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  • Let's Make A Record

    RAD05-4

    Artist: Sister Gertrude Morgan

    Label: Ropeadope

    Even in New Orleans, a city known for its tolerance for the exotic and eccentric, Sister Gertrude was impossible to ignore.

    For more than twenty years she roamed the French Quarter, dressed in a nurse's uniform -- her mission was to heal the sinners; the Word of God was her medicine. Planted at some street corner, she shouted or sang the Gospel through her megaphone and kept time with a tambourine -- or, more accurately, battered Time itself with rhythms that intensified as the spirit took her.

    "The album is very typical of how Sister Gertrude sang," Jaffe says. "As they got ready to roll the tape, she said to Larry, 'Let's make a record for our Lord' -- and on the spot, she made up a song based on that idea. She could take a verse from the Bible and turn it into a song. That's really what this record is: a series of sermons, with her preaching and improvising."