by Ann Powers
The popular conception of gospel’s relationship to rock and soul relies on the notion that a few key figures—Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, especially—melded the sacred and secular in a new way at mid-century. But the rock-band-style quartet long predates the emergence of these important players. For example, the group that launched Cooke, the Soul Stirrers, dominated the circuit at the same time Steele was making his mark in the Southeast in the decade before Cooke joined in 1950. Rebert H. Harris, the Stirrers’ leading man before Cooke, employed many of the same new ideas Steele explored, including a wide vocal range that slipped into a manly falsetto; a willingness to move onstage and connect with listeners; and a way of connecting spiritual devotion with detailed stories that evoked the daily toils and triumphs of quartet singing’s ardent fans.
Devotion to a very personal God fed the heat quartets released. With titles like “I Want Jesus to Walk Around My Bedside,” “Let It Breathe on Me,” “Here Am I, Send Me,” and “Be with Me Jesus,” the songs quartets favored allowed men to express an intensity of emotional connection that didn’t have many other outlets. Songs about beloved mothers were also common—a safe side step from actual love songs. In a parallel pop realm, white crooners like Bing Crosby wallowed in tenderness. But the mix of masculine strength and open, sweet passion that quartet singing had was distinctive. Women (and, though they might not say so, men) could not resist.
Southern gospel quartets became rugged, skilled working units partly because of the dirt from which they sprang. Dirt, or coal, or steel: in the South, groups often either were put together by factory or mine managers to entertain visiting bigwigs and help workers blow off steam, or came together to help alleviate the dehumanizing drudgery of industrial work. They had to be loud and flashy to rise above the toxic dust. The men who would train these groups, like the pioneering entrepreneur R. C. Foster, urged them to sing “with big voices where you could feel it with your hand!”28 A city like Birmingham, in its own paradoxical way, was part of the Great Migration that was, as the journalist Isabel Wilkerson wrote in her Pulitzer Prize–winning account of that period, “the first big step the nation’s servant class took without asking.”29 Founded in 1871, Birmingham drew in sharecroppers and their families hoping for a better chance at happiness than that slavery-by-another-name offered. In the segregated shantytowns where Jefferson County workers were made to live, they fought to thrive in what sometimes seemed like a much worse “better life.”
Gospel quartets grew out of this striving, modeling not just dignity but lionlike pride.30 Posturing and precision mattered in equal parts as the singers’ joined voices shaped elaborate musical patterns only to have one voice break through, nearing ecstatic release. Busting out synchronized moves in their Sunday suits, camouflaging their virility in the language of holy inspiration, these anointed ones were the ultimate alpha males of their popular music era. Swagger, sweat, and rhythm distinguished gospel quartets from glee club–like jubilee groups such as the Golden Gate Quartet. Jubilee groups were jazzy and popular but wouldn’t offer much to rock and roll. There just wasn’t much craziness there—or much sex.
Men like Silas Steele had sex. “Oh man, popular—is that the word for it?” Spirit of Memphis tenor Robert Reed laughed when asked by the historian Doug Seroff if Steele had pull in Memphis at the group’s height.31 Steele looks fine in publicity photographs from the period, as do all the Spirits. One shot circa 1951 shows the group—eight men strong at this point—in suits that practically shine, with big bow ties and hairstyles that codify the trends of the moment. Steele and the two singers with whom he often exchanged leads, Willmer “Little Ax” Broadnax and Jethroe “Jet” Bledsoe, are lined up in the middle like happy linebackers. Little Ax’s hand rests on Steele’s arm, his signet ring glittering.
As he did with Parnell in the Blue Jays, Silas had a special understanding with Little Ax, as did many baritone leads and their tenor counterparts during the quartet kings’ heyday. Their voices merged with a fluidity that, like the energy exchanged within a rock band, began to feel sexual as it redirected outward, inspiring the audience into greater paroxysms of self-abandonment. Generating a thrill with each other, quartet singers hit upon a pulse that was at once homoerotic and mutually enhancing. Throw Jesus into the mix, the ultimate spiritual lover, and things could get out of control.
