Sylvester made it disco. This group made it gospel.

Gospel boogie is a genre I'm still opening myself up to, still learning as I go, and one thread keeps leading to another.

The first thread was Greg Belson. He's been at this since he was a teenager collecting soul records in England in the mid eighties, moved to Los Angeles in 2006, and has spent something like thirty five years digging up gospel material nobody else was tracking. His radio show is closing in on its fifteenth year on air. By now he's basically the godfather of this area of research.

Gospel disco came out of church youth in the mid seventies, singers who'd grown up on soul and disco bringing that same four on the floor pulse into worship. It ran that way for a little over a decade before the sound quietly disappeared, and it's people like Belson who spent the decades since pulling it back into daylight.

Once I started reading what he's uncovered, I went looking at what I had in my own crates, and this record surprised me.

The Victory, by Ricky Womack and Christian Essence, turned out to have real demand behind it, which sent me looking deeper into why.

There's barely anything documented about Womack himself, no interview, no bio, just what's on the record. He produced and arranged most of it, and someone sharing his name, Esther Womack, sings backing vocals.

The why is the opening track, titled I Need You / Since the Savior Found Me. Womack's group didn't write the first half, they covered it. The song was originally Sylvester's, the disco singer behind You Make Me Feel Mighty Real, released in 1980. This small San Diego group took his disco record and folded it straight into a hymn.

Decades later, a DJ edited this exact track for a compilation called Overdose of the Holy Ghost. I grew up listening to that DJ under the name Joey Negro, one of the names I came up on in the nineties. What I didn't know until this week is that he retired that name in 2020, after George Floyd, and goes only by his real name now, Dave Lee.

That's the genre for me right now. Pull one thread and three more show up behind it.