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Gospel Music in Newark

When it came to forming a music ministry for First Baptist Church, Roberts didn’t have to look very far. Newark in the mid-twentieth century was a wellspring of professional, semiprofessional, and amateur gospel singers and musicians who could, and often did, compete head-to-head with groups from New York City, its larger neighbor across the bay.

As gospel historian Ray Funk has observed, Newark’s introduction to gospel music, like most metropolitan areas, came through local male jubilee quartets such as the Southern Sons, the Silver Echo Quartet, and the Coleman Brothers. Among the city’s earliest professional and semiprofessional gospel artists, these quartets emulated the tight harmonies and percussive rhythms of the nationally popular Golden Gate Quartet and the Selah Jubilee Singers of New York City.¹ During the 1950s, these troupes, as well as other local quartets such as the Afro Quintette (also known as the Afro Jubilees) and the Hightower Brothers, began to adopt the rawer and more aggressively sung gospel quartet style popularized by the Soul Stirrers and the Blue Jay Singers of Birmingham, Alabama. Migrating to Newark from Florida, the Hightower Brothers was a family group whose secret weapon was its lead singer, the preteen Robert “Sugar” Hightower.² His exuberant presence on gospel programs was a harbinger of child soul stars such as “Little” Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson.

The Coleman Brothers are fascinating not only for their singing but for how they, as members of Newark’s African American migrant community, adapted to discrimination in employment by embracing entrepreneurship. In 1925, during the first wave of the Great Migration, three brothers, Lander, Melvin, and Russell Coleman, moved from Kenbridge, Virginia, to Montclair, New Jersey. They formed Coleman Records in 1944. Located at 59 Court Street in Newark, Coleman Records boasted a recording studio to capture the sounds of local and visiting gospel and secular talent. The Five Blind Boys of Alabama, the Original Blind Boys of Mississippi, and gospel crooner Charles Watkins were on the Coleman roster, as were R&B units such as the Ray-O-Vacs. The studio also enabled the Coleman Brothers quartet to broadcast every Sunday over Newark’s WHBI-AM. Songs they sang included Lander’s composition “Milky White Way,” a 1947 hit for the Trumpeteers gospel quartet that Elvis Presley covered in 1960. The brothers eventually purchased the building they occupied and converted it into the Coleman Hotel, a seventy-two-room inn that provided much-needed accommodations for out-of-town African Americans. Touring actors, musicians, and singers—from Ruth Brown and Billie Holiday to Big Maybelle—found lodging at the Coleman Hotel when other inns would not provide them with accommodations.³

A Newark singing dynasty worthy of a book-length biography, the Drinkard Singers (also known as the Drinkard Jubilairs) were organized by family patriarch Nitcholas “Nitch” Drinkard. Nitch and Delia Mae Drinkard migrated from Blakely, Georgia, to Newark in 1923, bringing son William and daughters Lee and Marie (“Reebie”) with them. By 1933, they had added five more children to the family: Hank, Anne, Nicholas (“Nicky”), Larry, and Emily (“Cissy”). Settling into an apartment on Court Street, Nitch worked in road repair and Delia worked at the Singer sewing machine factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey.⁴ Around 1938, a fire ravaged their apartment building, forcing the family to move. Settling into a new Newark neighborhood, they began attending St. Luke’s AME Church, where the pastor was the Reverend Elzae Warrick. It was at St. Luke’s where they began singing as a family group.⁵

Initially a mixed-voice quartet composed of Cissy, Larry, and Nicky,⁶ the Drinkard Singers expanded to include daughter Lee Drinkard Warrick (Lee married Pastor Elzae’s son, Mancel), who became the group’s manager. Reebie Drinkard Epps taught the ensemble songs to sing and ran rehearsals.⁷ Anne Drinkard Moss joined the lineup in the 1950s. When Anne departed the ensemble, they replaced her with Lee’s adopted daughter, Judy Guions. Meanwhile, Lee’s biological daughters, Dionne and Dee Dee Warrick (they would change their surname to Warwick for professional purposes), parlayed their experience as background singers into careers as popular solo recording artists. So did Guions, who adopted Judy Clay as her stage name.

