"This album is a tribute to Pastor Wylie Champion, whi died while we were in the process of releasing this , his first record, and his wife, Mother Champion, who died a few months earlier.

We met Pastor Champion a few years ago while we were putting together another release, The Time for Peace Is Now: Gospel Music About Us. We found him in a collection of YouTube videos from the37th Street Baptist Church in Oakland, California, put together by the pastor there, Bishop Dr. W.C. McClinton.  There  was  quite  a  lot  of  talent  in  those  videos,  and  among  them  was  Pastor  Champion  whom we liked so much that we decided to make a record with him.Pastor Champion wasn’t like any other pastor you’ve ever met. As an itinerant preacher, a carpenter, and a father of five, he made a name for himself traveling up and down the California coast with his electric  guitar.  He  traveled  alone  and  he  played  alone,  well  into  his  seventies.  The  easiest  way  to  describe him would be as an outsider gospel artist. Other than these bare facts, we never learned much about him—except that he was also the brother of the well-known soul singer Bettye Swann. 

In fact, most of what we knew about him we got from his sister’s Wikipedia page.We decided that because we met Champion through the 37th Street Baptist Church, we would record him there too. We recorded him live on a two-track Nagra reel to reel, as we wanted the album to be  analog  in  the  style  of  traditional  gospel  recordings.  Over  the  course  of  two  evenings  (when  the  workday was done), Champion taught his band—musicians who had never played together before—a handful  of  songs,  a  small  selection  of  the  nearly  2,000  fragments  of  songs  and  sermons  that  he  regularly  performed.  We  listened  in  as  they  all  got  more  familiar  with  the  material  and  each  other  over time. 

At  some  point,  we  mentioned  to  Champion  that  he  would  have  to  be  interviewed  by  someone  to  write notes for the album. He wasn’t too pleased with this idea, saying he’d had a hard life and he didn’t want to talk about it. Over the next few months, we kept asking Champion to talk to someone about his life. He told us that he didn’t want to talk about growing up in Louisiana, his mother being accosted by the Klan, or that his father was a gambler. He didn’t want to talk about being jailed for 90 days for using a whites only bathroom, being in gangs or having a street name. We told him that was fine—he could talk about what he wanted to talk about. And he told us that he didn’t want to talk about anything.

You know, there are times when you make a record where it’s already made in your mind before you start. But then in the end, the record you thought you were making is not the record you made. We spent years puzzling over this one, trying to figure out what it was saying, who it was for, and how to get people to pay attention to it.

But  Champion  knew  that  this  record  wasn’t  going  to  be  for  everyone.  He  didn’t  really  care.  The  important part for him was just getting the message out there in the same way that he always had, travelling alone with his electric guitar. “I want to say what I mean,” he said, “be practical, precise, to the point, and, at the same time, diplomatic.” In other words, he just wanted to be a good man. "