Steele and his Blue Jays mentor Tooter Parnell had a dramatic way to show how mutual incitement lay at the heart of quartet gospel. “Parnell, the guy actually that he loved in there so dearly . . . he used to lift Steele up,” Reed said. “You know, playing with him on the stand.” At a song’s high point, Steele would jump right into Parnell’s outstretched arms, “like a little baby,” John Evans of Detroit’s Flying Clouds told Seroff. “Parnell would hold him and the people would go wild.”32
The geometry of desire within these moves and harmony sounds can be both conventionally masculine—“hard,” as the most aggressive quartet singing is called—and unapologetically feelingful. The greatest quartet kings put their own twists on the formula. Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones was priest of the falsetto; he caressed and massaged notes with his higher register in ways that would inspire Al Green, soul groups like the Temptations, and later, Prince. Ira Tucker of the Dixie Hummingbirds added a lonesome burr to his delivery that he attributed to the influence of country music. Rebert Harris was the model of power in elegance, a big man who always moved and sang with consummate control. Archie Brownlee of Mississippi’s Five Blind Boys was the opposite—a transcendent shouter whose groans and wails foreshadowed the manic sounds of garage rock.
If the preacher directed excitement, and the gospel queen let it fill her up, the gospel quartet demonstrated how to become expert at it, to direct and wield its power. Quartet singers were very self-aware about how women responded to their work, not only because that interest afforded those who wanted it some less-than-pious liaisons, but because that feminine response was what ultimately gave the groups power. Bill Johnson of the Golden Gates came up with the nickname that applied to the church ladies who’d lift up their skirts when they fell out at quartet concerts: Sister Flute. It’s a crude, funny name, evoking both the high, climaxing moan that would come from their throats, and an image both phallic and open: insert yourself here. The quartet kings had tricks to please Sister Flute. Jumping into the crowd was one. The Five Blind Boys of Alabama would take one another’s hands and leap off a theater stage at once. The smashed guitars and flung microphones of later rock bands were nothing compared to the personal endangerment quartet members risked.33
The musical innovations of the quartets also figure later within the geometry of rock’s desiring expressiveness. Though the quartets weren’t structured around bass and drums, they did introduce the persistent rhythm that rock would further develop, through the bass singer’s “pumping” technique. You can hear this early on in Bessie Smith’s gospel attempt, “Moan, You Moaners,” in which she’s backed by a quartet that rocks Smith with a steady roll. The central structural difference quartet singing bequeathed to rock was “the drive,” a bold enactment of the journey toward climax. In it, the lead singer breaks free of his fellows, improvising—reaching, teasing, trying out whatever increases the heat in the room. The backing singers focus on a single percussive phrase. They are stroking the song. Together, as Hinson explains, quartet members and their audience “transform the drive into a vehicle of sensuous inducement.”34
The images of quartet kings running around the aisles of an auditorium are very rock and roll. They’re mostly forgotten now, in part because of Sam Cooke. His style was so different—his main analogue was Jeter, who was also calm, intellectual, a subtle seducer. It’s worth remembering, though, that other singers who’d pioneer soul and inspire rockers, including Wilson Pickett, O. V. Wright, and Joe Hinton, who replaced Steele in the Spirits when he left for California, showed more allegiance to the “hard” style. Its celebration of roughness and unapologetic masculinity infiltrat
ed rhythm and blues and found a home within the rock bands of the next era.
The hard and the soft both thrived within gospel quartets. Some women found a way to modify the quartet formula. Like the rocker chicks of later eras, they presented themselves as ready and able to play with the boys, in suits, hair done up in pompadours. And they had swagger. The Songbirds of the South, female counterparts of the Spirit of Memphis, had a female “bass” named Elizabeth Darling, who pumped with the skill of a man and even recorded the blues “Bald Headed Daddy” under another name, Lydia Larson and the River Rovers—though some of her Songbird sisters, even the ones who sang anonymously on the session, considered that a disgrace.35 By contrast, softness with intensity existed within the Spirit of Memphis Quartet, in the person of Steele’s favorite counterpart, Willmer “Little Ax” Broadnax. Not as much of a showman as Steele, Broadnax had the more astounding voice. He could hit notes in his natural tenor that other men could only attain in falsetto. His tenor rang out like no other deployed by a quartet king.