Pastor Warrick left St. Luke’s around 1949, and by 1954, the Drinkards also departed St. Luke’s, shifting their affiliation to New Hope Baptist Church in Newark. Cissy, who directed the New Hope Choir and later organized its Radio Choir,⁸ would go on to form a trio of background singers called the Sweet Inspirations. The Sweet Inspirations backed top-selling artists from Aretha Franklin to Elvis Presley while also singing and recording as a unit. Born in Newark on August 9, 1963, Cissy’s daughter Whitney (“Nippy”) Houston became one of the best-selling popular music artists of all time. Her death at age forty-eight on February 11, 2012, was mourned by millions worldwide.

Harry Freeman Johnson was another local singer drawn into the Drinkard music dynasty and Roberts’s music galaxy. A native Newarker and member of the city’s Wells Cathedral Church of God in Christ, Freeman Johnson sang with his brothers and, with Larry and Nicky Drinkard, in a vocal harmony group called the Four Bells.⁹ Military service temporarily interrupted Johnson’s musical pursuits, but he returned to singing upon his discharge. Johnson’s raspy baritone—a dead ringer for James Cleveland’s gruff delivery—made him the Angelic Choir’s in-house substitute for Cleveland when the latter was unavailable.¹⁰

The Drinkard Singers noted Roberts’s own vocal proclivities at a gospel presentation held at Bishop Alvin A. Childs’s Faith Temple Church of God in Christ in New York, where the Youth Cavalcade Choir was on the program.¹¹ Roberts tells the story to gospel historian Eric Majette Jr.:

In the audience that night was the Drinkard Family…. The fellow who had been singing with them had been drafted into the service. I did a song with Bernice Bass’s Youth Cavalcade Choir, and when it was over, they sang, and I was floored by their style and their originality. I went to Miss Warrick and asked her, “Could I become a part of your group?” She said, “Well, let me pray about it.” But they heard me. They consented to let me become a member of the Drinkard Singers, and that was my initial induction into what I think of as professional gospel singing. I stayed with them two or three years.¹²

Other Newark gospel notables whom Roberts befriended while they were members of Bass’s Youth Cavalcade Choir were Constance “Connie” Pitts of the Pitts Sisters (she also soloed for True Love Baptist Church in Newark),¹³ organist Robert Banks, and pianist Leon Lumpkins (1934–2007).¹⁴ Robert Banks (b. February 3, 1930) went on to a storied career as a singer, accompanist, songwriter, producer, and recording artist in the jazz, R&B, and gospel fields. He was a stalwart recording artist and studio musician for Savoy Records before recording his own projects for Verve. Throughout his career, he worked with artists representing a broad range of styles, including the blues of Willie Hightower and the soul stylings of Solomon Burke as well as the contemporary gospel of Myrna Summers and the Interdenominational Choir. (He produced their 1970 album Tell It Like It Is for Cotillion, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records.) Greater Abyssinian Baptist Church minister of music Leon Lumpkins organized the Gospel Clefs, a piano- and organ-led male gospel group with high harmonies and unusual melodies and arrangements that emulated the highly charged, flamboyant style of female groups such as the Davis Sisters and the Ward Singers. Among Lumpkins’s many compositions for the Gospel Clefs was the exquisite 1958 “Open Our Eyes,” a prayer pleading for peace and brotherhood. Chicago disk jockey Herb “Cool Gent” Kent was so moved by its message that he concluded his radio broadcasts over WVON-AM by playing the song.¹⁵ The song crossed over into the pop world when it was covered in 1973 by Earth, Wind and Fire.

The Newark-based Unique Gospel Singers would ultimately contribute one of its vocalists, Pearl Tucker Minatee, to Roberts’s music ministry. Minatee was born on April 11, 1931, in Newark’s East Ward, the oldest of seven children of Henry Fogie Tucker and Hattie Mollie Dixon Tucker. The Tuckers were southern migrants who met and married in Newark. Pearl attended East Side High School, sang alto in the All State Choir, and was offered a scholarship to study voice at Shaw University, but she stayed home to help her family make ends meet. She attended Mount Zion Baptist Church and sang in its choir alongside her friend, Sarah Vaughan. With the Unique Gospel Singers, Pearl sang locally as well as on Anna Tuell’s New York–based religious radio program. Despite their local popularity, the Uniques recorded only eight sides for Savoy, of which four were released: “Jesus Wonderful Jesus” / “Strength and Courage” in 1954 and “I Had to Tell It” / “I Wonder Where Would You Be” in 1958.¹⁶ The Reverend Doctor Stefanie Minatee, Pearl’s daughter and the leader of the acclaimed New Jersey gospel choir Jubilation, suspects that her mother met Roberts during the period when she was in the Uniques.¹⁷

