4

The Arrival of James Cleveland

On Friday, May 20, 1960, when James Cleveland walked up the steps at 58 Market Street and entered the Savoy Records office to sign his recording contract with the label, he encountered more than the company’s usual chaotic clutter of desks, tables, and aisles “jammed with boxes and piles of circulars.”¹ The company’s employees were emotionally shaken. That morning, they arrived at the office to discover that marauders had entered the building, rifled through the file cabinets, helped themselves to $100 from the safe, and fled. Although Lubinsky told Billboard no files had been stolen, it was an unsettling start to what would become a nearly lifelong partnership between Savoy and Cleveland.² For the twenty-eight-year-old, signing an exclusive contract with Savoy Records must have felt like reaching the pinnacle of accomplishment, one he had been climbing toward for years. Indeed, just the week before, he appeared on the stage of the legendary Apollo Theater on a gospel program alongside iconic singer-guitarist and recording artist Sister Rosetta Tharpe.³ Perhaps his time had come.

James Edward Cleveland was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 5, 1931, to teenagers Ben L. Cleveland and Rosie Lee Brooks. All told, James had three sisters and two half-brothers. Rebecca “Betty” Brooks, Marion McCoy, and James were children of Ben and Rosie; Victoria “Vickie,” Gerald, and Ben Jr. were children of Ben and a different mother.⁴ According to US Census records, by 1940, James was living not with his parents but with his grandmother, a forty-five-year-old widow named Anna Ellis, and her sister, Irma Richardson, at 308 East Thirty-Third Street. Ellis attended Pilgrim Baptist Church at Thirty-Third Street and Indiana Avenue, a short walk from their apartment, and was a member of Pilgrim’s relatively new gospel chorus, under Thomas A. Dorsey’s direction. Young James accompanied his grandmother to choir rehearsals and, to counteract boredom, sometimes sang along with the choir. One day Dorsey overheard James’s clear boy soprano, perched him atop a box, and had him render “All I Need Is Jesus” for the Pilgrim Baptist congregation. It was Cleveland’s first public church solo.⁵

Solo performance notwithstanding, the young Cleveland’s true desire was to play piano. He studied the semiclassical piano technique of gospel songwriter and group leader Roberta Martin. Cleveland’s parents encouraged their son’s musical ambition, but they were unable to afford a piano, so the young boy improvised. “I used to practice each night right there on the windowsill,” he told author and historian Anthony Heilbut. “I took those wedges and crevices and made me black and white keys. And, baby, I played just like Roberta [Martin].”⁶

Cleveland soaked up Martin’s piano style, but he also studied the singing techniques of her Roberta Martin Singers vocal ensemble. He was especially moved by group members and soloists Myrtle Scott, Eugene Smith, and Robert Anderson. One of the most prominent male soloists in gospel music during the 1940s and early 1950s, Anderson (1919–95) would go on to serve as one of Cleveland’s informal musical mentors.⁷ Moreover, Cleveland would adopt Eugene Smith’s narrative preamble prior to a song performance. Cleveland was equally enthralled by Mahalia Jackson, who lived on Indiana Avenue a few blocks south of the Ellis household. Delivering the Queen of Gospel’s newspaper to her stoop, Cleveland cupped his ear to her front door in hopes of hearing her singing.

By the 1940s, Cleveland had joined Thorne’s Gospel Crusaders, a fifty- member youth chorus sponsored by a Mrs. Thorne who operated a music studio at 3305 South Michigan.⁸ It was during his tenure as a Gospel Crusader that Cleveland’s voice shifted from unblemished boy soprano to raspy baritone—a sound Cleveland himself described as “like a foghorn.”⁹ While a student at Wendell Phillips High School, Cleveland met Imogene Greene (1930–82), a budding gospel music vocalist, and served as her accompanist.¹⁰ Floriene Watson Willis, a Phillips pupil and also a gospel singer, remembered that Cleveland played piano for the school’s annual spring gospel music festival.¹¹

