In 1939, at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind in Talledega, Mississippi, six boys, all about the age of nine, sang together for the first time as members of the school’s boys choir. Their families had given them up to the school so that they could get a nominal education and be trained in the primary vocation available to blind African Americans: making brooms and mops.
But Clarence Fountain, Jimmy Carter, Johnny Fields, George Scott, Olice Thomas, and Vel Bozman, had a different idea. They formed a gospel singing group, the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, and started practicing in earnest and performing for soldiers at a nearby military training camp. By 1944, they were confident enough in their ability to leave school and start touring. In 1948 they conquered the gospel charts with their Vee Jay release, “I Can See Everybody’s Mother (But I Can’t See Mine),” a tune written by Fountain and featuring his searing vocals. A concert that year with the Jackson Harmoneers was billed as a battle between “the five blind boys of Alabama and the five blind boys of Mississippi,” and those names stuck for both groups.
The Blind Boys of Alabama were trailblazers in the “hard gospel” sound, where the smooth harmonies of the jubilee style were replaced by a shouting and preaching front man accompanied by a group that focused on singing powerful chords. Fountain and the Blind Boys created almost unbearable tension--and beauty--as Fountain sang ecstatically over the musical drama created by the other members. In the 1950s, Fountain and the Blind Boys were the premier house wreckers on the gospel circuit; they became legendary for their ability to emotionally destroy audiences. As Fountain said, "You have to feel the spirit deep in your gut, and you have to know how to make someone else feel it."
The group was offered countless opportunities in the 1950s and 1960s to join fellow gospel stars like Sam Cooke and move to popular music, but Fountain firmly resisted: “There was no way we were going to go pop or rock. Who needed it? Our bellies were full, we had no headaches, we were happy. When you promise God something, you don’t go back on that.” In the 1960s the Blind Boys were solidly identified with the civil rights movement, singing at many benefits for Martin Luther King’s campaign for social justice.
In 1983, on a flight from Seattle to New York City to visit a friend there, I thumbed through a Time magazine and noticed an article about a musical production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that sounded too interesting to be believable—a musical version of Sophocles’ Oedipus tragedy featuring the Five Blind Boys and the Pilgrim Travelers, Sam Cooke’s former gospel group. When I got into Manhattan I told my friend about it, and she told me that she had just been to see the show, that it was completely fantastic, and that she would genuinely love to see it again. So we got tickets.
The show, “The Gospel at Colonus,” was even more spectacular than I could have hoped for. TWO black gospel choirs, sitting facing each other on opposite sides of the stage. The most soulful pit band I have ever heard. Morgan Freeman was the interlocutor—he basically took the place of the chorus in traditional Greek tragedy. As the show began, the mostly white audience was a little unsure of how to respond to the powerful production.
Then Freeman stepped up to the lectern and intoned: “Behold, Oedipus.”
A curtain at the top of a ramp on the side of the stage parted to reveal Clarence Fountain in a gorgeous cream suit and shades, and the blind singer was led down the ramp to center stage. The choirs and the pit band tore into an uptempo gospel two-beat groove and Fountain began to do his thing—singing, and shouting, and singing, and screaming, and singing again, his arms flapping at his sides, building to an emotional breaking point, at which precise moment the singers and the band stopped suddenly and Fountain screamed and leaped backwards, his knees up against his chest, only to be caught and held in midair by a cast member standing behind him.
That was it. The audience lost its mind and from that point on just let the show take them away. The production culminated with an unforgettable tableau depicting the death of Oedipus: Fountain draped across a white piano that slowly sank into a stage bubbling with artificial smoke while the rest of the Blind Boys sang a funereal ode to the dead king. Now that’s a finish!
Fountain and the Blind Boys toured international with “Colonus.” They won their first Grammy—for best traditional gospel album—in 2001 and then they won the same award for three more years in a row. Fountain had to quit the road in 2007 due to his struggles with diabetes but continued to record with the group when his health allowed. In 2017 the two last surviving original members—Fountain and Jimmy Carter, who had started singing together sixty-nine years earlier—participated in the album “Almost Home.” As Fountain once remarked, “My theory is to do something good in the end and that will close out your longevity. After that, you can go home and sit down.”
Clarence Fountain, one of the greatest singers and performers that America has ever produced, died this morning in Baton Rouge at the age of 88.