The Blind Boys Of Alabama – H A L L E L U J A H ! Yeah Yeah Yeah !
When the Happy Land Jubilee Singers decided to leave school and become professional singers in 1944, it was as much an economic decision as an artistic one. The Talladega Institute had left these blind youngsters ill-prepared to support themselves; the sextet’s polished imitations of the Golden Gate Quartet offered at least the possibility of making a living.
The group recorded its first 78 single, “I Can See Everybody’s Mother But Mine”, for Coleman Records in 1948. Fountain’s impassioned lament for a dead mother was so heart-grabbing that it became a hit. Soon the Happy Land Jubilee Singers were pressured to record a series of similar “mother songs” — “Alone And Motherless”, “When I Lost My Mother”, “Goodbye Mother”, etc.
“Those mother songs were a phase we went through,” Fountain recalls. “Those songs got us over in the churches in the black community, because people like to hear about their mother who has passed and gone. When I had my mother, I didn’t mind singing those songs, but when I lost mine, I stopped singing them because I knew how it felt.”
By the mid-’40s, a new sound was taking over gospel music, supplanting the jubilee style. Pioneered by the Soul Stirrers and their compelling lead singer R.H. Harris, this new approach was less intricate and less swinging than jubilee; it featured a rough, shouting lead over smooth harmonies and a stomping beat. It was less like jazz and more like the blues, and it spread like wildfire through black churches.
It was soon dubbed “quartet” style gospel, though the groups were often quintets or sextets. Neither as anonymous as the large gospel choirs nor as individualistic as the soloists, these small vocal groups boasted a give-and-take between the lead singer and the backing singers that was exciting to witness. And because the rhythms and harmonies were so basic, the style encouraged freewheeling improvisation.
A good introduction to this phenomenon is the 26-song anthology Kings Of The Gospel Highway: The Golden Age Of Gospel Quartets (Spirit Feel/Shanachie), which includes tracks by the Soul Stirrers, the Pilgrim Travelers, the Swan Silvertones, the Spirit of Memphis, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, and the Sensational Nightingales. When the Happy Land Jubilee Singers adapted to this new style, they discovered that Fountain could sing rougher and louder than anyone.
In 1948, a New Jersey promoter named Ronny Williams had the idea of booking the group in tandem with the Jackson Harmoneers. He advertised the Newark concert as “The Battle of the Blind Boys: The Blind Boys Of Alabama vs. the Blind Boys Of Mississippi.” The show was a triumph, and soon it was repeated all over the East. Before long, audiences so often referred to the two groups as the Five Blind Boys Of Alabama and as the Five Blind Boys Of Mississippi that the quintets gave up their original names and adopted the promoter’s monikers.
“We became archrivals,” Fountain remembers. “It was personal as well as professional. We thought we were the best blind group, and they thought they were. The shows were great, because the adversity was so great. We’d open up with one or two selections. They’d come up and do two, and then we’d declare war, so to speak. A lot of times we’d taunt each other onstage. ‘How do you like that?’ we might say, or ‘What do you think of that?’ We’d go back and forth till it was clear who had ‘tore’ the house up.”
Just imagine yourself back in 1949, crammed into the wooden pew of a brick Baptist church in Philadelphia or Chicago. After the minister’s benediction, six young black men walk onto the riser. Wearing dark suits and wraparound shades, they move like a train, each man clutching the shoulder of the man in front of him. You realize that all but the lead man is blind, and as soon as they introduce themselves with a thick drawl, you realize they’re from the deep South.
When they begin to sing, oh Lord, you never heard anything like it. They start out slick, crooning jubilee style, accompanied only by a guitar with a tiny amp. But when that moon-faced fellow, the one they call Fountain, starts to twitch and shout, the whole room catches fire. His enormous tenor is filled with rasps and growls as if it were scraping past all the hard times the singer and the churchgoers have ever experienced.
After a few numbers, the Blind Boys Of Alabama shuffle over to one side of the sanctuary, and another train of six blind men comes puffing up to the riser. They are the Blind Boys Of Mississippi, and their lead singer, Archie Brownlee, can match Fountain shout for shout, growl for growl.
Soon the two groups are trading songs, and the men are standing in the pews, egging them on with shouts of encouragement, “That’s right, brother!” “You tell them!” The women spill into the aisles, where they get “happy feet” and begin moaning in unintelligible words. Some faint straight away and have to be carried off. It’s pandemonium — and except for the lyrics, it anticipates the scenes provoked by Elvis Presley and James Brown seven years later.
“We won more often,” Fountain claims, “but it was a hard hill to climb, because those guys could sing. But by us being a jubilee as well as a quartet-style group, we could do things they couldn’t do. For a while there, they were getting over on us every night by singing ‘Old Ship Of Zion’ in a unique arrangement. So we put a jubilee style on the song; we doubled the time so people could clap behind it. We sang that song right behind them and tore the place up.”