Packin' Up: The Best of Marion Williams - Gospel Music Album for Worship, Church Services & Spiritual Uplifting

Among many students of American popular music, Marion Williams's greatness is now a critical commonplace (Rolling Stone, memorably, went so far as to call her "the greatest singer ever"). Packin' Up: The best of Marion Williams reminds us not just of Williams's greatness, but also that there are many Marions to love in the legacy she bequeathed to the world she left in 1994: the unrivaled gospel house-shouter, masterful reinterpreter of Protestant hymnody and 16-bar blues alike, baleful balladeer, evocative folksinger. Few voices possess her expressive capacity, the ability to summon wonder and woe with impeccable calibration as her musical lights led, or the spirit moved, and with Packin' Up, Williams's vast reach - generically, vocally, historically, psychospiritually - is comprehensively documented and celebrated, and beyond dispute.But Packin' Up stands out for another reason: producer Anthony Heilbut's decision to use Herbert Pickard (affectionately and universally known as Peewee among gospel people) for piano and organ overdubs on more than a dozen tracks, several of them among the album's best. Personal favorites: "Press On" swaggers and sways with the help of Pickard's fierce organ lines; his piano on "Motherless Child" is the sound of the blues in their Sunday best; and "When Death Shall Determine my Stay Here" is a clinic in empathic, seemingly at times nearly telepathic, accompaniment. Hielbut's liner notes make a persuasive case for Pickard's place as second only to Roberta Martin in the history of gospel pianists. This is true, so far it goes. Pickard, as Martin before him did so well, plays with an open-nerved sensibility to rhythm and white space - a refined intuition for when and where to place the right note in time, and when not to - remaining ever alive to the unfolding arc of possibilities between piano and voice, in a fashion that may well be unsurpassed in American musicianship, certainly in gospel. But Martin's influence as a pianist rose alongside and is impossible to appraise apart from her work as a writer, composer, arranger and singer. In contrast, Pickard brings to the Packin Up sessions the consummate session player's incisive ability to know the difference when what is needed is to play WITH someone and when to play FOR someone - for, in this case, the singer who is, Heilbut's notes tell us, Pickard's favorite. This affection, Heilbut writes, "is audibly evident in the immensely soulful and empathetic way he responds to her -- you would think they were separated by a few feet, and not life itself." Just so. For those who have ears, let them hear.