"Feel Something Drawing Me On," the albums title song, comes from one of America's most distinguished Baptist preachers and songwriters, Reverend W. Herbert Brewster, whose gospel music was sung by Clara Ward and Mahalia Jackson. The entire recording is composed of gospel and spiritual music. Sweet Honey are exemplars of the African-American habit of modifying the staid hymns of European tradition with improvisation, which gives renewed life to songs that so often have had it squeezed out of them by mere repetitious formality. As you might suspect Sweet Honey find spiritual songs not only in formal church settings but in the lyrics of Woody Guthrie, in a funeral song from West Africa or wherever the human heart is coincident with song. |