In addition to the Youth Cavalcade Choir, other popular African American choirs in 1950s Newark included the Abyssinian Baptist Church Gospel Choir, led by Alex Bradford and Leon Lumpkins; the Abyssinian Young People’s Choir, which featured lead vocals by a young Kenneth Glover; and the Back Home Choir, organized by brothers Charles and Jeff Banks. According to gospel promoter Joe Bostic, the Back Home Choir, organized around 1955, took its name from the Banks Brothers’ monthly songfest called “The Back Home Hour.” The songfest was the brainchild of southern settlers in Newark who wanted to participate in local “singing get-togethers” that reminded them of their southern worship experience. Charles amassed the Back Home Choir out of this assembly.¹⁸ The choir’s successful appearance at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival was captured by Verve Records. So was the Drinkard Singers set. Both ensembles parlayed their appearances into a record contract with RCA Victor.

Besides the Abyssinian Baptist Church Gospel Choir with Leon Lumpkins, Bootsy recalled two other choral ensembles particularly popular with black Newarkers: “The churches that were quite popular, and famous with the choirs, at that time were Zion Hill with Lawrence Roberts at the organ and choir director, and at New Hope, it was Cissy [Drinkard] Houston and her brother Nicky Drinkard. So whenever other churches had choir anniversaries, they would always hold the three choirs to the end because they knew we were going to turn it out. [There were] maybe about fifteen church choirs [in Newark], but the three choirs the people wanted to hear were our three choirs.”¹⁹

This pool of talent in Newark did not go unnoticed by the community of East Coast independent record companies, or “indies,” that emerged during and immediately after World War II. After Apollo Records in New York hit pay dirt in 1948 with Mahalia Jackson’s two-sided hit, “Move On up a Little Higher,” labels began investigating the commercial potential of the gospel choirs and groups in their own backyards. The Drinkard Singers, the Afro Quintette, the Lucille Parks Singers, the Unique Gospel Singers, the Gospel Clefs, and, later, the Back Home Choir, signed with Newark-based Savoy Records. This hometown imprint would figure prominently in the local gospel community and, with Roberts’s assistance, become one of the most important gospel record labels of all time.

Savoy Records

Record-man-turned-historian Arnold Shaw dubbed Savoy Records, founded by Herman Lubinsky in the first week of November 1942, “the first R&B label of consequence, in terms of both the artists it developed and its longevity.”²⁰ Shaw’s recollection of Lubinsky, born Hyman Lubinsky to Russian émigrés in Branford, Connecticut, on August 30, 1896, was as an “alert and hardworking entrepreneur,” “energetic,” and a “loud talker.”²¹ Indie record company expert John Broven called Lubinsky the “quintessential loudmouth, overweight, cigar-smoking record man with little apparent charm or saving graces” but added that, “for all his failings, he was a brilliant record man.”²²

Lubinsky was also a pioneering radio man. A profile in the January 1923 issue of the Radio Dealer called Lubinsky “perhaps the greatest contributor to radio progress,” noting that his decision to make the new medium a career began when he was about eight years old.²³ Indeed, the story goes, a fifteen-year-old Lubinsky happened to be serving as a wireless operator on the SS Carpathia when, on April 14, 1912, he heard and copied down distress signals coming from the RMS Titanic after it struck an iceberg and proceeded to sink. The Carpathia came to the aid of the ship’s survivors. At the outbreak of World War I, Lubinsky served as a naval radio operator and taught radio to Army men at New Haven High School. Later, he taught electrical theory and practice at the Essex County Vocational School for Boys. He contributed technical articles to electronics journals. After the war, he worked as a federal revenue agent and, by 1922, operated the Standard Electric Company in Newark. Better known as the Radio Record Shop of Newark, the business was located at 77 Elizabeth Street.²⁴

