Lift Him Up

Phillips had some success with his first 78, "Take Your Burden to the Lord" b/w "Lift Him Up That's All," part of Columbia's legendary 14000 D series of race records that also included sides by Bessie Smith, Lonnie Johnson and Blind Willie.

Then came the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Suddenly, the New York labels stopped sending scouts and field recorders down south in search of raw talent. Like Phillips, Dranes last recorded in 1929. Blind Willie Johnson, whose compositions have been covered by Led Zeppelin ("Nobody's Fault But Mine"), Eric Clapton ("Motherless Children") and the Grateful Dead ("If I Had My Way"), did not step into a recording studio again after April 1930, when he was just 28 years old.

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The two men named Washington Phillips are buried in the Cotton Gin Cemetery in the countryside six miles west of Teague. But an hour-long search could only locate the tombstone of the Phillips who died in the Austin State Hospital. That the Washington Phillips who was gospel's great disappearing act would take his eternal nap in the anonymous ground seems about par for this course in music history.

The shack where Phillips lived is gone, but 62-year-old Durden Dixon, one of the few blacks still living in Simsboro, showed me where it used to sit, about 20 yards in from the road. Sometimes the old man would bellow neighborhood boys away from his dewberry bushes, Dixon recalled. Other times he'd invite them up to his porch, where he'd pull out a box-like instrument, Dixon says, "he made himself out of the insides of a piano." Dixon smiles broadly at the idea that someone wants to know such details about the man he said was "kind of a hermit."

Aside from a few bottles of Coors Light discarded under a tree, the land seemed untouched in the 48 years since Wash Phillips was called home. There are old pieces of tin and some rusted buckets. There was also a little brown bottle, half-buried where the porch used to be. When I picked it up, emptied the dirt and showed Dixon, he laughed. "That's his snuff bottle, man." The next day an antique appraiser confirmed that the bottle once held Garrett's snuff circa the early '50s.

What do you know, Annie Mae Flewellen's 74-year-old memory was on the mark. If there's anything the story of Washington Phillips has told me, it's that sometimes what's true and what's false comes from where you least expect it.

The great musician Wash Phillips didn't die in the nuthouse. And his instrument almost certainly was not a dolceola. The legend lessens with the mundane facts. It's comforting to know, however, that the singer who has affected so few people so profoundly didn't live out his last years in mental torment, but surrounded by the people who respected him for who he was. "Leave it there, oh leave it there," he used to sing in his sweet tenor of the truth. "Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there."

Sometimes it can be as simple as that, knowing when and where to let go. Sometimes 18 tracks are the whole shot and you accept that and go on living the life you sing about in those songs.