3
The Birth of the Angelic Choir
For reasons lost to history, the Reverend Joseph J. Napier resigned from the pastorate of the First Baptist Church of Nutley after ten years of service. No sooner had the church inaugurated a search for a new pastor than a member named Birdell Malloy Smith tendered Roberts’s name for consideration. She had known him since his days with the Drinkard Singers and could vouch for his singing, directing, keyboard accompaniment, and leadership skills. But could he preach? She invited the newly ordained Roberts to visit First Baptist to preach one Sunday. Roberts’s oratory won the congregation over. Smith formally recommended that the church board install the young man as their new pastor.1
But there was one problem: Mount Zion Baptist Church in Westwood, New Jersey, also was courting Roberts for its pastorate. In the end, Roberts declined the Mount Zion offer because First Baptist was closer to his home and growing family. He also reasoned that First Baptist would be “a greater challenge for me and would prove my ability to pastor.”2 So, on July 24, 1960, with a starting salary of $15 per week, the Reverend Lawrence Roberts was installed as pastor of First Baptist Church. At twenty-four, he was the youngest Baptist pastor in New Jersey.3
The pastor took stock of his new assignment. Membership under Napier had dwindled to twelve. Although the wooden church structure was only fifty years old, it appeared to have outlived its usefulness.4 To Roberts, it was nothing more than “a log cabin with a potbellied stove for our heat.”5 Robert Logan recalled that the church could fit about one hundred congregants.6 Erecting a modern facility was essential for expanding the church’s membership and ministry, but building a church from the ground up meant raising a substantial sum of money. A fund-raising campaign of this magnitude would require the financial support of more than twelve members. There was plenty of work ahead. Meanwhile, Roberts began ministering to the twelve.
At first, First Baptist was literally a mom-and-pop enterprise. Lawrence and Bootsy Roberts handled everything themselves, including running the music department. “When we went to First Baptist, we didn’t have a choir,” Bootsy recalled, “so my husband would play and sing a solo. [Or] he would play and I would sing a solo, and we would do a duet together. That was our music.”7
But as much as the membership may have appreciated the Robertses’ musical talents, the church really needed a choir. With only twelve members, a choir would have to be brought in from the outside. This was not uncommon for new churches or those in transition and with insufficient members to form a sizable singing ensemble. Roberts invited members of his Voices of Faith community choir to sing one Sunday a month at First Baptist. Among those who complied were Pearl Minatee and her sister Lillian (Pearl would eventually bring her whole family to First Baptist), Ernest Nunnally, Tommy Johnson, Freeman Johnson, and organist Robert Logan. All joined First Baptist. Gertrude Deadwyler Hicks was so eager to participate that she spent “the better part of an hour” taking the bus from Jersey City to Newark, and then waiting “on that [bus number] 13 to Nutley.”8 She also became a member of the church.
Hicks, a member of the Lawrence Roberts Singers and the Voices of Faith, would figure prominently in Roberts’s music ministry in the years to come. Born March 9, 1938, to Georgiana and Arvie Deadwyler in Brooklyn, New York, Gertrude and her missionary parents left Brooklyn to establish the Mount Olive Pentecostal Faith Church in Jersey City, New Jersey. As her parents managed the myriad details of church operations, Gertrude learned to play classical piano under the tutelage of a Miss Thompson. In elementary school, Gertrude performed for school programs and eventually added singing to her musical toolkit.9 Like many of Roberts’s singers and musicians, she first met Roberts at Zion Hill.
Lawrence Roberts put Freda Roberts in charge of leading songs and named Ernest Nunnally the choir’s first director.10 Ernest Lee Nunnally Jr. was born on October 22, 1916, to Ernest Sr. and Sandy Robinson Nunnally in Blakely, Georgia, also the hometown of Nitch and Delia Mae Drinkard.11 Ernest Jr. moved with his family to Newark around 1945, where they joined Zion Hill. Although he and his brother Archie were members of the L&N Gospel Singers, Ernest also joined the Voices of Faith.12 Ernest’s daughter, Etta Jean Nunnally, said her father took Roberts under his wing and “nurtured and taught [Roberts] a lot about gospel music.”13 Since Nunnally was twenty years older than Roberts and familiar with syncopated rhythm from working with the L&N Gospel Singers at Zion Hill, his tutelage was a huge help to the young pastor-musician.