Lubinsky founded New Jersey radio station WRAZ in June 1923. The station’s call letters changed to WCBX in April 1924 and on October 15 of that year received the right to change its call letters to WNJ (for Wireless New Jersey). Listed variously as located in Newark’s Hotel St. Francis at 22–24 Park Street and in the Lubinsky home at 89 Lehigh Avenue, WNJ was known as the Voice of Newark because of its ethnic programming for a city teeming with eastern and southern European immigrants and African American migrants. Around 1933, a tussle with the Federal Communications Commission over signal range resulted in Lubinsky’s inability to renew his station’s FCC license. Exiting broadcasting, Lubinsky focused on his Radio Record Shop, now at 58 Market Street, where he sold radios, radio parts, and phonograph records. Music enthusiasts could dive into a bin of nineteencent disks and preview the latest singles in private listening booths.²⁵ On November 7, 1942, Lubinsky expanded his empire by opening Savoy Records in offices just above the Radio Record Shop. The company name was probably derived from Harlem’s popular Savoy Ballroom, nicknamed The Home of Happy Feet.²⁶ Savoy’s earliest releases were by modern jazz artists who were not being courted by major labels.

But it was challenging to open a new diskery in November 1942. Four months earlier, the increasing popularity of jukeboxes and radio broadcasts of phonograph records prompted the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), led by its authoritarian president, James Caesar Petrillo, to strike over its members’ loss of live performance revenue. The AFM demanded that royalties from each record sold be placed in a musicians’ compensation fund for the benefit of the membership.²⁷ Musicians recording in violation of the ban were in danger of incurring severe consequences from the AFM.

On the other hand, the strike gave shoestring independent record companies like Savoy a chance to gain a foothold in an industry hitherto dominated by deep-pocketed major companies like Victor, Columbia, and Decca. “The Petrillo-enforced hiatus in the record industry,” noted Billboard in January 1943, “has provided an open door for many of the lesser known labels to come to light.”²⁸ To provide new product to consumers without breaking the ban, some record companies, including Savoy, rereleased prewar recordings or previously unissued sides. Although Savoy brazenly advertised its first issues in Billboard as “not pre-war materials,”²⁹ jazz discographers believe that Savoy’s first four sides, all instrumentals, were previously unissued audition sessions Lubinsky cut in 1939 of the Dictators, a jazz combo formed by pianist Clement “Clem” Moorman.³⁰ Two of these initial sides, “Rhythm and Bugs” and “Tricks,” were released the week of December 1, 1942, on Savoy 100 as by the Savoy Dictators.³¹

The fledgling Savoy hit pay dirt with its subsequent releases on a combo called the Picadilly Pipers, featuring Moorman on piano, and recording under the recording ban–busting nom de plume of the Bunny Banks Trio.³² The trio’s “Don’t Stop Now,” with vocals by Bonnie Davis, entered Billboard’s Harlem Hit Parade chart at number eight on January 30, 1943, and made it to number one by April 10 of that year.³³ Former Savoy employee Bob Porter told researchers Robert Cherry and Jennifer Griffith that although Lubinsky, like other independent record company owners, toyed with a variety of music styles at the start, his entrepreneurial instincts suggested that black music was the most direct route to profitability.³⁴

Lubinsky did not tarry when it came to squeezing every ounce of opportunity out of the local African American music community. In 1943 he dipped into the font of black religious music by forming the King Solomon subsidiary. The first King Solomon artist was the Kings of Harmony, an a cappella quartet from New York City that sang in the style of fellow New Yorkers the Selah Jubilee Singers.³⁵ By spring 1948, Savoy was releasing gospel sides on its flagship label, assigning them to a new 4000-numbered religious series. The two initial sides in the 4000 series were by the Progressive Four, a male gospel quartet that, like the artists released on King Solomon and the pioneering Newark quartets, sang in the unaccompanied jubilee style. According to music historian Jay Bruder, at least three of the first six singles on Savoy’s newly established 4000 gospel series were leased from Lillian Claiborne and Haskell Davis’s DC diskery. The sides arrived from Gotham Records owner Ivin Ballin, who was handling DC’s pressing and distribution at that time.³⁶

Savoy signaled its shift to the emerging piano- and organ-led gospel group sound in January 1949, when it shuttered King Solomon and signed the Ward Singers of Philadelphia to its flagship label. As the Consecrated Gospel Singers, Gertrude Ward and her daughters Willarene (Willa) and Clara appeared for the first time in public as a singing trio in 1934. The trio’s appearance at the 1943 National Baptist Convention in Chicago was so well received that they began receiving invitations to sing at churches throughout the nation. Their first record, an independently pressed rendition of Mary Lou Coleman Parker’s “Jesus” (performed by Gertrude Ward and Daughters) led to a recording contract with Savoy. The single paved the way for the Wards’ more-than-decade-long string of Savoy hits. With the acquisition of Marion Williams, Frances Steadman, Henrietta Waddy, Kitty Parham, and Esther Ford, the Ward Singers evolved into an effervescent, handclapping, shouting, falsetto-note-hitting, aisle-walking, and nattily coiffed female gospel super group.

