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A Lambeth church in 1975 … Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet grew from a recording of a homeless man in London
A Lambeth church in 1975 … Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet grew from a recording of a homeless man in London. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images
A Lambeth church in 1975 … Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet grew from a recording of a homeless man in London. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

Anthem for the homeless: mystery at the heart of a contemporary classic

This article is more than 5 years old

A 26-second recording of a nameless rough sleeper began composer Gavin Bryars’ musical quest for the heart of humanity

The British have a curiously romantic attachment to the figure of the homeless person. In 1908, the Welsh poet WH Davies published The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, with an enthusiastic preface by George Bernard Shaw, recounting Davies’s travels around North America. In 1948, an abridgement was fruitily broadcast on the BBC Home Service by Dylan Thomas, introducing a new audience to Davies’s book.

Other British writers – George Borrow and Orwell, Walter Starkie – wrote about life on the road or the street with varying degrees of romanticism and realism, and the journalist Henry Mayhew, in London Labour and the London Poor (1851), invested his articles with a deep and genuine sympathy. Perhaps the archetypal man of the road, though, was Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, a character improvised for a Mack Sennett’s Keystone studios short and immediately propelled into immortality.

Chaplin said that he had tried to capture a sense of “romantic hunger” thwarted by outsize feet. He did so in silent images. One of the 20th century’s great musical works does the same for spiritual hunger. Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet takes a rejected fragment of audio from a film project about people living rough in London and turns it into a work of metaphysical yearning.

A fascination with found material … Gavin Bryars

Many of the rough sleepers that the film-maker Alan Power was documenting in the Elephant and Castle district of south London (where Charlie Chaplin grew up amid poverty and sickness) were alcoholic. On camera they sang half-remembered splinters of folk and pop songs, sentimental ballads, bits of opera. Only one didn’t drink. He was an elderly man, as far as anyone remembers, for no footage of him survived – just a 26-second recording of him singing, in impressively consistent tuning, a fragment of what sounds like an old evangelical hymn, “Jesus’ blood never failed me yet…” He seems like a figure who could quite easily have stepped out of the pages of Mayhew.

Bryars was already deeply interested in using “found material”. He spent significant time away from composition, studying the work of Marcel Duchamp, whose “readymades” are key works of high modernism, and he had already experimented with found material in the 1969 indeterminate piece The Sinking of the Titanic.

Along with Jesus’ Blood, it has remained in Bryars’ performance repertory to this day. Jesus’ Blood originally occupied one side of an LP but it has also appeared in a new version on CD at considerably more than an hour; and it has also seen life as a single, with the original voice doubled by the latter-day troubadour of America’s underclass, Tom Waits. With each iteration, the piece evolves, but it never loses the profound emotional power of its source material.

The story of how a small fragment of unwanted audio came to be one of the most celebrated musical works of recent times is a complex one. Bryars had been working with Power, not on the original shoot – he never met the old man on the recording – but as a mixer and editor. By way of thanks, Power gave him some of the tape reels, which were expensive in 1971. As a boy brought up in the low-church tradition and familiar with many hymns and religious songs, Bryars was immediately intrigued by the words and melody of Jesus’ Blood, and was drawn to the voice, which has an almost trained quality, beautifully phrased and consistently pitched.

Bryars made a loop of 13 bars and, recognising that his piano was in tune with the singer, began to work on harmonisation. He made a simple chordal arrangement, which in later versions has developed into a rich ensemble sound with strings and brass, weighted to the low end of the harmonic scale. Bryars was by that time teaching at Leicester Polytechnic and was able to make use of a small sound studio there. To preserve the delicate original, he recorded it on to a second machine, leaving the loop running while he went to fetch a coffee. When he returned, he found that the painting students in the various rooms around the studio had fallen silent and were listening sombrely to the old man’s voice. Someone was weeping in a corner. It’s an effect that audiences have been experiencing ever since.

Seeing that reaction, Bryars recognised that he had to treat the material with respect – beginning with an attempt to discover the provenance of the singer and the music . Yet no trace of the hymn, nor of the man who sang it, ever turned up. It may be taken from a song sheet prepared for some long-forgotten mission hall or it may be a hymn composed or improvised by the old man himself. Bryars’ publishers scoured the archives in hope of finding a published text, but to no avail. This changes the stakes, for what might have seemed a casual appropriation of found material (the charge a newspaper laid against Bryars when a version of the song was shortlisted for the 1993 Mercury prize) is actually more like a collaboration between two composers who never met.

What makes Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet such a lasting treasure is that, through it, a nameless old man continues to live, as vividly and stoically as one of Samuel Beckett’s homeless characters, in turn the heirs of Chaplin and Buster Keaton. He is confirmation of Beckett’s understanding that “the tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, someone somewhere else stops.” The same is also true of laughter, and it is seldom noted that there is also gentle laughter here, as there has to be whenever humanity is acknowledged.

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