The song appears on the band’s forthcoming record
Robert Plant and his new band, Saving Grace, have shared their cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Gospel Plough.” The reimagined song is the latest preview of Saving Grace, an album and a band six years in the making, arriving September 26th via Nonesuch Records.
Self-described as “a song book for the lost and found,” the ten-track collection sees Plant and a group of distinguished players exploring the evolution of roots music, both vintage and modern. They invigorate the sounds of blues, folk, gospel, country and the tantalizing traditions that lie in between. With “Gospel Plough,” they transform a centuries-old spiritual number into a hypnotic mélange of vocals, steel banjo, acoustic guitar, and percussion.
Plant had already received great acclaim for his brilliant, Grammy Award-winning foray into American roots music with singer and fiddler Alison Krauss—and alongside Patty Griffin and Buddy Miller, in his 2010 Grammy-nominated Band of Joy. But Saving Grace began at home on the Welsh borderlands, drawn together by a shared lean towards his much-loved corners of evocative song. First united in 2019, Plant and this new collective of like-minded collaborators—vocalist Suzi Dian, drummer Oli Jefferson, guitarist Tony Kelsey, banjo and string player Matt Worley, cellist Barney Morse-Brown—had been experimenting for barely a year, even serving as an unheralded opening act on a handful of dates for Fairport Convention, when the pandemic intervened and any formal plans were temporarily shelved.
“It’s an impressive collection of people now. I can’t tell you how lucky I feel about this,” the former Led Zeppelin frontman says. “What I am really impressed by is this living, new world of whatever this music is. With this mélange of music, song and voice, anywhere and everywhere is the way to see the road ahead.”
Once protocols permitted, Plant and Saving Grace began to record informally in a barn setup and sometimes outdoors—with a backdrop of birdsong emerging on the back half of “Gospel Plough”—and then booked themselves in small venues without fanfare. Until now, there were no press releases, only the image of the lone bison used on the cover of the album, which breathes fresh life into a collection of songs by Memphis Minnie, Bob Mosley (Moby Grape), Blind Willie Johnson, The Low Anthem, Martha Scanlan, Sarah Siskind, and Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk’s Low, as heard on Robert Plant and Saving Grace’s recently released rendition of “Everybody’s Song.”
Having grown into a wide-ranging workshop of styles and personalities, weaving through time and circumstance with joy and abandon, Robert Plant and Saving Grace are preparing to perform for the first time in the US this fall. A tour of more than a dozen North American shows includes NYC’s Brooklyn Paramount, Port Chester’s Capitol Theatre, Chicago’s The Vic, Los Angeles’ United Theater, and others, with support from Rosie Flores. The run will now conclude with a newly-added stop at Harrah’s Resort SoCal on November 23rd.