If Lubinsky was, as Shaw suggests, “more of a wheeler-dealer than a creative record man,” he also acknowledges that “either by accident or intuition, he employed a series of extremely good record producers.”³⁷ Starting in 1945, it was Teddy Reig (1918–84) who steered to Savoy some of New York’s most sophisticated jazz and bebop artists, among them Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and Dizzy Gillespie.³⁸ Savoy’s first R&B artists and its earliest flagship label gospel releases came courtesy of career record man Ralph Bass (1911–97), who worked for Lubinsky from 1948 to 1951.³⁹ When Lee Magid (1926–2007) joined Savoy in November 1950, he not only sustained the label’s share of R&B and religious artists, but he also stepped up production of sides by emerging vocal harmony groups such as the Four Buddies.⁴⁰ Fred Mendelsohn climbed aboard in 1951 after Bass departed Savoy to run King Records’ new Federal imprint.⁴¹

Fred Mendelsohn would play a significant role in the growth and sustainability of Savoy’s religious series. Born May 16, 1917, Mendelsohn was raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His initial exposure to black music was as a teenager working in a drugstore in a predominantly African American section of Brooklyn.⁴² In 1944 he became the music director for New York radio station WBNX⁴³ and started Regent Records three years later. Mendelsohn entered Savoy’s orbit in mid-June 1948 when he sold a portion of Regent to Lubinsky, who became the company’s treasurer and general sales manager while Mendelsohn remained president and artists and repertoire chief.⁴⁴ By 1949, Regent and Savoy were sharing offices in Lubinsky’s 58 Market Street location. Between Magid, whom Broven called “the hustler with the staccato speech to match”⁴⁵ and Mendelsohn, whom Shaw remembered as “husky but gentle,”⁴⁶ Savoy became a major force among independents recording and selling popular and religious black music.

Another of Lubinsky’s inspired hires was Oscar “Ozzie” Cadena. Born in Oklahoma City in 1924 and raised in Newark, Cadena started as an employee of Lubinsky’s Radio Record Shop. He produced jazz and gospel for Savoy Records between 1954 and 1959,⁴⁷ frequently using the New Jersey studio of audio engineer Rudy Van Gelder for his projects. Considered one of the most important recording engineers in jazz, Van Gelder (November 2, 1924–August 25, 2016) began his professional life as an optometrist. By 1959 he had moved into full-time recording engineering, working with Savoy and other important jazz labels such as Blue Note, Prestige, and Impulse. He was known for his fair fees and almost compulsive preparedness. Peter Keepnews, writing in the New York Times, noted that Van Gelder “was not in charge of the sessions he recorded; he did not hire the musicians or play any role in choosing the repertoire. But he had the final say in what the records sounded like, and he was, in the view of countless producers, musicians and listeners, better at that than anyone.”⁴⁸ Skilled in capturing the musical intricacies of postwar jazz and bebop, Van Gelder’s engineering and Cadena’s production gave Savoy gospel music a crispness rarely captured on disk prior to this time.

Mendelsohn and Magid enlarged Savoy’s gospel roster significantly by signing the Davis Sisters of Philadelphia away from Gotham in 1955 and the Roberta Martin Singers away from Apollo two years later, in late January 1957.⁴⁹ Whether it foresaw the rise in popularity of piano- and organ-led gospel groups, helped fuel it, or both, Savoy Records became the premier label for this fast-growing style of gospel music. In turn, gospel music became the company’s priority after the payola scandal of 1960 ruined the careers of disk jockeys such as Alan Freed and put some small record labels out of business. Savoy gradually dropped its popular line and by the early 1960s focused almost exclusively on religious music, eventually amassing what became, according to Shaw, “one of the largest catalogues of gospel records” in the country.⁵⁰