Though he would eventually transition to organ, Robert Logan was the Voices of Faith’s piano accompanist when they appeared at First Baptist. Born December 12, 1938, in Carteret, New Jersey, Logan began playing piano publicly around the age of twelve at Mount Sinai Fire Baptized Holiness Church, a Newark church his father, the Reverend Robert Logan Sr., pastored. “I’m self-taught by the anointing of the Holy Ghost,” Logan said. “My mother [Rebecca Logan] laid hands on me and I started playing what they were singing right in the service.”14 As with Roberts, it was the hopeful pursuit of a young lady that brought Logan to Zion Hill, where he heard Roberts playing organ and leading the Young People’s Choir. It didn’t take much persuasion for him to join the Voices of Faith and even less to follow Roberts to First Baptist.
Of the musical instruments bequeathed to Roberts by First Baptist when he took over the church’s leadership, Logan recalled there being “a piano, an organ, and one of the original speakers. Reverend Roberts, maybe a month later, decided to upgrade [the organ] because he was very good at what he wanted to hear. God blessed him to hear good music and good sounds, and the three- and four-part harmony required with groups and all that.”15
Although not a member of Zion Hill, Raymond Murphy was another Voices of Faith chorister who assisted First Baptist Church’s newly reconstituted music ministry. He first heard the Voices when they participated in a service at Pastor Warrick’s New Hope Baptist Church:
I was actually an Episcopalian, and someone asked me to come to [New Hope one] Sunday morning. I sat up in the balcony, and I can remember that Sunday just as plain as day. I’ll never forget it. Five hundred folk dressed in black marched down the aisle singing “Lord, This Is a Mean Old World.” And that was New Hope’s choir, and the Voices of Faith marched in behind. I had never heard all this before. And then [Roberts] preached the Twenty-Third Psalm, and the day that he preached, it gave me a new meaning of what the Twenty-Third Psalm really meant. And that’s when I started following him. I found out you had to be eighteen to join the Voices of Faith. I was only sixteen. I lied and I said I was eighteen and I joined the Voices of Faith. And they took me in. [Roberts] baptized me.16
The Voices of Faith sang for First Baptist’s service every fourth Sunday, with Lawrence and Bootsy providing music for the other Sundays. “Eventually numerous Voices of Faith [members] started joining the church,” Bootsy recalled. “When they joined the church, then we had enough members to form a choir.”17
If First Baptist was to increase its membership and raise the funds to build a new church, it had to be modern and that meant having gospel songs in its repertory. That was, of course, not a problem for Roberts. By 1960, when the Voices of Faith became First Baptist’s choir, gospel songs and gospel singing had become de rigueur in African American Protestant churches. But prior to 1933, when the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, under the leadership of Thomas Andrew Dorsey, initiated a national campaign to organize gospel choruses in African American Protestant churches, the repertory of mainline Protestant church choirs in northern cities such as Newark and Nutley consisted of concert spirituals, hymns, anthems, and classical choral literature. Pastors disdained the hand-clapping and foot-patting religious music of Dorsey because of its musical proximity to jazz and blues, genres that, to them, represented nightclubs and the vice and immorality associated with those social institutions. Gospel music also reminded pastors of the unfettered worship of the southern folk church. The physicality and improvisation of the folk church ran counter to the button-down rules of conduct that bespoke middle-class respectability. And for many northern pastors and congregations, middleclass respectability meant performing the staid hymns and anthems of the western European tradition.
The attitude began to change when African Americans who moved north during the Great Migration brought their appetite for soul-stirring southern folk church practices with them. Their practices included physically and aurally demonstrative worship and zesty congregational singing of traditional spirituals, evangelical hymns, long- and short-meter hymns, and new gospel songs written by African American composers such as Charles A. Tindley (“Stand by Me”), Lucie E. Campbell (“Touch Me Lord Jesus”), Charles Price Jones (“I’m Happy with Jesus Alone”), and Dorsey (“If You See My Savior”). A direct descendant of West African music, which accompanied daily life, worship, and other ceremonies, gospel music encouraged hand clapping, foot patting, improvisation, lyric repetition, and communal participation in the singing. Migrants heard echoes of southern-style worship in Dorsey’s gospel music and sought it out, even if that meant stealing away to a local Pentecostal, Spiritual, or Holiness church, where gospel music and folk church practices were not only welcome but essential components of the worship experience.
