by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. I put on the much-hyped Lifetime movie The
Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel,
about the Clark Sisters, a Black gospel group from Detroit who made their first
album in 1973 for a small label owned by their uncle, Bill Moss, in their home
town, Detroit. They achieved national success in 1981 with a single called “You
Brought the Sunshine” and recorded for a subsidiary of Word Records, the
leading white church music label. I hadn’t heard of the Clark Sisters before
the promos for this movie about them started appearing on Lifetime, complete
with encomia to them by Queen Latifah, Missy Elliott and Mary J. Blige, all of
whom were listed as “executive producers” on the promos even though Queen
Latifah was the only one listed on imdb.com’s credits. There are the
predictable bits of “first-itis” — my name for the tendency of biographers to
claim that the person or people they’re biographing were the first to do a
particular thing when there were examples — often plenty of examples — of people doing it before them. The
Wikipedia page on the Clark Sisters claims, “The Clark Sisters are renowned for
their vocal stylings, dubbed as ‘the Clark Sound.’ They incorporate high and
fast melismas, acrobatic trills and riffs, and deep, soulful growls, or ‘squalls’.” Sorry, but those
are basic musical devices used by all Black gospel singers — at least all the ones we have on records.
Judging from the snippets of the Clarks’ songs heard in this film, what they
did differently from other gospel singers and groups was singing in very close harmonies (in the softer parts of their songs,
I found myself thinking, ‘This is what the Beach Boys would have sounded like
if they’d been women, they’d been Black and they’d have grown up in church”)
and pushing the melismas and trills harder than most of their predecessors.
There’s a surprisingly strong line in the Black community between gospel music
and rhythm-and-blues or soul music — which screenwriter Camille Tucker makes a
dramatic issue in the film. Even though to outside listeners (especially white
ones like me) they may seem to rely on the same musical and dramatic devices —
the melismas (the effect of “sliding” from one note to another, often doing
long runs up and down the scale on a single syllable of lyric, which in turn
requires a degree of breath control comparable to what you need to sing
coloratura parts in opera), the dramatic delivery, the emotional commitment and
passion — Black listeners, especially churchgoing ones, regard R&B and soul
as perversions of gospel and its singers as people who have almost literally
sold their souls to the devil for worldly success. There are plenty of stories
about the clash between gospel and soul — Ray Charles acknowledged in his
autobiography that he took his style from gospel but sang about “sweet baby”
instead of “sweet Jesus” (i.e., about sex instead of salvation); a month before
his death Sam Cooke was booed off the stage when he joined his old gospel
group, the Soul Stirrers, for an impromptu reunion and got catcalls like, “Get
that blues singer off the stage! This is a Christian program!” In the complete
reissue of Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace there’s an interview with Rev. C. L. Franklin, Aretha’s father and the
pastor of the largest and most influential Black church in Detroit, in which he
says, “People are always coming up to me and asking me, ‘When is Aretha going
to go back to the church?’ I say, “Haven’t you heard the way she sings? Aretha
never done left the church!”
Indeed, I found myself thinking of Aretha Franklin quite often while watching The
Clark Sisters because it seemed to me that
they were grabbing Aretha’s
no-holds-barred soul style and bringing it back to its roots in the Black
church — at times the Clark Sisters sounded like five Aretha Franklins in one
group, each trying to outdo each other on how long they could hold a note, how
long they could sustain a melisma or a trill, how much power and force they
could bring to their music. The real heroine and central character of The
Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel
isn’t any of the sisters but their formidable mother, Dr. Mattie Moss Clark
(Aunjanue Ellis, giving a scorching performance that holds this film together),
who was the international choir director for the Church of God in Christ and
also the wife of a pastor named Elbert Clark. The actor playing Elbert Clark is
not listed on imdb.com’s page for the film but he manages to make an indelible
impression even though he departs the story after the first act: he screams at
Mattie that she’s “useless” to him because instead of being a good little
pastor’s wife, appearing with him at church functions and hanging on his arm,
she’s pursuing her own career and raising their daughters to sing as a group in
the church. The tensions between Elbert and Mattie reach a climax one night
when Elbert not only declares that Mattie is “useless” to him, he throws her
oldest daughter Jacky (Angela Birchett) out of their home because Jacky isn’t his kid but the product of Mattie’s earlier marriage —
and he slaps Jacky with such force he knocks her over. Mattie divorces Elbert
and keeps the kids in the same house with her earnings as the Church of God in
Christ music director and the money Jacky is earning as a hospital nurse (Jacky
seems to be the only one who has a career outside of music), and she puts
together the Clark Sisters vocal group and rehearses them intensely to the
point where she considers them ready to perform in public.
They gradually work
themselves up through the circuit of theatres in major cities’ Black community
and break through to a secular audience even though Mattie insists that no matter
what the temptations, they stay away from the “devil’s music” and devote
themselves and their voices to the greater glory of God. At the same time the
sisters themselves — Jackie, Twinkie (Christina Bell), Denice (Raven Goodwin),
Dorinda (Shelea Frazier) and Karen (Kierra “Kiki” Sheard, daughter of the real
Karen Clark) — start getting restless over their mother’s control of both their
musical and personal lives. They attract the predictable young Black men as
suitors — one of the would-be Clark husbands is himself a church pastor, and we
groan, “Oh, no,” as we recall
what Mattie’s pastor husband did to her. Twinkie, the organist for the group (the only one who plays an
instrument) and their principal songwriter, signs a bad contract giving away
the publishing rights to all the group’s songs to a white entrepreneur in
exchange for a small advance she uses to buy a Lincoln Continental (given how
tightly their mom scheduled them, one wonders when Twinkie even found the time
to learn to drive!), and later marries a scapegrace guy who drags her off to
North Carolina with vague promises that he can find a job there even though we can tell he’s just a gold-digger and we wish she’d
leave him frantically ringing her doorbell in the ran the way Olivia de Havilland
did to Montgomery Clift at the end of The Heiress. Denice has a succession of pregnancies and ends up
with seven sons and a rather devil-may-care attitude about who their fathers
are and whether or not they’re willing or able to marry her — though she finally
does get married and withdraws
from the group to pursue a position as a minister in the church despite the
cultural conservatism of the denomination and the difficulty of a woman getting
ordained in it.
