Leo Welch - The Angels In Heaven Done Signed My Name (LP)

Leo “Bud” Welch spent most of his life felling trees in north Mississippi, playing church services and weekend dances, then suddenly turned up in his eighties with records that made blues and gospel fans sit up straight. The Angels In Heaven Done Signed My Name, released in 2019 after his passing in 2017, feels like the hard-earned benediction to that late-life run. It is a gospel record first, but it carries the loping pulse and raw guitar bite he honed in the hill country bars. You can hear a lifetime of Sundays and Saturday nights rubbing shoulders in these performances, and that tension is what makes it so gripping.

Welch’s voice was always full of grain and grit, and time had carved it into something striking by the end. He doesn’t push for pretty. He testifies. The title track sets the tone, a sturdy spiritual given the kind of no-frills, amplifiers-warm treatment you’d expect from someone who came up under the shadow of RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough yet never left the pews behind. The rhythm favours a steady stomp. Guitar lines snake through the verses like a good deacon nudging the congregation back to the chorus. There’s a small band feel throughout, close and room-sounding, the sort of session that respects the songs and their function, not just their form.

What lands hardest is the sense of continuity. Welch’s debut, Sabougla Voices, was named for his Mississippi hometown and leaned into church music. His follow-up, I Don’t Prefer No Blues, flipped to the other side of the same coin. This record closes the loop. The song choices reach deep into the spiritual well he drew from for decades. He moves through classic call-and-response structures with an ease that only comes from living them. When the voices crowd around him, you can almost see the folding chairs and hear the tambourines. Yet the guitar remains the guide, locking into modal riffs that summon the trancey flavours of the region’s juke joints.

Production wise, it’s thankfully unfussy. There’s warmth, some spring reverb, a bassline that rolls rather than thumps, and percussion that feels like feet on wooden floors. No studio gloss gets in the way, which suits Welch’s late-blooming career just fine. He was discovered after a lifetime in the woods, not a semester at music school, and the record respects that. It captures him as a working musician who knew the songs back to front. The arrangements never drag. Tempos sit right in that zone where bodies sway without thinking, and he rides them with a storyteller’s patience.

If you’re coming here as a blues listener, the gospel guardrails won’t keep you out. In fact, they make the ride more interesting. The patterns are familiar. The release is in the refrains. The faith is specific, but the feeling is universal. You get the same rough jubilation you’d find on a Junior Kimbrough floor-filler, just aimed heavenward. That crossover is part of Welch’s historical significance. He didn’t switch teams so much as reveal how close the two games always were in the hill country. It’s no surprise this record drew warm notices when it appeared. Fans knew they were hearing a final chapter from someone who had already given more than anyone expected.

For vinyl tragics, The Angels In Heaven Done Signed My Name works beautifully on the turntable. The room tone and handclaps bloom, and Welch’s guitar sits with a lived-in glow that digital sometimes trims too neat. If you’re hunting Leo Welch vinyl, this is the one that tells the whole story in a single spin. It pairs nicely with Sabougla Voices if you’re building a small stack of Leo Welch albums on vinyl. You’ll find copies pop up at indie shops and on label stores. If you like to buy Leo Welch records online, keep an eye on pressing info and mastering notes, since the quieter passages really benefit from a clean copy. And if you stumble across it in a Melbourne record store, tucked between Fat Possum blues and Southern gospel, don’t hesitate. It’s the sort of slab that reminds you why we keep chasing these sounds across dusty bins.

Welch didn’t live to see this one land, which adds a hint of melancholy when the needle lifts. But the record itself doesn’t linger on endings. It celebrates a life spent making people move and believe, sometimes both at once. That’s the mark of a true folk artist, the kind you measure not by charts but by the grip of their groove and the truth in their voice. The angels may have signed his name, but Leo Bud Welch signed his records with calloused hands and a guitar that still sings. For anyone who loves vinyl records Australia wide, this is a heartfelt, rough-edged beauty worth bringing home.