Thanks to gospel music evangelists such as Dorsey, his colleagues in the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses like Sallie Martin and Magnolia Lewis Butts, and singers such as Mahalia Jackson and the Ward Singers, one city after another fell sway to gospel music and gospel choirs in the 1930s and 1940s. Midwestern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Cincinnati were among the first to organize gospel choruses, with cities on the West and East Coasts, including Newark, following suit. Ultimately, it was the economic reality of operating a church in African American urban communities that prompted pastors to accept gospel music and gospel choruses. The sustainability of their ministry depended on a sizable tithing membership, and if the adage was true, that music brings people into the church and preaching keeps them there, avoiding gospel music meant potentially losing out on a steady flow of membership from the thousands of newly arrived southern migrants.
But despite their growing primacy as interpreters of the new gospel songs, African American church choirs rarely caught the attention of record companies prior to 1947. Those that did, as did the Nazarene Congregational Church Choir of New York City in 1926, were recorded singing spirituals and hymns in the staider northern style. Perhaps choirs were considered, at the time, too closely associated with the religious worship experience to be exploitable for Christian entertainment. On the other hand, the techniques of gospel soloists, quartets, groups, and musicians were imitated by secular groups, making the sounds of Saturday night and Sunday morning almost undistinguishable outside the lyric content. It wasn’t until the mid- to late-1940s that commercial recordings of African American choirs singing newly composed gospel songs first appeared. And these were made not by church choirs but by professional touring troupes such as J. Garfield Wilson’s Camp Meeting Choir of Charlotte, North Carolina (“Don’t Wonder about Him,” 1946) and Cleveland’s Wings over Jordan Choir (Lucie Campbell’s “He’ll Understand and Say ‘Well Done,’” 1948). Of the more than three hundred sides that Savoy Records had in its gospel catalog by 1960, only two were by church choirs. These disks were cut in November 1958 by the Young People’s Choir of Newark’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, probably produced at the recommendation of the church’s music minister and Savoy recording artist Alex Bradford.18
The first known African American church choir to release a series of commercial singles of gospel songs from the pens of Dorsey and others, and to render them in the vigorous manner of the new aesthetic, was the Echoes of Eden of St. Paul Baptist Church of Los Angeles, California. St. Paul’s newly elected pastor, the Reverend J. H. Branham, commissioned the formation of the Echoes of Eden to provide his Los Angeles congregation and radio listenership with the Dorsey-trained gospel choral style he enjoyed back home in Chicago. To direct the choir, Branham retained J. Earle Hines, a featured vocalist for the National Baptist Convention. In its earliest years, the Echoes of Eden featured vocally powerful lead singers such as Erie Gladney, Sallie Martin, and child singer Jamesetta Hawkins (later to become R&B star Etta James). Capitol Records, Johnny Mercer’s five-year-old label, signed the chorus in 1947. Among their earliest recordings were songs featured by National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses conventions such as Dorsey’s “We Sure Do Need Him Now” and “I’m So Glad Jesus Lifted Me,” a song credited to the Chicago Spiritual Church leader Reverend Clarence H. Cobbs.
Other African American church choirs that recorded gospel songs in the late 1940s and early 1950s released their music on local independent labels such as Black and White (St. Paul COGIC Choir of Chicago), Faith (Voices of Hope, with Thurston Frazier), Songs of the Cross (Hope Mission Choir), and Modern (Trinity Baptist Church, with Ineze Caston). That the Voices of Hope, Hope Mission Choir, and the Trinity Baptist Church were all Los Angeles enterprises demonstrates the dual influence of Hollywood’s commercial record industry and the Echoes of Eden, whose regular radio broadcast on KOWL was a staple in African American households in southern California.
