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The Rolling who? Why this obscure gospel album could be the best record ever made

Underrated: The Swan Silverstones - Getty
Underrated: The Swan Silverstones - Getty

Forget The Beatles, The Beach Boys or Bob Dylan. Leave your Thrillers, your OK Computers and your Exile on Mail Streets at the door. The best album ever recorded is one you’ve almost certainly never heard of, according to one of music’s most celebrated producers.

Joe Boyd, who produced Pink Floyd’s debut single Arnold Layne and Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, says that the greatest album ever made is Saviour Pass Me Not by US gospel quartet The Swan Silvertones.

“Every single track is killer,” says Boyd of the obscure 1962 album, which was recorded in one day at Vee-Jay Records’ studio in Chicago. His choice bucks the trend for perennial favourites such as The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds or The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to be named the best album ever recorded.

“If you’re talking about [my favourite] album from the LP era there’s always one that I say without fear of anyone being able to prove me wrong, probably because very few people have ever heard it or ever will. But the greatest album ever made is called Saviour Pass Me Not by The Swan Silvertones,” Boyd says in the latest episode of The Sound of the Hound podcast, which is a series about the early days of recorded sound and the recording pioneers who have shaped how we listen over the decades.

Boyd, who has also produced REM, Fairport Convention and Billy Bragg, says that the Silvertones “made lots of great records”. But “something happened” the day they recorded Saviour Pass Me Not. “Everything came together: the sound was exquisite and the group never sounded better. That is my Desert Island Disc,” he tells the podcast, which I co-host with former Abbey Road boss Dave Holley.

The Silvertones were formed in 1938 by Claude Jeter, a former coal miner from Kentucky with a distinctive falsetto. They gained popularity throughout the 1940s and 1950s, becoming known for the harmonic contrast between Jeter’s voice and his bandmates’ coarser tones. Paul Simon has said that Jeter’s singing of the line "I’ll be a bridge over deep water if you trust in my name" in the band’s 1959 version of Oh Mary Don’t You Weep served as the inspiration for his own Bridge Over Troubled Water. Jeter later sang on Paul Simon’s 1973 track Loves Me Like A Rock.

Boyd is right about Saviour Pass Me Not being an esoteric choice: there is no evidence that the album charted, it is not available on Spotify and it was last re-released decades ago, according to the Discogs website. Vee-Jay records closed down in 1964 but not before it became The Beatles’ first US record label, releasing the Introducing…. The Beatles album earlier that year.

Boyd’s opinion is interesting because he has had a ringside seat on the music industry as we know it. A Harvard graduate who moved into the record business in the early 1960s, he was in charge of the sound at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan famously went electric, he hosted a Procol Harum gig at his UFO club in London on the day that Whiter Shade of Pale was released, and he was there at the Saville Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue when Jimi Hendrix played his final London shows in 1967. Boyd, 77, has also worked extensively in films, collaborating with Stanley Kubrick on the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange and producing the famous Duelling Banjos track in redneck horror-thriller Deliverance. But he is arguably best known for his work as a producer.

In a wide-ranging interview, Boyd says his approach to recording has been “shaped by all the listening” he has done, from jazz and folk to gospel and world music. One of his driving principles as a producer has always been to “make records that I could listen to in 50 years” rather than tailor then to the vagaries of musical fashion at the time.

The biggest change to the recording process in his lifetime has been the introduction of digital technology, he tells the podcast. Digital technology has almost made music too perfect, Boyd says. “I hesitate to talk about it in a way because I end up sounding like a curmudgeon. Because it’s very sad to me. I hear a lot of modern records where the singing is good, the song is nice but it’s clear there’s a click track going on and that it’s perfect. Every note has been massaged or nudged or moved so that it’s absolutely the way it’s supposed to be. My feeling when I listen to a record like that is ‘Interesting, great, I never have to hear this again.’”

The cover of Saviour Pass Me Not
The cover of Saviour Pass Me Not

Conversely, he says there’s always a moment when you record a group of live musicians together in a room when the musicians “don’t actually know” what’s going to happen next. This moment of “uncertainty and adventure” is where the magic of music lies. “I believe that as a listener, you listen to music that has that quality of uncertainty. Even when you listen to it for the 25th time you experience a little bit of that adventure, which is drained from the music when you have perfection,” he says.

Boyd is probably best known for his work on Nick Drake’s first two albums. Drake only ever released three records before he took his own life in 1974. The albums are now seen as classics but sold badly at the time. Boyd says it’s a bittersweet feeling that they are now held in such esteem. He remembers going to see the documentary Searching for Sugar Man, in which a musician presumed dead starts touring again. In one scene the musician, Sixto Rodriguez, walks onto a stage in South Africa and the vast audience goes crazy. “When I saw that I just burst into tears,” says Boyd. “Your fantasy is ‘We only think Nick’s dead.’”

The Sound of the Hound is available on Apple, Acast, Spotify and all major platforms