Lawrence Roberts’s relationship with the record business in general and Savoy Records in particular began in October 1957, when he decided to form a small gospel group. “Just out of a whim of seeing other folks get started,” he recalled, “I picked girls from the [Zion Hill Young People’s] choir and started my own group. And it was a success.”⁵¹ His group, the Gospel Chordettes, consisted of Bernadine Greene Hankerson (formerly of Philadelphia), Delores “Amy” Best (formerly of Detroit), Marjorie Raines, Freda Roberts (no relation, originally from Jacksonville, Florida), and Gertrude Deadwyler Hicks (Brooklyn, New York).⁵² Sandy Miller Osborne recalled childhood days sitting on the porch of her family’s home on Sherman Avenue in Newark, listening to the Gospel Chordettes rehearsing around the upright piano in their living room. She remembered how, much to her mother’s dismay, Roberts’s heavy-handed piano playing left the upright in constant need of tuning.⁵³ The Gospel Chordettes sang in and around Newark initially and then expanded its territory to New York City when Bishop A. A. Childs invited them to sing for the congregation at his Faith Temple Church of God in Christ.⁵⁴

One of the Gospel Chordettes’ most popular songs in performance was the Roberts-composed “I Can’t Believe It,” a cheerfully but pointedly critical editorial on the social ills of the world at midcentury. It reminds the listener of the headshaking critiques Sister Rosetta Tharpe chronicled in her 1946 hit, “Strange Things Happening Every Day.” In a hoarse, declamatory tone, Roberts led the Gospel Chordettes on the spunky chorus: “Fighting on the land, trouble everyplace / And just the other day they sent a Sputnik into space.”

Invoking Sputnik gave “I Can’t Believe It” novelty potential—an astute move at a time when novelty singles, especially those about outer space, science fiction, intergalactic creatures, and B-movie themes, had the potential to become radio hits.⁵⁵ But referring to the Soviet satellite was also a commentary on US anxiety during the late 1950s. When the Soviets launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957, the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation brought on by deteriorated political relations between the United States and the Soviet Union came into sharper focus. Americans gazed nervously into the sky, wondering whether Sputnik’s surveillance capability was a prelude to World War III.⁵⁶

Ward Singers matriarch Gertrude Ward heard the Gospel Chordettes sing “I Can’t Believe It” on a program the two groups shared and thought the young people might have a hit on their hands. She suggested Roberts contact Herman Lubinsky at Savoy and ask him to record the song.⁵⁷ It didn’t take much convincing. Several of Roberts’s colleagues in the Newark gospel community, likely some of the same “folks” he saw “get started,” had already released singles on Savoy. In fact, it seemed as if everybody Roberts knew had a deal with Savoy. Besides the Gospel Clefs, the Unique Gospel Singers, the Afro Quintette, the Lucille Parks Singers, and the Drinkard Singers, the Greater Abyssinian Baptist Church Youth Choir and Jeff and Charles Banks of Greater Harvest Baptist Church were also on the Savoy roster. Alex Bradford, serving as minister of music for Abyssinian Baptist Church under the church’s pastor, Reverend Raphus P. Means, a Spartanburg, South Carolina, native, recorded for Savoy’s new Gospel subsidiary.

Years later, Roberts recalled that “I went down to Savoy [at 58 Market Street]. I had written some songs, and a very dear friend of mine, Professor Robert Banks, was working for Mr. Lubinsky at the time. I let Mr. Lubinsky hear my music and find out if it had any commercial value. One of the songs I had written at the time was called ‘I Can’t Believe It.’ And he liked it, wanted to record it, and that’s how I got started.”⁵⁸ On March 3, 1958, the Gospel Chordettes entered New York’s City’s Beltone Studios to cut five sides, including “I Can’t Believe It.” Roberts’s pal Robert Banks accompanied on organ and an uncredited drummer, possibly either Bobby Donaldson or Joe Marshall, provided the song’s hard-charging backbeat.⁵⁹