Savoy Records officially entered the business of recording church choirs when Lawrence Roberts persuaded Herman Lubinsky and Fred Mendelsohn to cut some singles of his Voices of Faith. By now a fairly experienced producer, Roberts nevertheless felt a thrill when the Voices of Faith entered a New York studio on Thursday, June 8, 1961. “When I came in to the studio and I saw all those people gathered around the microphones, I thought, this is my baby,” he told Birdie Wilson Johnson in August 2000. “These are my children and this was the group I had made, I had started, I had named, I had taught.”19 But the group he “had named” was about to change its name. According to Raymond Murphy, it was after the Voices of Faith completed its first recording for Savoy that Roberts renamed them the Angelic Choir.20
The June 8 session produced six sides, including the choir’s first single, “He Will” / “A Little Too Close to Be Afraid.”21 Written by James Cleveland, “He Will” was first recorded in 1960 by Detroit’s Voices of Tabernacle under Cleveland’s direction and with the brilliant soprano Hulah Gene Dunklin Hurley as lead singer. Cleveland also cut a version of the song for HOB Records with his vocal group, the Gospel Chimes. Marjorie Raines of the Lawrence Roberts Singers assumed Hurley’s role for the Angelic Choir version.22 “A Little Too Close” features a shouting lead by Roberts. The single earned four stars from Billboard, the magazine’s highest rating for singles, indicating that it had high probability of achieving radio play.23
The single sold sufficiently well and received enough radio play for Savoy to authorize another Angelic Choir recording session for November 10, 1961. One song from the session, “It’s the Holy Ghost,” was a clever sendup of “Hit the Road Jack,” the Percy Mayfield composition that Ray Charles and his Raelettes turned into a number one pop and R&B hit earlier that year. The Angelic Choir replaced the Raelettes’ finger-wagging chorus, “Hit the road Jack / Don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more” with “It’s the Holy Ghost / Makes me feel all right, all right, all right, all right.” As with “I Can’t Believe It” and “If You Make It to the Moon,” “It’s the Holy Ghost” exemplified Roberts’s instinct for giving gospel music a pop sensibility so it would appeal to a younger generation. “‘Hit the Road Jack’ was popular with everybody,” Roberts told Birdie Wilson Johnson. “So I thought it would hark [sic] that popularity into the gospel field … which it did.”24 Indeed, “It’s the Holy Ghost” earned a four-star rating in the January 13, 1962, issue of Billboard.
The flip, “I Know the Lord,” also recorded on November 10, likewise received four stars from Billboard, in no small part to the choir’s unbridled reading of the spiritual “I Know the Lord Laid His Hands on Me,” with remarkable steel guitar accompaniment from Sam Windham. A Baptist musician from New York City whom Roberts and the Ward Singers employed for live and studio performances, Windham could make his steel guitar squeal and shriek like a soul succumbing to spirit possession. His high notes mimicked Marion Williams’s stave-topping soprano flights. Although gospel vocal recordings of the period typically avoided extended instrumental solos, Windham’s virtuosity was given full rein on “I Know the Lord.”25
Ten of the thirteen sides the Angelic Choir recorded in June and November were compiled into the choir’s eponymous debut album (Savoy MG- 14049) and released in spring 1962. In addition to “It’s the Holy Ghost” and “I Know the Lord,” the album featured “Mercy Lord,” a rereading of Dorsey’s “Little Wooden Church on the Hill,” complete with rocking piano, organ, drums, and Windham’s blazing steel guitar. And whenever the studio musicians sped up the tempo, as on the Ernest Nunnally–led “Mercy Lord” and “No Weeping,” they chugged along like Cameo-Parkway’s house band, the Applejacks. Other religious chestnuts on the album are Charles A. Tindley’s “We’ll Understand It Better By and By,” and a variation on Robert Lowry’s 1876 “Nothing but the Blood,” simply titled “The Blood.” Both songs evoke the unconventional arrangements of Roberts’s pal Leon Lumpkins and the Gospel Clefs. Billboard gave the album three stars in its May 19, 1962, issue, indicating moderate sales potential.26
Their slightly unconventional arrangements and rocking rhythm section notwithstanding, what the Angelic Choir lacked in studio experience they more than made up for in unbridled passion. They sound thrilled to be together in a recording studio, most for the first time, and confident in the hands of their capable leader. Indeed, it may well have been the choir’s youthful everyman enthusiasm that appealed initially to listeners. It was no affectation. There was no audition process. All one had to do to join the Angelic Choir was become an adult member of the First Baptist Church of Nutley and receive Roberts’s permission.
