Tony Cummings continues his personal pilgrimage to locate the 1001 greatest Christian tracks ever recorded.

Michelle Pillar

51 MICHELE PILLAR -WALK AROUND HEAVEN. From the album'Michele Pillar', Sparrow, 1985
A good test of a song's quality is, can you easily recall the place and time when you first heard it? The fact is all these years on I can still vividly remember being driven back from some gig (long since forgotten) by a record executive who in a desperate effort to keep us awake put on the car tape machine a 'new piece of product'. (Record executives talk like that). The effect was electrifying. It still is. A walking blues-pop-country rhythm which sounded as Deep South as chitlins and cornbread (the stalwart sessioneers here were indeed from Muscle Shoals), then a soprano sax blowing a line of delicious soulfulness before a clear pop voice glides the song through to its hook-to-hand-your-hat-on "we'll walk around heaven one day." It was a classic that Michele couldn't quite repeat, her subsequent albums got gradually more MOR and creatively moribund that even marriage to brilliant jazz-fusion man Larry Carlton couldn't reverse. But this brilliant pop-gospel cut still gets the sensibilities snapping like it did all those years ago during that sleepy car ride.

52 RANDY STONEHILL - CHINA. From the album 'Equator', Myrrh, 1985
The current popular opinion offered both by long-in-the-tooth rock gospel veterans who remember when Randy gigged in velvet flares and roots music buffs for whom rock guitars are noisy encumbrances, is that Randy's back-to-acoustic move with his last couple of albums is a definite return to musical sanity. I would agree in part, Randy's high nasal voice and wordy incisive lyrics work brilliantly within ^n acoustic guitar framework. But paradoxically it was with one of the Christian music masters of the new technology - DA frontman and producer extraordinaire Terry Taylor - that Randy came up with his finest album. This is the piece de resistance, a haunting number full of eerie, shimmering atmosphere as the lyric, in sad evocative imagery, looks at a nation of countless millions. Superb.

53 DAVID MARTIN - STRONGER THAN THE WEIGHT. From the album 'Stronger Than The Weight', US Home Sweet Home, T 985.
American soft rock in a Foreigner mold is often despised by those with heavier tastes. Yet, when executed well there are few forms of music better able to convey tremulous sincerity. Here Mr Martin, a CCM songwriter of some note (a song on the 'Stronger Than The Weight' album became a smash for the Imperials) sings soft rock quite superbly. Simple keyboard accompaniment leaving all the effect to the subtlety of the vocal, which hovers in the hinterland between assertive faith and sad recognition of human failure. He sings "Stronger then the weight that holds my sin/Deeper than the sea of doubt within/Higher than the wall that locked me in/I'm gonna trust in him." A soulful sax weaves in and out at the close and the result is a minor masterpiece.

Charlie Peacock

54 CHARLIE PEACOCK - THE SECRET OF TIME. From the album 'The Secret Of Time', US Sparrow/UK Sparrow, 1990
"Deliver me from strategy/From endless clever thinking/Set my sights upon the shore/Keep this boat from sinking" writes one of the best songwriters of the post war years, a man who'd once planned the BIG record deal that seemed appropriate for his monumental singing and songwriting talents but who finally came to see that "whether I decrease or whether I increase is not my concern" and who settled instead for making superb recordings like this one for a 'Christian record company'. This track with its dreamy, haunting intro and Charlie's delicate voice at times uncannily resembling Smokey Robinson's suddenly bursts into a ricocheting rhythm track the complex secrets of which known only to producer Brown Bannister and an awesome drum computer programme. As Charlie and that other superb vocalist Vince Ebo swop soul-boy phrases Charlie observes "My history is written through the choices I make." Suddenly he's speaking a prayer "Let me sing just ten true words/I'd rather sing just ten true words than a hundred words that in the end amount to nothing, absolutely nothing." And may we, who are enriched by Christian art, find these words of truth.

