One of the things I love about these guys is their name: you could hardly get
any simpler, any homelier.
Harmonizing Four
TV broadcast (TV Gospel Time), early 1960s
“That’s Alright”
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“I’m Going Through”
*****
Recordings, 1957
“Farther Along”
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“Motherless Child”
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lagniappe
It was 25 years ago . . . that four boys in the Dunbar Elementary School Glee Club in South Richmond [Virginia] decided to see what they could do with some close four part harmony. The director of the glee club encouraged their first efforts and pretty soon the Harmonizing Four developed to the point that the were invited to sing for civic meetings, clubs, schools, and churches all over the city.
—Program, 25th Anniversary Tribute to the Harmonizing Four, Richmond, Virgina, 1952 (quoted in Jerry Zolten, Great God A’Mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds: Celebrating the Rise of Soul Gospel Music [Oxford 2003])
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odds & ends
• Elvis Presley was a huge fan of these guys, particularly bass singer Jimmy Jones. (Jones left the group in 1958, after these records were made but before this TV appearance, to form his own group [Jimmy Jones and The Sensationals]; he was replaced by Ellis Johnson.)
• One of the group’s members, Lonnie Smith (rear right on “That’s Alright”), is the father of keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith.
How much more sharply suffering probes the psyche than does psychology!
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When we see ourselves on the brink of the precipice and it seems that God has abandoned us, we no longer hesitate to ask him for a miracle.
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The kind of plagiarism which it is most difficult for any human individual to avoid (and even for whole nations, who persist in reproducing their faults and aggravate them in so doing) is self-plagiarism.
—Marcel Proust, The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time,
v. 6; trans. Peter Collier)
The Sensational Gospel Eagles, “Tell It To Jesus”
Live, South Carolina (Greenwood), 2011
Gospel groups come from somewhere; they’re rooted in a particular place. These guys, for instance, are from Greenwood, South Carolina, a town of about 22,000. The name of the high school football team? The Eagles.
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads(Kevin Nutt, gospel) —Give the Drummer Some (Doug Schulkind, sui generis, Web only)
—Daniel Blumin
—Cherry Blossom Clinic (Terre T, rock, etc.)
—Antique Phonograph Music Program (MAC, “78s and cylinders . . . played on actual period reproducing devices”)
—HotRod (“Shamanic vibrational love frequencies for the infinite mind,” Web only)
• WHPK-FM(broadcasting from University of Chicago)
Friday at the Art Institute of Chicago (after a sentencing hearing in a drug case in federal court; my guy got 86 months, which was a little more than I’d hoped for but a lot less than the 151-188 months the government sought):
Vincent van Gogh
Terrace and Observation Deck
at the Moulin de Blute-Fin, Montmarte (1887)
Slim and The Supreme Angels, “I Wanna Go”
Live, North Carolina (Branch Memorial Tabernacle, Goldsboro), c. 1996
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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lagniappe
reading table
—“Never again, never again!”
—And yet there’s a contradiction: “never again” isn’t eternal, since you yourself will die one day.
“Never again” is the expression of an immortal.
—Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary (trans. Richard Howard, 2010)
More of these handwritten diary entries, which were written after Barthes’ mother died, can be found here. (Thanks to Orange Crate Artfor the tip.)
Long after a song has ended, you still hear that voice.
Dorothy Love Coates & the Gospel Harmonettes
“I’m Just Holding On,” live (TV broadcast)
*****
“That’s Alright With Me”
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lagniappe
Were gospel to be more publicly acclaimed, she [Dorothy Love Coates] might have the stature of a Billie Holiday or a Judy Garland. Instead, for thousands of black people, she is the message carrier.
—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (6th ed. 2002)
*****
[I]t was obvious that Keith [Richards] and Gram [Parsons] enjoyed spending time together. . . . [W]e just all cared deeply about the same things. We just loved, for instance, to sit and listen to Dorothy Love Coates, the gospel singer.
music clip of the day 