Early Gospel Singers – C

Jesus Paid For It All

Born Irene Ambergey in Neon, Kentucky, Martha was exposed to gospel music at an early age. She traveled the region with “The Family Singers,” a gospel group consisting of her mother, father, uncle, and grandfather. At the age of ten, she traded her calf to a neighborhood boy to obtain her first guitar, and she taught herself to play from the Spiegel Chord Book. In her early teens, she and her two sisters, Opal and Bertha, began performing regionally. Billing themselves as “The Sunshine Sisters,” they played folk, gospel, and sentimental songs.

The sisters joined briefly with the Coon Crook Girls in Renfro Valley, Kentucky, and later relocated to Atlanta as the Hoot Owl Holler Girls on WSB Radio. The girls had already adopted the stage names of Minnie (Opal), Mattie (Bertha), and Martha (Irene). Thus, when she met and married James Carson Roberts, a mandolin player, Irene became known as Martha Carson.

Martha and James attained considerable success as a guitar/mandolin duo throughout the 1940s. However, they separated in 1950, which made a number of fans bitter. While Martha was touring with Bill Carlisle in the Smoky Mountains, one fan made a harsh comment regarding the breakup that reduced Martha to tears. But it was during this outpouring of tearful emotion that Martha was inspired by God. Her mind was touched with the thought, “I’m satisfied and you’re satisfied.” She picked up a dirty blank check off of the floor of Bill Carlisle’s car and began writing down the words to what would become her first solo Capitol release and her most beloved song. Martha penned the words to “Satisfied” and a gospel music legend was reborn.

Martha’s first recordings for Capitol were groundbreaking in many ways. Ken Nelson, who supervised the recording, gave her total creative freedom, allowing her to perform her upbeat gospel songs with a tight, economical band and a lot of rhythm. Martha’s unique phrasing and the innovative guitar style of young newcomer Chet Atkins resulted in music that was different enough from the familiar country sounds to appeal to a broad base of people. “Satisfied” was the first gospel song to ever top the country charts and to cross over onto the pop charts as well. Other artists, including Elvis Presley, have recorded the song over a hundred times.

She remained in the music scene during the later 60’s and the 70’s, writing and performing in Tennessee, but she did not record again until the Starday/Gusto, company approached her in 1977, asking her to re-record some of her songs for a Greatest Hits album. Martha agreed, and even recorded some of the new songs she had recently written.

In the late 70’s, with her two sons grown, she began to devote more time to her love of music, playing many areas of the southern states. Audiences young and old, greeted her with great affection. She made appearances on the Ralph Emery Show and The Nashville Network, and one of her songs was even featured on an episode of the TV series “Fame” in 1983. Unfortunately, her comeback was cut short by the untimely illness of her husband, Xavier. She went into retirement to care for him until his death in November 1990.

Martha continues to write, record and perform her special style of gospel music. As a recording artist, Martha can look back on a musical career that influenced American music as a whole. Her recording of “Satisfied” is among the collection of The Smithsonian Institute as a musical milestone. As a warm and grand lady, a great and influential artist, it seems certain that she will continue to thrill and inspire many an audience with her one of a kind projection. Her heartfelt rendering of the music of a happy spiritual!

Source: Angelfire.com

The group came together in Cleveland, OH in 1914 thanks to the efforts of John H. Parker, the son of an ex-slave who in 1855 had used the Underground Railroad to flee from Kentucky to Raleigh, Ontario where Parker was born on land set aside by Queen Victoria to be bought by former U.S. slaves. In 1885, young Parker moved with his family to Ypsilanti, MI. By 1900, he was living in Cleveland where he soon began performing with something called the Buckeye Quartet. Parker’s first contact with the Christian & Missionary Alliance occurred in 1909, and within a few years, he was asked to form a quartet named for the organization. The group initially consisted of tenors Parker and Spurgeon R. Jones; baritone Henry D. Hodges, and bass singer Alexander E. Talbert. The unit was expanded to a quintet by the addition of lead tenor Floyd H. Lacy, a postal worker who Parker heard performing with a secular group billed as the Musical Magpies.

The distances covered by the Christian and Missionary Alliance Gospel Singers have got to exceed those of any African-American gospel ensemble of the early 20th century. Regionally popular in Pittsburgh, Erie, Toledo, and Chicago, they made it to a mass revival meeting in Toronto in 1922, then toured west to Edmonton, Calgary, Brandon, and Winnipeg. By this time they were so successful that the members were able to quit their regular jobs and devote themselves to full-time religious harmonizing. It is interesting to note that they toured the northern United States from coast to coast but never apparently in the South, where as educated and relatively privileged Negroes, they would have clashed with that region’s racially delineated caste system. Aside from a handful of sides issued on the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle record label, this group recorded exclusively for Columbia, turning out two dozen sides in 1923-1924. After visiting Britain in 1930, they spent the next six years serenading audiences in Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, and Latvia. Surely citizens of those northern countries would have enjoyed a robust performance like “Good Bye Pharoah,” which sounds for all the world like it’s being sung by a troop of Royal Canadian counties or a barbershop quartet in Thunder Bay.