Sometime in the 1940s, Cleveland and Greene joined the Lux Singers, a mixed-voice gospel group organized by local beautician and salon owner Beatrice Lux. In an era of gospel singing characterized by the tempered passion of the Roberta Martin Singers and Sallie Martin’s Singers of Joy, the Lux Singers were just the opposite—spontaneous and sanctified. In addition to Cleveland, the Lux Singers ensemble included a young Clay Evans. The future pastor and civil-rights leader was newly arrived in Chicago from Brownsville, Tennessee, when he joined the Lux Singers. Decades later, Evans remembered Cleveland as “not big enough to get up on the piano stool but he had a lot of showmanship.”¹²

Flush with experience from the Gospel Crusaders and the Lux Singers, and seeing the burgeoning success of other local gospel groups, Cleveland invited Norsalus McKissick and Bessie Folk, two members of the Roberta Martin Singers, to join him in a trio called the Gospelaires. According to Bessie’s son, Eugene Folk, the nineteen-year-old Cleveland was living with his family at the time. “James was ambitious and eager to try new things,” Folk said. “Norsalus was a close friend to my mother, and James knew that, so he asked them to help start his own group. Miss [Roberta] Martin agreed because the music was published by her, therefore the music remained ‘in the family’.”¹³

The Gospelaires cut six sides in October 1950 and January 1951.¹⁴ The sessions, recorded in New York and released on Apollo Records, likely came to fruition through Martin’s influence, since the Roberta Martin Singers were on Apollo at the time. However they got to New York, the Gospelaires were, like the Martin Singers, a paradigmatic example of the emerging organ- and piano-accompanied group that would soon compete successfully with soloists and quartets in the gospel music marketplace. “Oh What a Time,” recorded during the Gospelaires’ January 1951 Apollo Records session, constitutes Cleveland’s first commercially recorded solo. His voice is a thin shadow of what was to come, but if you listen closely, you can hear the emergence of Cleveland’s tear-stained rasp.

A short period of live performances by the Gospelaires followed, but by 1952, McKissick and Folk returned to the Roberta Martin Singers full time, and the Gospelaires were no more. Nevertheless, the experience whetted Cleveland’s appetite and helped further his reputation in the industry as an up-and-coming singer, accompanist, and recording artist.

Cleveland was also a budding songwriter. The Roberta Martin Studio of Music published one of his first compositions, 1948’s “Grace Is Sufficient.” Since Martin published only compositions her singers performed, Cleveland was all but guaranteed that his piece would be used in live programs and on recordings. “I sold all of [my] tunes to Miss Martin for little or nothing,” Cleveland remarked ruefully later. “Of course, she made fabulous sums of money off of them, but that wasn’t my interest at the time. My mother was still doing day work for eight hours a day and sometimes she would come home and I’d have the money there in my hand—more money than she was making as a grown woman—and it was a big deal.”¹⁵

Cleveland tried every trick in his singular pursuit of gospel stardom. “I’d stand around by the door and hope somebody’s musician didn’t show up,” Cleveland once said. “Then I’d offer to play for them.”¹⁶ Lorenza Brown Porter, manager of the Argo Singers, recalled receiving a note at one of the Argo’s programs, asking her to invite James Cleveland to sing. It turned out Cleveland had written the note himself and had it passed forward to Porter.¹⁷

Cleveland’s next artistic collaboration was with the Meditation Singers. Organized in Detroit in 1947 by Ernestine Rundless, the group was composed of members of the Voices of Meditation Choir at New Liberty Baptist Church, where Ernestine’s husband (and former member of the Soul Stirrers), the Reverend E. A. Rundless, was pastor. In addition to Ernestine, the Meditation Singers featured Marie Waters, Herbert Carson, and a teenaged Delloreese Early. Early left the group in 1954 to pursue solo stardom as R&B chanteuse Della Reese.¹⁸ Cleveland’s piano accompaniment can be heard on the group’s first two singles, recorded in late 1952 by Detroit producer and record-store owner Joe Von Battle.¹⁹ From there, Cleveland and his high school pal Imogene Greene collaborated with Ella Mitchell, Rose Hines, and Dorothy Bates, who were known as the New York–based Gospel All-Stars. The group, featuring Cleveland on piano and Herman Stevens on organ, waxed six sides for Apollo in 1957.²⁰ One, the rollicking “That’s Why I Love Him So,” is alleged to have been inspired by Ray Charles’s “Hallelujah, I Love Her So.” But it is Cleveland’s poignant duet with Greene on “Remember Me” that demonstrates the remarkable vocal timing the young man had already mastered.

