by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night KPBS announced
that at 10 p.m. — an hour earlier than usual — they were going to present a Live
at the Belly Up episode that the moment
they announced it became a “must-watch” item for both Charles and I: a show
featuring the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Preservation Hall Legacy Quintet and
New Orleans-born soul singer Irma Thomas. The Blind Boys of Alabama first came
together in 1939 when they were students at the Alabama Institute for the Negro
Blind in Talladega, Alabama and worked almost exclusively in Black churches
singing straight-ahead gospel until they were discovered at the Knoxville, Tennessee
World’s Fair in 1982 and then got cast collectively as Oedipus in Steven
Berkoff’s musical The Gospel at Colonus, a mash-up of Greek mythology and gospel music that proved unexpectedly
popular in L.A. One of the current Blind Boys, Jimmy Carter (obviously not the same one!), has been with the group since its
inception; another, Clarence Fountain, is in ill health but still sings with
them whenever he can. The current lineup is Carter, Eric “Ricky” McKinnie, Ben
Moore and Joey Williams; Williams also plays guitar for them (you could tell he
was an official part of the group even though he sang on only one or two of the
songs because he was wearing the same sort of cream-colored suit as the rest),
and Carter and McKinnie were chosen as the spokespeople for the group in the
obligatory interview segments.
Their most recent album is a tribute to Blind
Willie Johnson called God Don’t Ever Change, though they didn’t do any Johnson songs on Live
at the Belly Up. Instead they did a set of
gospel standards, mostly dealing with the
soon-this-life-will-be-over-and-I’ll-be-with-God theme — not entirely
inappropriate considering the group members’ advanced ages. (There’s a
fascinating Wikipedia page on the group but it doesn’t go into detail about how
long each of the current members have been with the Blind Boys or how they went
about finding replacements when the original members retired, tried for solo
careers, or died.) They began with, of all things, a song called “I Can See” —
though previous PBS documentaries, including the quite beautiful film The
Eyes of Me, have made it clear that
blind people don’t mind using, or hearing other people use, the word “see” as
an overall term for perception even if they can’t literally see — and then did
a quite beautiful gospel ballad called “Almost Home.” Then they did a song
called “God Knows Everything” that had something of the same feel as Mahalia
Jackson’s “God Knows the Reason Why” — and after that the horn section of the
Preservation Hall Legacy Band joined them for the gospel standard “Uncloudy
Day” (a song I first heard from the Staple Singers, though they may not have
been the first to record it; according to Wikipedia the song was actually
written by Josiah Kelley Atwood in 1879, though the Staple Singers’ two versions,
from 1956 and 1965, were the ones that established it in the gospel repertory
and inspired Willie Nelson, of all people, to cover it in 1977) and a beautiful
wailing version of “Amazing Grace” in which they kept the familiar words but
tweaked the melody into a minor key, to quite moving effect.
The Preservation
Hall Legacy Quintet is an offshoot of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which
was started in 1960 by a white couple, Alan Jaffe and his wife, who were
running an art gallery in New Orleans and decided to assemble the survivors of
the glory days of New Orleans jazz — though New Orleans revivalists had been
putting bands together of the survivors at least since the rediscovery of
trumpeter Bunk Johnson in 1940 and his first recording session in 1942. The
Preservation Hall Jazz Band adopted an unusual solution to the problem of
mortality among its members: when a member died he or she was quite likely to
be replaced by a direct descendant. I noticed this on a previous PBS special on
the parent group in which some of the listed personnel had the same last names as ones I’d heard on their previous
performances and records (including a free concert they gave at San Francisco’s
Stern Grove in 1972 which featured at least two musicians who’d recorded with
Bunk Johnson, trombonist Jim Robinson and bassist Alcide “Slow Drag” Pavageau)
but different first names,
and I quickly caught on that the deceased musicians were being replaced by
their kids, many of whom played the same instruments as their forebears. That
show featured drummer Joseph Lastie, whose father Melvin Lastie had been the
drummer of Cosimo Matassa’s great New Orleans studio band which backed Fats
Domino and Little Richard, as well as lesser-known but almost equally great New
Orleans R&B and rock artists like Huey “Piano” Smith.
