-known artists I Believe in Angels Singing gives voice to lesser known artists who sing in local churches. Several of the tracks consist of songs performed by descendents of a community of Virginia slaves given their freedom in the mid-1800s and now settled in the Ohio River Valley.