Marie Knight – The last mile of the way
As with Davis’ recordings for Perfect, Knight’s single was well-received, climbing as high as #35 on the Billboard R&B report; it even bubbled under the Pop 100 at #124. The trouble, she said, was that she never wanted to make the record in the first place.
“It was the manager from the record company’s idea,” she explained. “I tried to do R&B, but after maybe a year or so, I said to myself, ‘I got to go with what’s a part of my life.’
“R&B just didn’t work for me,” she reiterated, before adding, with the faintest hint of pride, “but ‘Cry Me A River’ did go over pretty big.”
From Sam Cooke to Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles to Al Green, countless singers have crossed over from gospel to pop, gloriously blurring the boundaries between the two genres of music. Knight, however, is adamant about the difference between praise and performance. “To be an entertainer is one thing,” she insisted. “To be a performer with the church is another.”
The fevered heights to which she and Tharpe drove each other on their electrifying 1940s recordings of “Up Above My Head” and “Didn’t It Rain” for Decca certainly suggest as much. With Sister Rosetta’s keening soprano scaling the mountaintops and Knight’s rich contralto scouring the valleys, the two women, spurred on by the virtuosic likes of bebop drummer Kenny Clark and blues pianist Sammy Price, accounted for some of the most breathtaking call-and-response in all of gospel music.
Tharpe was already an immensely popular entertainer when she first heard Knight, then just a teenager, singing with Mahalia Jackson at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 1946.
“Mahalia was very generous,” Knight said. “She was the type who would let me work as a single on the floor even though it was her show. I didn’t know that Rosetta was in the audience that day, but after she heard me sing, she got my address and came to my house in Newark. She said, ‘I could enjoy working with you very much.’
“At the time,” Knight went on to explain, “Rosetta was a box-office attraction, but she wanted to start a team with me. She was very uplifting about it. And with both of us being from the church, we had very few rehearsals because the songs we did we had done so often in church. Her voice was so high and it teamed so well with mine.”
The two women’s comedic instincts also meshed, especially in “Saints And Sinners”, a bit of vaudeville-style hokum that figured prominently in their act during the late ’40s and ’50s. “Rosetta was the saint and I was the sinner,” Knight said, recalling the routine, which involved the two women trading their stylish stage gowns for “hayseed” attire.
“I would come out onstage with a small mandolin and she would have her guitar and, because I was the sinner, I would always play in the wrong key. Rosetta would then put the song back in the right key and I’d set the mandolin down and we’d sing with piano and guitar and really sell it. It was the pleasure of my life working with her.”
Much the same is true of Campbell’s experience working with Knight on Let Us Get Together, especially given the material they worked with. “I’ve been a Rosetta Tharpe fan for 30 years, and I’ve always thought that hearing her and Marie singing together was the best of it,” he said.
“I used to live in Jackson, Mississippi, in the mid-’70s, and I saw the Dixie Hummingbirds there one time,” added Campbell, who produced the Hummingbirds’ final album with the late Ira Tucker, 2003’s Diamond Jubilation. “They just totally blew my mind. I tried to absorb as much of that classic gospel stuff as I could after that, and Marie Knight’s name was all over it.”
Campbell had been an aficionado of the sanctified blues of the Reverend Gary Davis long before he immersed himself in the world of postwar gospel.
“When I first started playing, I was all over his stuff and had to learn every note,” he enthused. “I never saw him live, but I did see him on Pete Seeger’s ‘Rainbow Quest’ show on PBS, and that killed me. To have a chance to marry the music of Reverend Gary Davis and Marie Knight, to put them together, what else do you want to be doing with your life?”
Lately, Campbell — who is perhaps best known for his tenure in Bob Dylan’s band, including his stunning fretwork on the album Love And Theft — has been carving out a niche for himself as a rocker with a preternatural feel for black gospel music.
The Dixie Hummingbirds even cut “Someday”, the song he wrote after seeing the group perform back in the ’70s, on Diamond Jubilation. “I never thought I’d get to use it because I didn’t work in the gospel field,” Campbell said. “Then, all these years later, I’m producing an album of theirs and I bring the song out and they record it.”
“My spirituality is personal and unique; it’s not conventional at all,” he added, elaborating further about his affinity for gospel music. “But I don’t go after this music for its religious content so much as I do for its spiritual content. Which to me means the soul of the performer or the writer expressing what they’re feeling.
“The best gospel is heartfelt music. That’s what makes it good. Whether it has spiritual content or not, it’s good music. That’s what draws me to it. Whether it’s rock ‘n’ roll, blues, country or gospel, if you’re getting that, I want to be involved.”
To Knight, however, the spiritual content of the music is what matters most.
“I been with the church all my life, first in Newark and then other places,” she said. “It’s my life. It’s a part of me. It’s what I do.”
ND Senior Editor Bill Friskics-Warren is the author of I’ll Take You There: Pop Music And The Urge For Transcendence. He is the senior pop critic at the Tennessean in Nashville.