Pastor Champion - I Just Want to Be a Good Man (2022)

This album is a tribute to Pastor Wylie Champion, who died while the Luaka Bop label (David Byrnes, Floating Points & Phaorah Sanders…) was in the process of releasing this first record, and to his wife, Mother Champion, who died a few months earlier. . The Luaka Bop teams met Pastor Champion a few years ago while preparing another album, The Time for Peace Is Now: Gospel Music About Us.
Luaka Bop: “We wanted the album to be analog in the style of traditional gospel recordings. At some point, we mentioned to Champion that he should be interviewed by someone to write notes for the album. He wasn't too happy with the idea, saying he'd had a tough life and didn't want to talk about it. He told us he didn't want to talk about growing up in Louisiana, his mother being accosted by the Klan, his father being a gambler, being jailed for 90 days for using a bathroom reserved for whites, having been in gangs or having a street name”.
The important thing for him was simply to get the message across the same way he had always done, traveling alone with his electric guitar. "I mean what I mean," he said, "to be practical, precise, direct and, at the same time, diplomatic." In other words, he just wanted to be a good man.