The Legacy Quintet
was apparently founded in order to be able to send a band out on tour while the
main personnel hold down the fort in New Orleans, and it’s not entirely a
traditional New Orleans Dixieland ensemble; though there’s a trumpet and a
trombone in the front line (and both the trumpet and trombone players also
sing), their reedman (who looked younger than the rest) plays saxophone instead
of clarinet — usually he plays a Sidney Bechet-style soprano sax during the traditional
ensembles but also doubles on alto and tenor (and played a quite lovely tenor
solo during “Amazing Grace”). Also they use only two rhythm instruments, a
drummer and an electric keyboardist whose instrument is basically set up to
sound like the Hammond B-3 organ/Leslie speaker combination Jimmy Smith made de
rigueur for jazz organists; the
camera didn’t get close enough to show whether this instruments has foot pedals
for playing bass lines like a regular pipe or electronic organ, but it sounded
like bass notes were coming from somewhere and that’s the most likely place. The Legacy Quintet played two songs,
“Bourbon Street Parade” — which Louis Armstrong recorded with the Dukes of
Dixieland, so the Legacy Quintet’s trumpeter not only sang on the song but did
part of his vocal as an Armstrong impression — and “St. Louis Blues,” which
began with a surprisingly cacophonous collective ensemble from which the melody
gradually emerged. Then Irma Thomas came out and, alas, got to do only one song
solo, “Love Don’t Change.”
The Wikipedia page on her describes her as a
contemporary of Aretha Franklin and Etta James, which will give you an idea of
what she sounds like even though the Wikipedia writer ruefully notes that she “never
experienced their level of commercial success.” Perhaps that was because she
spent virtually all her recording career on small labels, many New
Orleans-based, like Specialty, Ron and Minit; in the late 1960’s she cut some
sides for Chess, which had broken Etta James as a major soul star, but she
didn’t really reach beyond the Black R&B audience until Jim Jarmusch used
one of her records in his 1985 film Down by Law. Irma Thomas’s Wikipedia page also notes that “as a
teenager she sang with a Baptist church choir,” which of course is absolutely
no surprise; I’ve been harping on this point for a long time, but I’ll say it
again — one of the most pernicious and destructive myths of the music business
is the one about how African-American singers in the R&B and soul styles
had these “untrained voices.” B.S.: you do not sing as well as Aretha or Tina
Turner or Patti LaBelle do for as long as they have without having had
professional vocal training, and these great singers got their voices trained
right by the choir directors in the churches where they started out as kids.
The myth of the “untrained” Black soul voice is particularly destructive to
white singers who grow up believing it and thinking that the only thing they
have to do to sound like Aretha or whoever is to stand up in front of a band
and scream. So many aspiring white singers like Bonnie Tyler and Stevie Nicks
blew out their voices way too early because they didn’t realize that soul
singers need vocal training just as much as opera singers do — and I’m
convinced that even if Janis Joplin had lived her career wouldn’t have lasted
much longer because her voice wouldn’t have withstood the punishment she
inflicted on it. (When I heard the posthumously released version of Janis
covering Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” my thought was, “Damn! She
died just when she was starting to learn how to sing.”)
Irma Thomas didn’t get
to show much of herself in this show — I suspect she had more to do in the
complete Belly Up appearance at which this telecast was filmed, especially
since this was part of a late 2017 concert tour at which all three acts
received billing but Irma was on top. She just sang “Love Don’t Change” (the
song’s next line is, “But people do,” which will give you an idea of what it’s
about) and then joined the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Preservation Hall
Legacy Quintet for a finale on the Pete Seeger-Lee Hays song “If I Had a
Hammer.” Charles and I had just heard this song similarly gospel-ized on Sam
Cooke’s live album from the Copacabaña nightclub in 1964. (Cooke’s live album
from the Harlem Square Club in Miami in 1963, though not released until 1985,
is generally considered better than the one from the Copa because, playing to a
Black audience, he was considerably wilder — but his choice of material at the
Copa was more adventurous, including “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the
Wind.”) Charles joked, “This is what Pete Seeger would have sounded like if
he’d been Black and gone to church,” and the artists on this Live at the
Belly Up show (copyrighted 2018 but
obviously filmed in late 2017) completed the process of “gospel-izing” the song
and putting over its message of justice, freedom and love between all humanity
at least as well as Seeger’s group The Weavers did and considerably better than
the pop versions by Peter, Paul and Mary and Trini Lopez we got in the 1960’s.
