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[Live & On Record]

BLIND BOYS OF ALABAMA:
BAR-ROOM PREACHERS

“We didn’t come to Boston looking for Jesus; we brought him with us,” Clarence Fountain of the Blind Boys of Alabama announced from stage at the House of Blues a week ago Wednesday. Such is the presumption of the righteous, that interesting quality Dylan wrote about in “With God on Our Side.” Yet there is circumstantial evidence that Somebody’s been in the Blind Boys’ corner as they’ve traveled the gospel road for almost 60 years. Spiritual singing was a way out of the beatings that were routine at the school for the deaf and blind where they met as teens. During the ’40s and ’50s, their tent-show, revival-hall, and radio performances, as well as their recordings for the Specialty label, helped establish the sound of gospel music as we know it. And after two decades of struggle the Blind Boys were rescued from obscurity in 1984 when they were tapped by the creators of the Off Broadway musical The Gospel at Colonus as a down-home Greek chorus. Since then they’ve etched a higher profile with recordings (including the Richard Thompson tribute Beat the Retreat) and festival appearances. Today, as core members Fountain, Jimmy Carter, and George Scott enter their early 70s, they are perhaps at the height of their career.

Much of their rare club performance at the House of Blues was taken from the new Spirit of the Century (RealWorld), their most inventive album and a hit of sorts that’s won media attention in America and has charted across Europe. (“You can get on all right over there if you can get around eatin’ the cows,” Fountain said of their recent UK and Scandinavian tour. “I’ll tell you, some chickens died so we might live.”) Dapper in matching silver silk shirts and Nehru jackets, the rubber-voiced Fountain (who stretched from resonant bass notes to hoarse growls to a gravelly falsetto), Carter, and Scott rocked through traditional selections like “Across the Bridge,” a country-flavored spiritual complete with pedal-steel-like guitar bends and a two-four beat, and “He Can Turn the Tide.” They also plumbed the Tom Waits and Ben Harper numbers from Spirit of the Century. The highlight, however, was their new flip on the kind of genre juggling that made Ray Charles notorious in the ’50s. The Blind Boys have rearranged “Amazing Grace” to the melody of “The House of the Rising Sun,” taking a blues tune about a brothel back to church. On stage this allowed the three men to work vocal magic, shifting pitches to create a weave of harmonies and joyful shouts that climaxed in Carter’s high seeker’s wail.

Although the Blind Boys are raw history, Boston’s own Silverleaf Gospel Singers opened with an a cappella set that made Fountain and crew seem like sleek modernists. If only most churches had music this uplifting — and served alcohol.

BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Issue Date: May 7 - 13, 2001