Shortly thereafter, Savoy pressed and shipped “I Can’t Believe It,” backed with the Freda Roberts-led “He’s Got the Whole World in His Arms.” Savoy’s advertisement in the March 24, 1958, issue of Billboard played up the novelty component of “I Can’t Believe It” by referring to it as “the Sputnik song.”⁶⁰ A week later, Billboard featured the single in its Review Spotlight column, calling it “exuberant” and “powerful” and that it “should click with lovers of spiritual themes.” Although there was no mention of Sputnik in the magazine’s Review Spotlight, a separate critique of both sides on the following page cited the song’s “excellent lyrics tied in with ‘sputnick’ [sic].”⁶¹ Lubinsky boasted to Billboard that the song was even garnering pop spins. The single’s popularity placed the Gospel Chordettes on the stage of the Apollo Theater for a weeklong appearance in May 1958 as part of Fred Barr and Doc Wheeler’s Gospel Caravan. They sang alongside the Davis Sisters, the Soul Stirrers, the Mighty Skylights, Raymond Rasberry Singers, and New York organist and group leader Professor Herman Stevens.⁶² Decades later, Gertrude Hicks was still thrilled to have gone from rehearsals at the Millers to the stage of the legendary Apollo. “Oh, I thought I was somebody, oh yes!” she exclaimed.⁶³

Satisfied with the success of “I Can’t Believe It,” Savoy arranged for the Gospel Chordettes to record again on June 23, 1958, this time at New York’s Bell Sound Studio.⁶⁴ Employing the era’s formula of cutting a follow-up single with a similar sound and theme, Savoy released “If You Make It to the Moon.” This Roberts original with novelty potential featured Bobby Donaldson on drums and Banks on organ. Banks’s eerie organ glissando on the introduction evokes 1950s science fiction matinees much as “Moon” sustains the space-age sentiment of “I Can’t Believe It.” On this piece, however, the focus was not the perceived terror of Sputnik but pushback on the prospect of putting an astronaut on the moon. “If you make it to the moon, tell me what you gonna look for?” Freda Roberts asks pointedly. Then engaging in a playful call-and-response with her fellow singers, Freda follows with “If you are looking for joy [on the moon],” the group responds, “we’ve got that here.” Does the moon offer love and peace, Freda wonders? The group’s answer is the same: “We’ve got that here.” As with “I Can’t Believe It,” the speed of technological and social change in modern secular society was not always viewed as a positive development by socially conservative Christians.

When the follow-up single was pressed, it was credited not to the Gospel Chordettes but to the Lawrence Roberts Singers. “After [‘I Can’t Believe It’] was released,” Roberts explained, “there was a group doing secular music called the Chordettes.⁶⁵ And they wrote Mr. Lubinsky a letter stating that their name was copyrighted and we couldn’t use it. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll use a name I know they can’t sue me about: Lawrence Roberts!’ And that’s how [the Gospel Chordettes] became the Lawrence Roberts Singers.”⁶⁶

“I Can’t Believe It” and “If You Make it to the Moon” were indicative of Roberts’s playfulness when it came to gospel music and his exposure to, and affection for, other music styles absorbed during his Arts High days. So did two more Lawrence Roberts Singers recordings, “Walk through the Valley” and “When the Lord Saved Me.” Both are taken at a breakneck pace, with Roberts hammering the piano keys with such vigor at the outset of “Saved” that the opening chord contains a dissonant note; one can see how he could knock the Miller family’s piano out of tune. Taken as a group, these selections are rollicking reminders of the sometimes negligible distance between the sacred and secular. Roberts’s gospel-rock sensibility would color some of his later work, including one song during the forthcoming Peace Be Still session.

In his autobiography, The Gospel Truth, Roberts stated that the Gospel Chordettes / Lawrence Roberts Singers received no payment for their initial Savoy sides. They were just enjoying the opportunity to record and be heard on the radio. But after Savoy labelmate Alex Bradford told Roberts that one of their singles, probably “I Can’t Believe It,” was a hit in Chicago, St. Louis, and Alabama, Roberts confronted Lubinsky about the matter of compensation. Of his first lesson in the street hustle of the independent record business, Roberts reported, “I was then informed by Mr. Lubinsky that he was not aware (much to my surprise) that I had not been receiving any monies. We discovered that one of his employees had put an infant son’s name on our record [as composer credit], and as a consequence was reaping the benefit of finances that we should have gained.”⁶⁷