The Clark Sisters have their biggest hit in 1981 with a song
called “You Brought the Sunshine” — which the script admits was largely
“borrowed” from Stevie Wonder (writer Tucker wants us to believe mother Mattie
is so narrowly focused on church music and oblivious to the world of Black pop
she has little or no idea who Stevie Wonder is and doesn’t recognize her daughters’ borrowing his
sound). Their Wikipedia page cites this and other songs by the Clark Sisters
that made the secular as well as gospel charts in saying, “They are credited
for helping to bring gospel music to the mainstream and are considered as
pioneers of contemporary gospel.” That last sentence may be true (though it
depends on how you define “contemporary gospel” and how you think it differs
from “traditional gospel”) but that bit about them being pioneers in bringing
gospel music to the mainstream is “first-itis” with a vengeance. With my usual
snottiness about such matters, I found myself wanting to ask Camille Tucker,
“Does the name ‘Sister Rosetta Tharpe’ mean anything to you?” In case the name
“Sister Rosetta Tharpe” doesn’t mean anything to you, she was a Black gospel singer and guitarist who
started recording for Decca in 1937 and joined Lucky Millinder’s Black big band
in 1941. That year, she recorded a song called “Shout, Sister, Shout” that was
the first hit record to blend gospel and pop (13 years before Ray Charles recorded “I Got a Woman,” often named as
the first gospel-pop record to make the charts), and she followed it up with
“That’s All,” a song she’d earlier recorded on her own with just her voice and
acoustic guitar, but which she rocked up with Millinder, played electric guitar
and seemed to have beamed in from 20 years later. (Among other things, Tharpe
was almost certainly the first guitar player to shred.) You can check these
songs out on YouTube — “Shout, Sister, Shout” in a Soundies music video from
1941 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oFrMR71ehE
and “That’s All” in a dub of the Decca record at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4Lx3qvwikY
— and hear not only the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll but also the roots of the
gospel music of the 1940’s and 1950’s that shaped the Clark Sisters’ sound.
The
biopic The Clark Sisters: The First Ladies of Gospel is at its most powerful when it deals with Mattie
the ultimate stage mother and her attempts to keep her kids together and in the
service of God and steer them away from the temptations of Mammon (particularly
the offers the Clark sisters got from white businessmen who wanted to pull them
out of the group and steer them into solo careers in R&B) as well as all
these guys who wanted to get into their ample pants and get their hooks into
the fortunes they thought (erroneously) the Clark Sisters were making.
Eventually the Clark sisters all did
get married, and I wish writer Tucker and director Christine Swanson had got
more into the sheer difficulty of maintaining a group while the members are
being pulled apart by the pressures of marriage, children and at least some
attempt to maintain family lives of their own. Where the film is strongest is
in the clashes between the Clark daughters’ attempts to live their own lives
and mama’s insistence on controlling them — Mattie is such a powerful presence
at times this seems like what the musical Gypsy would have been if Gypsy Rose Lee had had four
sisters instead of just one, they’d been Black and been torn between secular
entertainment and their values from the church — and also the clash between the
entertainment world and the church. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes,
Mattie is fired from her job as church music director by the church’s elders
just after her triumphant appearance with her daughters at the Grammy Awards —
a show she had been willing to be on the sidelines for, but her daughters had
dragged her out — and the grim elders tell her that she’s suffering from the
sins of pride and ambition and should just practice “obedience.” Of course the
parallel with Jesus Christ taking on the elders of his religion couldn’t help but occur to me; I wanted to
yell at the screen, “If Jesus had followed your advice and been ‘obedient’ to
the Temple elders, your religion wouldn’t even exist!”
The climax occurs when mom dies (like some of my
home-care clients, she ignores the advice of the health professionals around
her — including Jacky, who as a nurse knows something about health care! — and finally dies of a treatable
ulcer on her leg) and the others end up in a huge argument at her funeral
before finally getting back
together (all except Denise, who quit the group just after their big success)
for a major reunion concert and CD. The Clark Sisters: The First
Ladies of Gospel is a total success on
almost every level — about my only quibble, aside from the bits of “first-itis”
in the script, is the relentlessly past-is-brown cinematography of Jason Tan, a
modern-day affectation that bothers me generally and is even worse in a film
where the principal characters are Black since their brown skins tend to fade
into the overall brown murk. Director Swanson (another triumph in Lifetime’s
giving opportunities to women directors!) stages the action vividly and gets
strongly etched performances from her cast, and the acting is uniformly
excellent even though Aunjanue Ellis as Mattie almost inevitably stands out and
the men are generally pretty blank (but then this is a woman’s story!). The Clark Sisters: The
First Ladies of Gospel is at once a
celebration of the music and the religious spirit underlying it and a tight,
moving drama about the price of fame and the need at some point in your life to
let go of your parents’ dreams and pursue your own.
