The Branchettes Rock the Spirit of Jubilee Gospel on ‘Stayed Prayed Up’

EDITOR’S NOTE: As album releases slow down in December, we like to catch our breath and write about albums that came out earlier in the year that we didn’t get a chance to review but we think are worthy of your attention. Stayed Prayed Up was released in October.

When Lena Mae Perry talks to her Lord, everybody listens. Recorded live in her home church in Johnson County in Central North Carolina, through the auspices of Megafaun guitarist-turned-producer Phil Cook’s Spiritual Helpline project, the record Stayed Prayed Up and its accompanying documentary with the same title capture the spirit and the glory of African American jubilee gospel. It’s the roots of rock and roll, soul music born in church that with a few secular lyrical substitutions and some showmanship turned it into an aisle-leaping phenom that shook, rattled, and rolled the musical world in the 1950s, starting with groups like The 5 Royales.

Perry and her friends Ethel Elliott and Mary Ellen Bennett started the The Branchettes nearly 30 years ago when her home church choir at Newton Grove’s Longbranch Disciples Of Christ Church was booked at a program in Smithfield and only she, Elliott, and Bennett showed up. Elliott and Bennett have since passed on, but Perry continued as The Branchettes with pianist Wilbur Tharpe. He has passed as well, but the film and the record capture his powerful presence backing Perry on piano and vocal harmony. She’s aided in this outing by Angela Kent on gorgeous gospel harmony, backed by Cook on guitar and his Guitarheels: James Wallace on organ, Brevan Hampden on drums, and Michael Libramento on bass.

This is powerful stuff, loud and raucous, spilling over with the spirit rolling in the aisles and rattling the stained-glass windows. The selections are old-time gospel chestnuts that Perry rocks in a sanctified manner, held back from full-on secular get-downs by only the thinnest of threads. “Come By Here” is joyous, rollicking gospel fit for sinners and those washed in the blood of the Lamb as well. Tharpe high-steps around the melody as Perry exhorts the spirit to stop by and mingle.

“You Can’t Hurry God” is one of the quieter renditions that gets right to the point and gets out in a little over a minute, but still carries a powerful whomp. Perry gets her message across with a vengeance on another shorty, a less-than-two-minute rendering of “He Was There All The Time,” a call and response tonsil-stretcher with Kent that has both women painting the ceiling with celestial tones, Perry soaring with a grace and glory that belies her 82 years.

“If It Wasn’t For the Lord” is built for swaying, but “Lay Down My Life” is a marching anthem, a raucous stomper fit for a second line parade or just a strut down the aisle waving a Bible instead of a hanky or an umbrella.

Cook has said he’s not sure yet what shape his newest enterprise, Spiritual Helpline, will take, but hopes it will be along the lines of North Carolina traditional music nonprofit PineCone or Tim and Denise Duffy’s Music Maker Foundation, helping to spread the rock-solid holiness of African American gospel while supporting the musicians who are upholding that tradition. It’s an auspicious beginning, a soul-stirring journey that soothes and satisfies.