Samson and Delilah / If I Had My Way
Rev. Gary Davis and Meegan Ochs, ca. late-1960s, photo by Alice Ochs
Introduction – “Samson and Delilah”
Last month’s post on “Old Bill Rolling Pin” inspired our musical exploration for today. You’ll recall that post relied on an understanding of ‘coded’ lyrics as a safe way for black folks to express a range of feelings in the context of antebellum American slavery. Those feelings ran the gamut from deep personal sadness to collective murderous rage. Today’s song, the spiritual “Samson and Delilah” or “If I Had My Way,” uses such code and covers all that emotional ground.
Musicians cover this song rather widely, though its provenance is far murkier than the lesser-known “Old Bill …” We’ll deal with the code, as it’s powerful. However, since it’s easy to decipher, we’ll try more today to balance the recorded variants of the song with a history of its roots. There’s enough of the latter to discuss, but much to hear as well – and it’s all quite beautiful! If you’d rather just page through and sample the music, you can’t go wrong and we won’t be offended. Either way, let’s get to it.
I ended last month’s post with a recording of today’s song, so let’s start there. This is the definitive performance anyway. It’s Reverend Gary Davis with his supreme rendition of “Samson and Delilah,” released on his 1961 album Harlem Street Singer.
“Tell me where your strength lies, if you please …”
Today’s post is more about the song “Samson and Delilah” than the Reverend Gary Davis per se. However, it’s worth considering the song’s context in his repertoire. I found little out there in terms of substantive research in that sense, but I did run across a 2010 PhD thesis by William Lee Ellis, which he claims is “the first extensive analytical examination of the music of … Reverend Gary Davis …” It’s well worth a read if Davis is your subject of interest, and thankfully Ellis gives us a few key points regarding the song as well.
Listeners need no scholar to interpret Davis’ arrangement and performance of “Samson and Delilah” as powerful, inspirational, and even transformative. That is, of course, the point. Historically speaking though, Ellis’s research makes clear that it was “the most important song, sacred or secular, in Davis’ repertoire …” It “became his signature tune in later years, especially once Peter, Paul, and Mary had a hit with it in 1962.”
We’ll get to that track in a bit, but it’s important to know that the royalties from that cover allowed Davis a measure of financial security for the rest of his life. Nonetheless, he spent his remaining years teaching music in his home and spreading the gospel on the street to anyone with an interest.
Reverend Gary Davis – from http://www.culturalequity.org
As for provenance, Ellis recounts a story shared by multiple sources.
A publishing ceremony over the song was so memorable it has become engrained in Davis lore. Amidst a group of entertainment lawyers, someone asked Davis if he was the song’s author, to which he replied an emphatic “no” [collective gasp]. He then continued that the song, like a number of his religious titles, was “revealed” to him [collective sigh of relief].
There’s no doubt that Davis’ arrangement was his own and those royalties were well-deserved. It’s equally clear, though, that Davis drew his source material from a deep well of tradition wherein profit mattered not at all. According to Ellis:
As he did with secular music, Davis acquired religious songs from a variety of traditional, popular, and personal sources. This technique, in and of itself, belonged to an assemblage method in African American religious song that pulled from various sources including Bible verse, favorite hymns, one’s own compositions, and familiar refrains and choruses that fostered group identity and involvement.
Speaking of “group identity and involvement,” quite a few people today learned the song “Samson and Delilah,” as I did, from the Grateful Dead. Many know Bob Weir adapted the band’s version directly from Gary Davis, but we’ll get to all that below. For now, it’s important to realize that we can find the song deeper in that well from which Davis drew. I haven’t yet found definitive evidence that it is an antebellum spiritual created by enslaved people but, circumstantially, it certainly looks that way.