Title - Whatever You Need
Artist - Johnny Ray Daniels
For those unaware, Johnny Ray Daniels, born in 1946 in the Beaver Dam area of Greenville, North Carolina, was one of seven children.
By age 20, Daniels and a group of local friends started up a rock ‘n’ roll band called the Soul Twisters.
One night, Daniels’ life changed forever. He was standing on stage at a white nightclub in the neighboring city of Wilson, looking out over the faces of the audience dancing and drinking. “I saw them just like a picture,” he recalls. “In the blink of an eye, it was like I could hear the Lord saying, ‘You’re in the wrong place.’”
He played out the rest of his booking obligations with the Soul Twisters, and then quit the band. After leaving his gear and his guitar with his bandmates, Daniels started his music career over again, this time in the church.
He married a woman named Dorothy Vines, who was also singing in church with her sisters under the name the Vines Sisters. Daniels began attending their church, and when they found out he could play guitar they encouraged him to play piano too, something Daniels had never done.
He started on just two fingers. “I said Lord, give me that gift and I’ll play it for you. My fingers opened up and I’ve been playing ever since.”
Daniels put the music to every song the Vines Sisters ever sang as the group built up a reputation as one of the most stirring gospel groups in Eastern North Carolina. Holding on to a hard-driving old-school quartet style, they were soon dubbed the “Glorifying” Vines Sisters by a local radio DJ, for the way they sang and shouted for the Lord.
Daniels drove the Glorifying Vines Sisters on long road trips around the national gospel circuit, often coming home to sleep for four hours before putting in a day of work and getting right back on the road again.
After 54 years, he turned his business over to his son Anthony, who leads his own group The Dedicated Men of Zion and continues the musical legacy of the Daniels and Vines families.
And now the seventy-six-year-old has just-released his debut album, Whatever You Need (May 6th, 2022 via Bible & Tire), a mighty fine recording that exemplifies the core values of all traditional gospel music that still, and lovingly thrives around this great nation of ours.
1. Whatever You Need
2. Something Within Me
3. God Is Able
4. I Shall Not Be Moved
5. Jesus Is Waiting
6. Glory Glory
7. Lord You’ve Been Good To Me
8. Church Get Ready
9. Thank The Lord
Opening on the Gospel, finger-snapping vibrancy of the title track Whatever You Need, he smoothly backs that up with the mid-tempo funk lines within his own interpretation of Lucie Campbell’s Something Within Me, the feisty standpoint held within the forthright God Is Able, and then we get the low slung, Muscle Shoals-esque blues of I Shall Not Be Moved.
Some gently wavering, quivering even organ work opens up the medically-spun testimony about surviving a car accident of Jesus Is Waiting which is itself backed by the hand-clapper Glory Glory, the righteous Lord You’ve Been Good To Me, the recording rounding out on the outpouring of everlasting faith within Church Get Ready, coming to a close on the organ-imbibed gracious praise within Thank The Lord.
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