Chuck Wagon Gang – I’ll Fly Away
The shift to popular music by Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and countless others toward the end of the post-WWII golden age of gospel has meant that audiences far removed from their church services are familiar with the sound, cadence and ecstasy of what became soul music.
The parallel white tradition — euphemistically, southern gospel — seems, by contrast, to have been hermetically sealed, its particular sounds largely unknown to the secular world. The picture one might sketch is bounded by the raw primitivism of shape note singing (and its links to bluegrass gospel) on one end, and the pop harmonies of the Oak Ridge Boys on the other, with only Elvis’ nods to the Blackwoods and Statesmen as a clue to much more.
Two of these three discs suggest there may be abundant reasons for our general ignorance.
The Chuck Wagon Gang were one of the most successful southern gospel quartets, signed to Columbia for 40 years and selling 37 million albums. Formed in Fort Worth, Texas, around 1935 by Kentucky-born David Carter (and originally known as the Carter Quartet), the Chuck Wagon Gang began as singers of western songs and were led to sacred music by audience response. A form of the band, including a son and granddaughter of the founders, tours today.
Their two releases at issue here, I’ll Fly Away and Looking For A City, come on the budget Music Mill imprint, share the same liner notes and spartan credits, and jumble tracks from 1942-66 in no discernible order.
Nevertheless, here are the original four voices: David “Dad” Carter, brother Jim, and sisters Rose and Anna, accompanied only by Jim’s guitar. No, wait. Jim retired in 1953, his father two years later, so who’s singing the male parts after that? Ah, well.
When these sides were cut, all sorts of exciting things were happening in American music, from the sweet swing of big-band music to jump blues, from the charismatic sounds of gospel music through the birth of rock, from honky-tonk to the polish of Owen Bradley. None of those trends are reflected here.
There isn’t so much as a hint of swing to the Chuck Wagon Gang. That’s never more obvious than on the standard “I’ll Fly Away”, which has never sounded so…gloriously stilted. Even the occasional minor notes are treated with white-gloved fingers.
Except for one voice. Whichever sister’s soprano skates above each song has an enchanting hint of wildness to it, skittering close to admitting real passion and lending a distinct color to the rigid Gilbert & Sullivan phrasing of the quartet. This is, at the risk of caricature, the sound of uptight America at worship; the real old, weird America, if you will.
David Carter told James R. Goff, whose book Close Harmony: A History Of Southern Gospel Music provided the template for a new and broader introduction to the music, that he felt his family’s success came from the approachability of their music — that anybody could practice and learn to sing like them. Maybe, but Close Harmony, assembled on behalf of the Southern Gospel Music Association (with liner notes extracted from Professor Goff’s 2002 book), suggests far more artistically satisfying mentors.
These fourteen tracks introduce an equal number of seminal southern gospel figures, including the African-American Golden Gate Quartet (who, liner notes explain, played multiracial dates, particularly with the Blackwood Brothers).
Frankly, it’s a relief to hear the Rangers Quartet swing through “I’ve Found A Hiding Place”. Theirs isn’t a deep, sensual swing, but there’s joy in their voices and some fun in their arrangement. Some of these are very old recordings, and murky, but in the main they summon far more grandeur than do the Chuck Wagon best-sellers.
Here are the foundations of the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers, and (with the Blackwoods) Elvis, and much of the country music of the 1950s. Most of the quartets are piano-driven (the Chuck Wagon Gang preferred guitar), and none sing with the slightest doubt. It is the distant sound of a world so recently gone we can barely hear it.