That’s because Little Ax was a different kind of king. After living as a man into his seventies, Broadnax was killed during a violent fight with a younger girlfriend in 1992. An autopsy revealed that he was assigned female at birth. No one knows why the girl probably named Armatha became Willmer—a census taken when he was thirteen shows he was already identified as male by then—or why he chose a gospel path so heavily populated by alpha males. But Broadnax’s secret almost makes sense within the world of the quartet kings, where a man could be himself—or herself—at least and perhaps only within the space of a song.36
HOW MEMPHIS MADE GOSPEL ROCK
In Memphis after World War II, gospel’s alluring personalities were central to civic life, especially as it connected to the exploding local music scene. Factories springing up along the Mississippi River offered opportunities to rural migrants. At the same time, those new Memphians, along with returning soldiers, flooded the job and housing markets. Memphis was alive, unstable, and tense.37 Serving this place abuzz with change was a rapidly expanding medium: radio. Two stations made a particular impact on gospel as it fed the nascent spirit of rock and roll. WDIA was the country’s first station programmed by and for African Americans. At WHBQ, maverick DJ Dewey Phillips introduced white listeners—many of them restless, curious teenagers—to the “housewrecking” forces of rhythm, blues, and gospel.
The strides these stations made were motivated by entrepreneurship more than by anti-segregationist or musical goodwill. The former country and pop station WDIA was about to go under when its white owners took a chance on journalist Nat D. Williams, whose Tan Town Jamboree hit the airwaves in 1948. A year later, the Reverend Dwight “Gatemouth” Moore, a bluesman whose religious conversion proved to be a great business opportunity, got his own show. Moore brought the blues’s mischievousness into the pulpit, pulling stunts like offering to walk on the water (the water proved too “troubled” on the day he chose, and he turned away a disappointed crowd) and running a newspaper contest to name his newborn child. He also survived a stint in jail for stealing a Cadillac. Moore called the gospel concerts he put together “Spiritual Midnight Rambles”—a direct connection to the blues world where Thomas A. Dorsey had left Ma Rainey when he’d made his final conversion in 1932. His successor, Theo Wade, gave Silas Steele and the Spirits their own daily radio show.38
WDIA also presented concerts that put gospel acts on the bill with the rising stars of rhythm and blues. One, from 1956, saw the Spirit of Memphis and other gospel artists sharing the bill with Ray Charles, who’d made his breakthrough adapting gospel sounds to blues lyrics in “I Got a Woman” the year before.39 The gospel portion of the concert was billed as “A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land”; Charles, B.B. King, and doo-wop groups the Moonglows and the Magnificents appeared during the evening’s second half, as part of a skit comically reimagining the birth of “Rock’n Roll” within a cartoonish Native American tribe led by “Chief Moohah” and “Chief Rockin’ Horse.”
One of the other gospel ensembles performing that evening had ties to a more dignified presence on the Memphis gospel radio scene. The Brewsteraires were one of the groups organized by the Reverend W. Herbert Brewster, the composer, community activist, and pastor of East Trigg Avenue Baptist Church. Brewster had written “Move On Up a Little Higher,” the song that gave Mahalia Jackson her groove.40 If Moore and Wade were clowning holy hustlers who reveled in spiritual stunts, Brewster was a self-made dignitary, born into a sharecropper family but versed in several languages, the law, and the works of Shakespeare (all of which he tapped into for his stirring, musical sermons). He found a true star in his protégée Queen C. Anderson, a majestically voiced contralto whose emotional readings of Brewster’s hymns were a highlight of his services. “When she sang, she would put everything in her singing. And to tell the truth, you couldn’t sit under Queen C. Anderson without shedding tears when she was in the arena singing,” Nathaniel Peck of the Brewsteraires once recalled. Anderson was the powerhouse who first presented “Move On Up a Little Higher,” which Mahalia Jackson borrowed after Anderson performed it in Chicago. She died relatively young and never reached the fame she deserved. But Brewster made sure Anderson was a star in her hometown; he’d put her, the Brewsteraires, and his other group, the Pattersonaires, on a flatbed truck for mini-tours in front of the town’s grocery and furniture stores.41
This knack for musical promotion connected Brewster to a valuable friend: Dewey Phillips, a former GI who’d become a DJ on WHBQ the same year WDIA went African American. Phillips was white, but he loved rhythm and blues, and he challenged segregation on the air by playing those “race” records on his three-hour nighttime slot. He also loved gospel. Through Phillips, Brewster established himself as a presence on WHBQ, and the white kids listening soon started showing up at East Trigg. In a destabilizing spin on the norm, they’d sit in the back. “The integrated Sunday night assemblies were unprecedented events in the racially stratified city of Memphis before the civil rights era,” wrote Phillips’s biographer Louis Cantor.42 These services were something else, too: a hook-up scene.