But two days later, as the story goes, Lubinsky asked Roberts to substitute for Robert Banks on a recording session that Banks was unable to fulfill. Roberts agreed to play but only if Lubinsky would reconcile the royalty snafu. The company owner did so, and Roberts fulfilled his part of the bargain by playing organ on the session.⁶⁸ Recognizing Roberts’s keyboard skills, his knack for writing gospel hits, and his connections to the regional gospel music community, Lubinsky hired him to be Savoy’s gospel music producer.⁶⁹ Although flattered, Roberts told Lubinsky he was concerned he could not fulfill the requirements of the position because he knew nothing about the record business. Lubinsky assured him that if he took the job, he would personally show him the basics—from recording to distribution.⁷⁰

The most important lessons he learned from Lubinsky, Roberts recalled, were the fundamentals of recording and editing technology. “He showed me how to edit, how to mark the tape, where to cut the tape, how to put it back together, how to take out the parts I didn’t want or wouldn’t make things happen, how to get the music so it flowed in sequence for the next chord coming.” Lubinsky also gave his young protégé a crash course in sound balance. Lubinsky taught Roberts “how to not let a guitar and a piano clash…. not to let the organ override the piano, how not [to] let a soloist become a part of the background.”⁷¹

Roberts absorbed his lessons well and quickly, but not without mistakes along the way. He recalled a harrowing experience during the production of a Meditation Singers session:

If you took the tape off the machine, you had to do it very carefully because it was a large disc of tape and not covered on [one] side—just a bottom plate but not a top plate—and if you didn’t handle it gently, it would fall apart and you’d have tape all over the floor. [And] I abruptly—I don’t know what I was thinking about—got up, took it off, and dropped it. For four or five hours, I was in the room reeling tape on manually and trying to keep it straight. There is a God in heaven! I got it back on. And when it was all in order, I played it and nothing was damaged.⁷²

Back in those days, Roberts said, “we really had just a three-man [gospel division]. It was Mr. Lubinsky, who always reminded us he signed the checks, Fred Mendelsohn, and myself. [A]nyone that was anybody during the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, they were on our label: the Gospel Clefs, Gospel Harmonettes, the Ward Singers, the Roberta Martin Singers, the Davis Sisters, the Gospel Chimes, James Cleveland, Albertina Walker and the Caravans—we had everybody!”⁷³ Roberts also credited the quality of Savoy’s gospel product to its community of session musicians, notably Herman Stevens on organ, jazz talents Bernard Purdie and Joe Marshall on drums, Leonard Caston on bass, and Earl Hines Orchestra alumnus Clifton “Skeeter” Best on lead guitar.⁷⁴

“The only thing [Lubinsky] was unfair with, and I should not really even be mad at him for that, and that was money,” Roberts said. “I was underpaid, but I saw the country; I met the people, and this was one of my great interests.”⁷⁵

By 1959, the twenty-three-year-old Roberts was juggling multiple responsibilities. He was a new husband and father, a choir director, a gospel production and talent scout for Savoy Records, and manager of the Lawrence Roberts Singers. And his group was doing well. They were busy performing throughout the region and Savoy invited them back to record another single. That next disk, a November 1958 coupling of “When the Lord Saved Me” and “I’m a-Rollin’,” received an enthusiastic review in Billboard, which called it a “first rate waxing” and the group “a fine one.”⁷⁶ Roberts’s expressive baritone lead, sung at full volume, on “I’m a-Rollin’,” evokes Leon Lumpkins’s equally passionate delivery on “Open Our Eyes,” recorded just a month earlier.

On the heels of their continued success, the Lawrence Roberts Singers were invited to participate in radio station WCIN-AM’s November 1959 fund-raiser to be held at the Cincinnati Gardens in Cincinnati, Ohio. Probably patterned after the successful annual Goodwill Revue, held by Memphis’s WDIA to benefit local charities, the WCIN Goodwill Spectacular was, according to its publicity, “expected to be the largest show ever staged for Negro charities in the U.S.” In addition to the Lawrence Roberts Singers, gospel stars such as Brother Joe May, Madame Edna Gallmon Cooke, the Rasberry Singers, and the Reverend Morgan Babb and his Philco Singers were slated to appear on the November 6, 1959, benefit musicale.⁷⁷ To top it off, in 1957, Zion Hill’s pastor, Doctor John R. Stanford, had ordained Roberts a Baptist minister, and he was ready to embark on a ministerial career. What more could Lawrence Roberts take on?