Coleman was born to a family of sharecroppers in Gainesville, Alabama, United States. While he and his three brothers endured hard physical labor, he was exposed to musical influences from his fellow sharecroppers in singing and discovering traditional folk songs. At age 12, he was introduced to the harmonica, in large part teaching himself, and was encouraged by his parents to hone his skills as an alternative to their wearying occupation. He performed locally for small wages at dance halls and parties.

In 1914, upon the outbreak of the First World War, Coleman joined the United States Army and was stationed at Fort McClellan for the entirety of the conflict. At the fort, he developed a reputation for being stubbornly independent, often disobeying the Army’s strict code of conduct. As a result, his superior officers would call him Jaybird, a nickname associated with him for the rest of his life. During this time Coleman first performed for large crowds as he entertained his fellow soldiers. After his military discharge, he briefly returned to Gainesville, working for a few months as a farm labourer, before relocating with his younger brother, Joe, to Bessemer, Alabama, and becoming a full-time musician.

In 1922, Coleman teamed up with the singer and guitarist Big Joe Williams in tours across Alabama. He then traveled for two years with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, a popular tent show, making appearances throughout the South. Returning to Bessemer, Coleman married a popular local singer, and the couple supported themselves by performing as a duo. The Colemans were regular churchgoers and were renowned in the black community for their renditions of gospel songs. As a blues musician, Coleman was popular with black and white audiences alike. Occasionally he would play a harmonica as he strolled through the streets, drawing a crowd that followed him.

In 1926, Coleman began recording for Gennett Records, Silvertone Records, and Black Patti Records as a solo performer and as a member of the Bessemer Blues Pickers. His records were met with commercial success, but he asserted he was never compensated for his work. Despite his treatment by white-owned record companies, he allowed a charter of the Ku Klux Klan to manage his touring schedule and expand his audience to major southern cities. Typically, Coleman’s performances featured little or no accompaniment in a style rooted in the work songs of his childhood. He particularly favored the high-pitched E and D harps and played them with a heavily choked cross-harp technique, marked by a rapid hand vibrato. In the 1930s, Coleman was loosely associated with the Birmingham Jug Band, a group he helped form, and recorded with them in sessions for OKeh Records and Columbia Records. In 1930, he recorded “Coffee Grinder Blues” for Columbia, which, in a dispute with the label over payment, he blocked from wider release. It is his rarest record.

Coleman continued to perform on street corners in Alabama throughout the 1930s and 1940s. By the end of the 1940s, he disappeared from the music scene. He died of cancer on January 28, 1950, in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Sources: Wikipedia et al

Collins was born in Louisiana and grew up in McComb, Mississippi, just across the state line. By 1924, he was performing in local barrelhouses, often with King Solomon Hill; both of them sang falsetto parts and played slide guitar. Collins’s first recording in 1927 was “Yellow Dog Blues”, made for Gennett Records and recorded in Richmond, Indiana. His bottleneck guitar was referred to as a “git-fiddle” on record labels of the time, and blues historian Robert Palmer noted that his guitar “seemed to literally weep”.

Collins recorded again in 1931; some of his later recordings appeared under different pseudonyms, such as Jim Foster, Jelly Roll Hunter, Big Boy Woods, Bunny Carter, and Salty Dog Sam. His rural bottleneck guitar pieces were among the first to be compiled on LP.  In the late 1930s, Collins relocated to Chicago, where he died from heart disease in October 1949, at the age of 62.

Sources: Wikipedia et al

I Want To Be Like Jesus In My Heart
Lead Me All The Way

“One of the great gospel recordings of yesteryear is “Memphis Flu” by Elder Curry. Recorded in 1930 the lyric describes that the influenza epidemic that spread through Memphis in the years following the First World War. The track is propelled by Elder Charles Beck’s stomping eight-to-the-bar piano and Elder Curry’s melodic guitar playing while Jo Ann Williams powers through the lead vocal while a raucous congregation urged her on. As the [Document Records] sleevenote rightly acknowledges, “The performance possessed an indescribable ebullience that surely must have prepared the way for the descent of the Holy Spirit.” None of the seven other Curry sides here quite reached that same atmosphere though the powerful denouncement of illicit alcohol, “Drinking Shine”, comes close”.
– Tony Cummings, Cross Rhythms: Document BDCD-6035 Review (www.crossrhythms.co.uk)

“Biographically, little is known of these performers. According to Gayle Dean Wardlow’s note to Origin LP OJL-13 (where “Memphis Flu” was first reissued in 1966), Elder Curry was “a preacher and elder in the Church of God in Christ since 1915” and had “active churches in both Morton and Jackson, Miss. (1965)”. In the same notes Wardlow stated that Elder Charles Beck was considered by Curry to be the best sanctified player in Mississippi and was a member of Curry’s church before relocating to Memphis, Chicago, and Africa, where he was a missionary at the time those notes were written. Additional information was collated by Ray Funk in 1991 for Columbia CK 46779. In those notes, Funk reports that Beck was ordained a minister in the Church of God in Christ by Bishop Mason himself (who founded the sect in 1895 in Memphis), and was an important itinerant minister for them with congregations in Buffalo, Jacksonville, and Pittsburgh. In postwar years, Beck recorded for Eagle, King, Deluxe, Gotham, Chess, Chart, and Folkways in a number of varying styles. Charles Beck died in 1966, survived by several children who continue his legacy in both the R & B and gospel fields”.
– Ken Romanowski, extract from Document BDCD-6035 Notes (www.document-records.com)