The Blind Boys of Alabama
September 7, 2003 - 8:00 pm
The Blind Boys of Alabama won their second consecutive Grammy award for Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album for this year’s Higher Ground CD. The win follows the heels of the Grammy win for their previous CD Spirit Of The Century.
The Blinds Boys of Alabama have been pilgrims on the Gospel highway for nearly sixty years now: the seed of the group took roots among friends singing informally since 1937.
Since forming their group at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind the spirit and the in 1939, they have kept alive the spirit and energy of pure Soul Gospel music.
Founding members Clarence Fountain, Jimmy Carter and Georges Scott= along with more recent arrivals Joey Williams, Ricky Mckinnie and Bobbie Butler have drawn upon gospel’s river-deep reflections on life’s trials and mastered its haunting falsettos and vibrant, muscular harmonies. And at ages when most men have retired from life’s spotlight, they continue to command the music’s heart-pounding vigor as meditation erupts into foot-stomping, rollicking celebration.
Remarkably the Blind Boys not only represents the highest standards of a charismatic American musical tradition – they also extend that tradition. Gospel has always nourished Blues, rhythm-and-blues and rock’n’roll, so it seems only natural for the Blind Boys to have found a calling in transforming popular song back into consecrated writ.
The singers have repeatedly reinvented materials associated with artists from the world beyond the church. They’ve transformed Bob Dylan’s “ I Believe In You”, on last year’s Grammy-Award winning “Spirit Of The Century” Real world. They applied that same knack to an eclectic array of tunes drawn from the Rolling Stones, Tom Waits and Ben Harper, with a band that boasted such potent instrumentalists as blues guitarist John Hammond, string maestro David Lindley and harp virtuoso Charlie Musselwhite.
To follow up that Landmark recording, The Blind Boys have taken to Higher Ground. The new album pulls together a rich assortment of classic and contemporary spiritual songs, many from the soul music tradition- with compositions from Curtis Mayfield “People Get Ready”, Prince “The Cross”, Aretha Franklin “ Spirit in The Dark”, Jimmy Cliff “Many Rivers To Cross”, Ben Harper “I Shall Not Walk Alone” Stevie Wonder’s little track and yes, even Funkadelic “Me And My Folks”.
As Clarence Fountain makes clear, the distance between a funk-fortified, groove driven R&B hit and a soul stirring of the sermon on the bandstand is only a matter of interpretation. If the message is here it will shine through.
But that’s not all, Higher Ground bridges generational and genre divides in other ways as well. The Blind Boys’s willingness to work with artists from the world of contemporary rock music marks a refreshing openness and Ben Harper’s presence on several tracks is a prime example.
Their producer John Chelew says “ When people get on in years, they get a little less elastic in their point of view, but the Blind Boys are almost the opposite of that, they are so youthful”.