“It was a groovy ‘in’ thing to go out to East Trigg Baptist,” Phillips’s office assistant, Bob Lewis, told Cantor. “That used to be date night. A lot of young whites would come with their dates.”43 That was a good idea, especially for poor boys who otherwise might not have been able to take their girls to hear a full band, with saxophone, accompany a roster of touring stars that included the Soul Stirrers, Clara Ward, and even the great Mahalia. One of those boys was Elvis Presley, who was courting a fellow high school student named Dixie Locke. Gospel was Presley’s favorite music in the early 1950s, and he was definitely interested in making the scene.
Nathaniel Peck recalled that Presley even once came up onto the altar and sang—“he did a number once out there, on a program . . . one time.”44 This might seem impossibly bold, especially because in most Elvis biographies, the king-in-waiting’s connection to East Trigg is often discussed as illicit: the word sneak is nearly always employed to describe Elvis going the mile down the road from his home church, the First Assembly of God, to Brewster’s joint. But Peck remembers several white singers who’d sometimes join in the chorus there, and Phillips openly advertised the service as meant for a mixed crowd. Presley may not have had his parents’ blessing, but on some level, he was just trying to fit in with the popular kids he admired.
RACE CROSSERS, PRAISE SINGERS
As gospel developed and interacted with secular pop, another strain of spirit-raising music was doing the same thing on the other side of the color line. Southern gospel, as it became known, was connected to the rising field of country music, which developed simultaneously in the 1920s; but it was equally influenced by the sounds of African American musicians, especially quartets. By the 1950s, Southern gospel was a realm distinct from African American gospel; its practitioners, however, did not always observe the rules of the Jim Crow South. One white quartet
that regularly crossed the color line at East Trigg was the Songfellows—the very group that Elvis Presley tried and failed to join a few years later.45 The dimpled and dashing Cecil Blackwood led the group, a junior contingent of a very influential unit called the Blackwood Brothers.
The Blackwoods were the crossover kings of Southern gospel, offering what artists like Pat Boone and, in his calmer moments, Elvis himself would soon provide to rhythm and blues: a respectable alternative to wilder sounds that retained as much juice as pop propriety would permit. Formed in Mississippi in 1934, the Blackwood Brothers did itinerant-musician time in California and the Midwest before reaching Memphis in 1950. Membership evolved as the ensemble, like most gospel quartets, became a brand as much as a band. When Elvis would have discovered them, the lineup included manly baritone R. W. Blackwood and “artistic” bass Bill Lyles, along with teen-idol types James Blackwood and Bill Shaw. Teenage girls—including a young future country music star named Tammy Wynette—particularly liked Shaw, going nuts when he deployed his delicate falsetto in a long vocal tease on his featured number, “Over the Moon.”46 By 1952, when the group’s single “Rock-a My Soul” hit the Billboard spiritual charts alongside the Spirit of Memphis Quartet’s “Atomic Telephone,” the Blackwood Brothers were a fully operational music machine.47 Their Dixie Lily Flour–sponsored radio show broadcast twice daily on Memphis country station WMPS, which like WDIA had a signal that reached across three states. They had a downtown Memphis record store operated by brother Doyle and a full staff to manage public appearances, merchandising, and tours.