The new disc also includes versions of songs written by Tom Waits and Ben Harper. On 1995’s I Brought Him With Me, the Blind Boys tackled songs by Pete Seeger and Brook Benton. On 1992’s Deep River, they took on Kenneth Gamble and Bob Dylan. Most of these compositions had spiritual themes already, but the Blind Boys transformed them from vaguely religious numbers into explicit gospel hymns.
“We’re doing the opposite of what Ray Charles did,” Fountain asserts. “He took a gospel song, took out ‘Lord’ and put ‘baby’ in it. He had his way of thinking and we have ours. We take a rock ‘n’ roll song, take out the ‘baby’ and put the ‘Lord’ in.
“When they asked us to sing that Bob Dylan tune [“I Believe In You”], we had to listen to the lyrics very carefully to make sure we could agree with everything he was saying. We had to take some words out, but once we did, I didn’t have any problem singing that song. We’re trying to sing to masses of people, so we will sing what the people want to hear as long as we can agree with the words.”
“Our religious beliefs and our music run together,” insists Blind Boys co-founder George Scott. “If it’s something we don’t understand or believe in, we don’t sing it. We believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that He was crucified and rose again, and this is what we try to instill into the people. We try to live the life we sing about. Our beliefs make us sing better because we’re singing what we believe.”
“When I suggested that they sing the Tom Waits song ‘Jesus Gonna Be Here’,” recalls John Chelew, the new album’s producer, “Clarence said, ‘What does this mean, “He’s gonna be here soon; he’s gonna cover us up with leaves and a blanket from the moon”?’ He thought about it a while and said, ‘Wait a minute, when I die, there will be leaves on my grave and Jesus will comfort me like a blanket.’ And once he had it clear in his mind what the song meant and that he could agree with it, he could give it a great vocal.”
“Our music may be rock ‘n’ roll sometimes,” Fountain concedes, “but our lyrics are always about God. We can take a Bob Dylan tune or a Tom Waits tune, take out the lyrics that aren’t right, put in a different lyric, and no one will be the wiser. We keep the same melody, but we sing it the way the Blind Boys would sing it, so it has that gospel feel.”
“With the Blind Boys,” Chelew adds, “if they didn’t understand the lyrics, they wouldn’t sing it until they huddled together and figured out what the words meant. It was like a little philosophy session going on before each song. It was like touching history.”
That history began in 1938 at the Talladega Institute for the Deaf and Blind, a segregated state boarding school in Alabama. It was a tough place for a young boy who was black, blind and away from home for the first time in the midst of the Depression.
“It was almost like a prison,” remembers Scott. “We would go in September and get out in May. They taught us Braille and vocational trades. Sometimes we went hungry because the officials wouldn’t give us enough to eat.”
In 1938, a six-year-old boy with an unusually big voice enrolled at the Institute and joined the school’s gospel choir and male chorus. It was Fountain, and he quickly bonded with five other young singers in the chorus — Scott, Jimmy Carter, Olice Thomas, Velma Bozman Traylor and Johnny Fields — who shared his enthusiasm for the Golden Gate Quartet. They formed their own sextet, the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, modeled on their heroes.
The Golden Gate Quartet, founded at the beginning of the decade in Norfolk, Virginia, had adapted the jazz-vocal stylings of groups such as the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots to a cappella gospel singing. The intricate, meticulously worked-out harmonies were set to brisk, finger-snapping rhythms. The lead singer often “rapped” out a Bible story in a rush of syllables, while his bandmates imitated a trumpet or upright bass with their voices.
The group eventually became the darling of white liberal audiences and sang at John Hammond Sr.’s “Spirituals To Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938 and at Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 inauguration. You can hear the Golden Gate’s pioneering 1937-40 recordings on the 25-song anthology Travelin’ Shoes (RCA Heritage), and their later 1941-50 recordings on the 20-song anthology Swing Down, Chariot (Columbia/Legacy).
This innovative “jubilee” style was unlike anything else that had come before it in gospel, and it proved especially popular with younger listeners such as those who gathered around the radio at the Talladega Institute for the Deaf and Blind.
“The Golden Gate Quartet was our model,” Fountain acknowledges, “because that’s what we listened to every day. They had something nice that we had never heard before. Jubilee is a fast type of gospel, and it included what we called rapping tunes. It was like the rapping people today, but they were rapping to the melody. Today they drop their voices and rap out of tune. They’re rapping about the devil, but we were rapping about Jesus.”
