Preview: Celtic Connections

IT'S hard to imagine a more emphatically secular setting than Elvis Presley's Las Vegas hotel suite during the 1970s, when he and his good pal Tom Jones would hang out after the night's performances.

Yet that's a key locus to which the Welsh superstar, who headlines the Celtic Connections festival tomorrow night, attaches his lifelong love of gospel music. When he fancied a late-night song, Jones has said - explaining the genesis of his 2010 back-to-roots album Praise & Blame, which he'll perform in its entirety in Glasgow - The King's favourite repertoire comprised classic gospel numbers, with which Jones was able to join in thanks to his Presbyterian chapel upbringing.

Praise & Blame's stripped-down, rhythm-based arrangements, produced by Ethan Johns - known for his work with Kings of Leon, Rufus Wainwright and Laura Marling - see Jones lending his celebrated vocals to tracks such as John Lee Hooker's Burning Hell, Dylan's What Good Am I, Sister Rosetta Tharpe's Strange Things and Mahalia Jackson's Didn't It Rain, prompting comparisons to Johnny Cash's American Recordings with Rick Rubin. While for Jones it's both something of a full-circle project - he started out singing blues and rockabilly covers around the early-1960s Welsh club circuit - and a long-cherished dream, initially suggested by Elvis in the 1970s, he's said it's only now, at 70, that his voice has attained the right weathered, earthy qualities to do it justice. Judging by the speed with which tomorrow night's tickets were snapped up, despite the show's late addition to Celtic Connections' programme, there are plenty still eager to worship at his altar.

Jones's successful embrace of just about every popular music genre during his career also makes him an apt figure to head up a strong gospel strand at this year's festival, given how modern gospel has likewise embraced all manner of sounds, from disco to grime, defined nowadays more by its good-news message than any stylistic template.

In truth, gospel has never been a single or static entity. Its earliest origins are thought to be in African sacred songs and chants, brought to the US by slaves and subsequently adapted to Christian worship. Informed also by the rhythms and exhortations of work-songs, while Biblical stories and imagery came to codify black Americans' struggle for freedom, gospel as a term was invented in the 1930s by the musician/composer (and minister's son) Thomas A Dorsey, who channelled the flavours of blues and jazz into spreading the word.

The soul genre probably wouldn't exist without gospel, with artists such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Cissy Houston, Wilson Pickett, Dionne Warwick and the Reverend Al Green all having started out singing in church or gospel groups. The lines between soul and gospel were particularly fruitfully blurred in the former's early heyday during the Civil Rights movement, in which two more of this year's Celtic Connections attractions, Mavis Staples and The Blind Boys of Alabama, were prominent musical ringleaders. The enduring resonance of this era's songs was once again highlighted when President Obama, on the campaign trail, would frequently close his rallies with the magisterial sound of Staples's singing, in the classic Staple Singers' track I'll Take You There. Equally, though, gospel is not an exclusively black tradition, featuring centrally in the repertoire of classic country acts such as the Carter Family, and cited as a key source or influence by many Americana artists today.

According to the African-American scholar Willie Ruff, professor of music at Yale, gospel even has very its own Celtic connection (beyond Jones's Welshness). As may be remembered from when Ruff's work brought together choirs from Alabama and Lewis at the festival in 2005, he argues that the call-and-response format of much gospel singing derived not only from this pattern's prevalence in African music, but from the precentor-led "lining out" of Gaelic psalms in the Hebridean Free Church, transplanted across the Atlantic by slave-owning Scottish settlers. Be that as it may, gospel's venerable folk origins, resilience in the face of adversity, and rich cross-fertilisation with other genres make it a wholly natural fit within the Celtic Connections line-up, adding its own uplifting fervour to the next fortnight's panoply of joyful noise.

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on January 16, 2011