The Gospel Quartets
The hard men of gospel quartet, the house-wreckers who took the older style of jubilee quartet and set its meticulous harmonies against a roaring lead voice, had been gathering their forces throughout the pre-war years. Independently of Thomas Dorsey and the Chicago pioneers, quartets - almost exclusively male - had been developing out of two main regional sources. The fount of quartet in the South was the area of Jefferson County in Alabama, and traceable in fact to the work of one man - R.C. Foster. Foster was schooled in the art of university quartet singing by a Tuskegee Institute graduate, Professor Vernon Barnett.
The other great source of gospel quartet was serving the East Coast. For some curious reason, the Tidewater region of Virginia was the birthplace of numerous fine male quartets which by 1923 included the innovative Norfolk Jubilee Quartet.
The Dixie Hummingbirds - and Ira Tucker especially - remained at the head of gospel quartets for almost thirty years, becoming the grand masters of that style.
In later years the Hummingbirds were cast in the role of elder statesmen - still employing lush, progressive harmonies and shouting leads but also indulging the huge crowds with wicked impersonations of younger rivals. In 1966 they took the Newport Jazz Festival by storm and they seemed set for widespread popular acclaim but, their harmonic innovations became the stuff of legend and reference only.
The Swan Silvertones and the Spirit of Memphis go back almost as far as the Hummingbirds and both created a vocal music which holds up even today for both its spiritual depth and awe-inspiring technique.
Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertones created a religious music equal to the finest in any other field and their best songs - Savior Pass Me Not, Jesus Remembers, My Rock - may be counted as spiritual masterpieces.
The Spirit of Memphis go back even further than the Silvertones - some reports suggest as early as 1928 with original members Arthur Wright, Luther McGill, James Peoples and James Darling. One of their longest serving members is Earl Malone, who joined the group out of their junior section when he was 18 and still sings with them today - almost fifty years later! (1984) Yet even he can remember a time when he was looking up to them from the sidelines as a small lad.
In 1983 they celebrated their fiftieth anniversary at Mason's Temple in Memphis, with Earl Malone reflecting on a lifetime in spiritual music, 'The people who've come to Christ after hearing us sing, I think that's the best part of what we've done.
The Sensational Nightingales - At the other end of the post-war quartet spectrum stand the Sensational Nightingales and another legend - Rev. Julius Cheeks. Where the Silvertones and the Spirit of Memphis captivated audiences with exquisite understatements, the Sensational Nightingales devastated them with diamond hard harmony and the primeval roaring lead of Julius Cheeks.
Julius Cheeks died in 1980, having left instructions that his body not be taken further South than the Fourteenth Street Bridge in Baltimore, signifying his fierce hatred of southern racism.
The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi - Archie Brownlee died early too. At 2 o'clock on February 8th 1960, the hardest quartet singer of all time gave way to pneumonia in the New Orleans Charity Hospital. He was Julius Cheeks' big rival on the circuit, the inheritor of Silas Steele's title as the star voice of quartet. One old time singer recalled, 'My style wasn't broken until Archie Brownlee, he come in ... I mean, I saw him at Booker T. Auditorium jump all the way off the balcony, down onto the floor - blind! I don't see how in the world he could have done that. People would just fall out all over the house!'
The Five Blind Boys came out of the Piney Woods School for the blind, near Jackson, Mississippi, where they had learned to sing spirituals while still young boys.
The Alabama Blind Boys reached their performing peak with a series of classic recordings for Speciality, joined for a while by Rev Percell Perkins from the Mississippi Blind Boys. While they never quite matched their Mississippi counterparts, neither artistically nor in terms of popular acclaim, they were nevertheless a major force among the hard gospel quartets largely due to the commanding voice of Clarence Fountain.
The Mighty Clouds of Joy have been together for about thirty-six years and are totally dedicated to it. Willie Joe Ligon started the group when he was fourteen years old and his big inspiration was Rev. Julius Cheeks of the Sensational Nightingales. At an early age Joe Ligon moved to LA from Troy, Alabama where he was born. In LA he teamed with the more sophisticated city voice of California born Johnny Martin. The two lead voices then added bassman Richard Wallace from rural Georgia and baritone Elmo Franklin from Florida, and bagan to sing at small church events around the poorer parts of booming Los Angeles. The group later added two new members Leon Polk and David Walker.
Their recording of Live And Direct earned them a gold album and they won Grammy Awards in 1978 and 1980, with plaudits coming thick and fast - 'no singing group on the face of the earth produces a more joyful sound...'
These days Joe Ligon doesn't strain his vocal chords in quite the way he used to, preferring to share the lead duties with Paul Beasley, the amazingly high-voiced singer from the Gospel Keynotes. Neverless, he's still regarded as one of the greatest male gospel singers to have survived from the hard quartets. His three original co-founders - Johnny, Richard and Elmo - are still with him and the current group are without doubt the finest male vocal chorus in existence. (1984)
