Songfacts®:

• Lydia Lunch calls her music "punish rock," which is like punk rock, but a lot less refined. "The Gospel Singer" is one of her musical horror stories, telling the story of a deranged little girl who kills kittens and is likely to take down her father next.
  
  The song is loosely inspired by the 1968 novel The Gospel Singer by Harry Crews, who often set his stories in the American South. Lydia Lunch and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth formed an all-girl band called Harry Crews that released an album inspired by his books in 1987.
• Lunch wrote this song with Kim Gordon. They're longtime collaborators, with Lunch teaming with Sonic Youth on the group's 1984 song "Death Valley '69" before forming the band Harry Crews.
• This is one of Lydia Lunch's favorite songs in her vast catalog. "It's badass boogie," she told Songfacts. "Sometimes you just have to get raunchy."
• Lunch recorded this with Big Sexy Noise, one of her many bands.
• Lunch sings this in a southern accent, which isn't native: She was raised in Rochester, New York, and lived in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. She says the song "Brings out the Southern white trash in me," adding, "I've got a little bit of that and I'm not even from the South."