55 SOUL STIRRERS - JESUS WASH AWAY MY TROUBLES. From the album 'The Gospel Soul Of The Soul Stirrers with Sam Cooke Vol.1', US Specialty, 1990
Anybody whose read the painfully revealing biography of Marvin Caye 'A Divided Soul' will know the bizarre spiritual schizophrenia which seems peculiarly prevalent in the world of soul music where black performers, once singing the songs and living the Christian life, move into the fast lane of the pop world and with booze, women and (often) drugs tie-themselves up in knots as they try and reconcile the unreconcilable, a knowledge (if but a distant memory) of Cod and a life of immorality. In many ways Sam Cooke, for many the very founding father of soul music, was also the first down this sad and twisting path. A teenage gospel singing sensation, he recorded this song, among dozens of others with a gospel group that even by the early 50s were veterans of the black church gospel 'programmes' that sprang up in all America's larger cities. By 1955 Sam had left the group, cut his first pop record and begun a life, which would gain him fame and fortune and lead to the star eventually announcing he was a black Muslem before in 1964 being shot to death in a sleezy motel room incident. Whatever the tragedy of his backsliding, Sam left behind beautiful, timeless classics of gospel music of which this is possibly his finest. From the first word where "Jesus" is broken down into a breath taking eight-syllable sliding swirl of vocal acrobatics, here is a singer with enough dazzling technique to utterly confound lesser singers. A simple song of faith, recorded in near accappella with the rest of the Stirrers keep a simple background of oohs over which their genius lead singer can improvise, it is a sound of utter soulful richness.

56 PAUL FIELD - BUILDING BRIDGES. From the album 'Building Bridges', UK Myrrh, 1983.
"Thief In The Night" is considered Paul's classic but it's this song recorded a couple of years after the popular Nutshell broke up which still produces the goosebumps, a slinky jazz-style harmony verse and a chorus which cracks with percussive anger. If ever Cliff is hard up for a pop gospel song to cut here's a little gem.

57 PHIL KEAGGY - NOBODY'S PLAYGIRL NOW. From the album 'Play Thru Me', US Sparrow/UK Sparrow, 1984
Acknowledging that this man is Christendom's greatest guitarist, I still find my mind wondering whenever somebody plays his albums. Too often Phil's songs seem to my ears half-developed. But this is a beaut. Strong melody and hook with a memorable lyric apparently inspired after Phil had seen an ex-Playboy bunny giving her testimony on US Christian television.

58 YOUTH CHOIR -SOMEONE'S CALLING. From the album 'Voices In Shadows', US Broken, 1986.
From the era before they sliced their moniker down to The Choir and upped their personnel to a full band, this was when Derri Daugherty and Steve Hindalong were demonstrating what a guitar and drums duo could do to create some of the eeriest rock ever to emerge from Christendom. Spectacular use of space on the track makes this rocker something special. To those with more AOR tastes it may sound like a partially finished backing track. But for me those ringing guitars and the naggingly repetitive chorus work beautifully. A near perfect piece of 'indie' sounding rock which despite the bigger budgets of later albums, a sound The Choir have never quite recaptured.

59 FRONTLINE - EMMAUS ROAD BLUES. From the album 'Frontline', UK Kingsway, 1982.
Frontline were a short-lived band of Welsh rockers whose lead singer was...wait for it...Ray Bevan. Any Christian music buffs probably associate the Rev. Bevan with a rather glutinous form of MOR and praise music and would be stunned to hear the vibrato-voiced making a very convincing rendition of the blues. What takes this long moody 1 2-bar into overdrive is an utterly sublime sax solo. It honks and wheezes like the obscure session muso who blew it realised that this was his one chance for vinyl immortality and he was going for it.

60 JAMES CLEVELAND AND THE ANGELIC CHOIR - PEACE BE STILL, US Savoy, 1968.
In these CD-saturated days of mass black choir albums by the container load, it is hard to remember how dizzingly exciting the sound of those tumultuous wall-of-sound voices sounded when the fist gospel choir albums emerged in the 60s. This title track from which is no doubt the best selling choir album of all time, is a stone classic though. The choir sounds positively delirious while retaining a hard-to-define dignity. The sheer power of the performance utterly transcends the crude turn-on-a-tape-recorder-in-a-church recording. This shattering version of the lovely hymn, overseered by the gravel-voiced Godfather Of Gospel has never been bettered, (though Vanessa Bell Armstrong came close in the 80s). A black choir masterpiece no less.