The Blind Boys Of Alabama – H A L L E L U J A H ! Yeah Yeah Yeah !
The Five Blind Boys Of Alabama always had at least one member who could see, because they needed someone to drive the car, handle the laundry and count the money. But while the seeing members of the group (J.T. Hutton, Paul Exkano, Samuel Lewis, Percell Perkins, etc.) came and went, the blind members (Fountain, Scott, Carter, Fields and Thomas) stuck with the group through thick and thin. Fountain, Scott and Carter are still the core of the current group and the current album. Fields and Thomas join in whenever their failing health allows.
“The blind fellows always stuck together,” Scott explains, “right or wrong, no matter what. Sighted people don’t think like blind people; they think because we’re blind we should do this or do that, or shouldn’t do this or shouldn’t do that. They don’t realize we have to live like everyone else. And when it came to music, we did our own arrangements. If a sighted singer joined us, he had to go along with our style; we didn’t go along with his.”
The Five Blind Boys Of Alabama made their greatest recordings for Specialty in the mid-’50s. The years from the mid-’40s through the late ’50s have deservedly been called the Golden Age of Gospel, and Specialty captured much of it.
The label, now owned by Fantasy, has in recent years reissued splendid anthologies by the Five Blind Boys Of Alabama (Oh Lord — Stand By Me/Marching Up To Zion and The Sermon), the Soul Stirrers with R.H. Harris (Shine On Me), the Soul Stirrers with Sam Cooke (Jesus Gave Me Water, The Last Mile Of The Way, and Sam Cooke With The Soul Stirrers), the Soul Stirrers with Johnnie Taylor (Heaven Is My Home), the Pilgrim Travelers (Walking Rhythm, Better Than That, and The Best Of The Pilgrim Travelers), the Swan Silvertones (Heavenly Light and Love Lifted Me/My Rock), and the Chosen Gospel Singers with Lou Rawls (The Lifeboat). All these groups can be heard on volumes one and two of the excellent anthology Golden Age Gospel Quartets.
By the end of the 1950s, the Golden Age was coming to a close. Gospel stars such as Cooke, Rawls, Wilson Pickett and Solomon Burke had all crossed over to R&B (Taylor would join them in 1963). Those singers who remained found the gospel audience shrinking in a world where African-Americans could buy records by gospel-flavored pop singers and could attend shows in newly desegregated theaters.
The Blind Boys Of Alabama left Specialty and recorded for Keen, Savoy, Vee Jay and Jewel. Fountain left the group in 1969 for a solo gospel career on Jewel, while his bandmates soldiered on without him. They might have gone on that way forever, performing for smaller and smaller all-black audiences and recording for smaller and smaller labels, had it not been for an avant garde New York theater piece.
In 1981, Lee Breuer (co-founder of the Mabou Mines Theater Company) and Bob Telson (keyboardist for the Philip Glass Ensemble) hatched the idea of retelling Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex, in the form of an African-American church service. This story of an exiled prince who unwittingly kills his own father and marries his own mother and then blinds himself with shame was renamed The Gospel At Colonus.
With a blind tragic hero as the lead character, the show’s creators — longtime gospel fans — immediately thought of the Blind Boys Of Alabama. They reunited the group with Fountain for workshops that began in 1981. The Gospel At Colonus opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983, moved to Broadway the following year, and traveled to Washington’s Arena Stage, where I saw the production at the end of 1984.
The show opened with 32 choir singers in bright African gowns on benches as Morgan Freeman took the pulpit and declared, “I take my text today from the Book of Oedipus.” As the choir shouted “Amen!” and “Sho’ nuff!” to every sentence, Freeman described the prince’s crimes and self-mutilation. The blind man had now come to the town of Colonus, where he planned to live out his final days.
But the townspeople of Colonus, represented by J.J. Farley & the Original Soul Stirrers, didn’t want such an outcast living among them. They sang the Breuer-Telson hymn, “Stop, Do Not Go On”, and Fountain, in the role of Oedipus, answered with pleas to let him stay. The number built to a see-sawing, call-and-response roof-raiser.
The whole show followed the same pattern. As the preacher/narrator, Freeman would set up each situation, and then Fountain as Oedipus, the Blind Boys as his private echoes and the Soul Stirrers as the community sang their way through the dramatic conflicts. The show was popular everywhere it went, and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen co-produced the soundtrack album.
“Oedipus was a blind guy, and I was a blind guy, so that fit me to a T,” Fountain explains. “Morgan Freeman had the talking part, and I had the singing part. He couldn’t sing and I couldn’t act, so it came out all right. When I did my part right, I got over like a fat rat. The music was rock ‘n’ roll, but the lyrics were OK, and we put the songs in a religious feel. That’s where we came in; we put everything in the right place. They didn’t show us how to sing it; we sang it the way we wanted to sing it.
“The best thing about the show is it gave us a chance to go all over the world. And I learned something — you can’t sing just to black churchgoers. You can’t hardly make a living that way, but if you can go to Japan or France, you can do real well. It was like taking candy from a baby in Japan. We just tore them up.”
“The Gospel At Colonus helped us out a great deal,” agrees Jimmy Carter. “That’s when a lot of people who didn’t even know about gospel music found out about us. We had been singing to mostly black audiences, but we found out that white audiences would accept gospel music, too. We hadn’t known that. We found we could sing for the masses of people without changing our message.”