According to Raymond Murphy, part of the Angelic Choir’s early success was also a result of Roberts’s penchant for identifying and spotlighting the group’s most vocally gifted members: “Reverend [Roberts] had to get leaders in the choir who could carry the sound, such as Gertrude [Hicks], Bernadine [Hankerson], Freeman [Johnson] … and one young lady, Margie [Raines]. When he heard Margie sing “Christ Is the Answer,” it just blew him away!”27 It helped, too, that Hicks, Hankerson, and Raines had already tallied a few years of experience singing, touring, and recording as the Lawrence Roberts Singers.
But success was also the product of rigorous rehearsal. With the exception of the week prior to a recording, when rehearsals were held nightly, Angelic Choir rehearsals occurred every Thursday or Friday. Bootsy recalled that her husband ran a serious rehearsal. “No lollygagging. We would have time to laugh, but when he was serious, he was serious, and if he had to yell at somebody, most of the time he was yelling at me! Everybody else could laugh and talk, and if I said one word, he used me for an example. ‘This is no time to be laughing and talking, Bootsy.’ I said, ‘Well, everybody else is talking and laughing, but you have to call me out!’ I guess they felt like if he’ll pick on his wife, he’ll get on me!”28 Murphy concurred that “even though we were all grown and whatnot, [Roberts would] have no problem dressing us down and dressing us up again if it was called for. But rehearsals were just as serious as Sunday morning service. It wasn’t taken lightly at all.”29
Nevertheless, the banter between “Uncle” Lawrence and “Aunt” Bootsy, as they came to be known affectionately by the choir and the First Baptist congregation, provided moments of levity to counteract the serious work of learning new songs and perfecting others. Lorraine Stancil, who joined the Angelic Choir later, recalled an instance during a tour when Bootsy teasingly turned the tables on Lawrence, and he turned them right back on her: “We were about to take a tour of the mountain, [and] I heard Aunt Bootsy tell Uncle Lawrence, sort of jokingly, ‘Lawrence, be quiet!’ She asked him a question two minutes later, ‘Is that right, Lawrence?’ and he said, ‘Uh-uh, you told me to be quiet!’”30
Despite the hard work, rehearsal felt like being with family. The Reverend Doctor Stefanie R. Minatee, daughter of Pearl Minatee and herself a future Angelic Choir member, recalled that “The Angelic Choir was like a big family. Everybody was friends with everybody.”31 Phyllis Morris, who joined the Angelic Choir in 1979, likened rehearsals to a worship service. “In rehearsal,” Morris said, “the spirit was so high at times you didn’t have to have a church service. We had our service just singing gospel music.”32 Yvonne Walls, another chorister, had a similar recollection: “Sometimes the rehearsals were better than the recordings!” JaVan Hicks, who joined the choir around 1964, was pleased to discover that First Baptist Church had the type of soul-stirring services he enjoyed as a youth in Greensboro, North Carolina: “Growing up in the church in the South, being at First Baptist was a joy.”33
The Angelic Choir’s emerging popularity as a nationally recognized church choir augmented Savoy’s already solid leadership in gospel music. “The field for gospel and spiritual product—and exposure to same—is increasing,” Herman Lubinsky boasted to Billboard in early 1962. In response, his company expanded its release schedule to offer gospel not only on its flagship Savoy and Gospel subsidiary labels, but also on the Sharp, World Wide, and Regent subsidiaries. Lubinsky estimated that sixty new single releases would follow at the rate of a dozen a month—including material by Lawrence Roberts and the Angelic Choir.34 Lubinsky’s was no idle boast; Savoy had recently signed James Cleveland, an artist with the experience, visibility, and ambition to solidify the company’s leadership position in commercial gospel music.