Next for Cleveland was the Caravans, a female gospel group organized by Robert Anderson in the late 1940s to supply background vocals for his recordings and public appearances. Initially known as the Good Shepherd Singers, the Caravans supported Anderson until April 1952, when in the midst of a Chicago recording session they parted ways with their founder and used the time remaining on the session to launch their own recording career. Their sudden success was a mixed blessing. Nearly all of the original Caravans had families to care for and could not sustain the heightened travel schedule. One by one, they dropped out. That included the Caravans’ piano accompanist Charlotte Nelson. When she departed the group in 1954, the ladies were in urgent need of a keyboard player—one with the flexibility to travel.

Albertina Walker, now serving as the Caravans’ manager, happened to run into Cleveland hanging out at Mahalia Jackson’s home. She offered him the position of chief musician for the Caravans. He joined the group at its October 5, 1954, session at Chicago’s Universal Studio to record “What Kind of Man Is This” and “This Man Jesus.”²¹ “The record company didn’t want to record James because they didn’t think he could sing!” Walker reported years later. “But I told the record man [probably Leonard Allen or Lew Simpkins, owners of United and States Records] that I wasn’t going to record until he recorded James…. The record company people still protested, they insisted that we were a female group and shouldn’t use a male voice. But I insisted that they record James.”²²

It worked. Cleveland went on to make additional singles with the Caravans, and their popularity secured them entry on a package tour arranged by Specialty Records. Specialty owner Art Rupe recorded the Caravans and Cleveland singing “What Kind of Man Is This” at a July 22, 1955, stop at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium. Thanks to this recording, listeners can witness a twenty-three-year-old Cleveland in live performance, singing alongside the Caravans and pounding the piano into humble submission.

Cleveland supplemented the revenue he earned from recording, touring, accompanying, and composing by working with a variety of church choirs in Chicago and by serving as minister of music for the Reverend B. F. Paxton’s True Light Baptist Church on Chicago’s South Side. He held the True Light position until the late 1950s, when he departed once again for Detroit, this time to direct the choir at the Reverend C. L. Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church.²³ While residing with the Franklins, Cleveland taught the Reverend C. L.’s teenaged daughter Aretha to play piano after her first instructor scared the girl so badly she went into hiding. James “showed me some real nice chords and I liked his deep, deep sound,” Aretha told journalist Phyl Garland for an October 1967 issue of Ebony. She also praised his singing. “There’s a whole lot of earthiness in the way he sings, and what he was feelin’, I was feelin’, but I just didn’t know how to put it across. The more I watched him, the more I got out of it.” Cleveland also helped organize a gospel group consisting of Aretha, her sister Erma, and two other girls. The group sang for local churches but broke up after eight months. “We were too busy fussin’ and fightin’,” Aretha acknowledged.²⁴

When in 1958 the Reverend Charles Craig resigned as music minister of the Reverend James Lofton’s Church of Our Prayer to organize Prayer Tabernacle Spiritual Church in Detroit, he hired Cleveland to be his minister of music. The task included directing the church’s house choir, the Voices of Tabernacle. Just as some Zion Hill members followed the newly ordained Lawrence Roberts to First Baptist, participants in the Church of Our Prayer music ministry, among them soprano soloist Hulah Gene Dunklin Hurley and organist Frances Chandler, followed Craig to Prayer Tabernacle and became part of the Voices of Tabernacle.

The Voices of Tabernacle was a disruptive force in gospel music. Decades later, choir director and accompanist Charles Clency recalled vividly his first encounter with the Voices of Tabernacle. It was during a 1959 program on Chicago’s South Side:

Charles Craig and James Cleveland came out with a completely brand new idea of all kinds of contemporary chords, extended chords, chord alterations. I heard sounds I never heard before in gospel. I could not believe what I was hearing; none of us could. Alfred Bolden was on the organ, and Herbert “Pee Wee” Pickard was on the piano…. The organ and piano were unbelievable in terms of balance, quality, expertise, dynamics, soft, loud, spirituals, gospels, anthems…. James Cleveland always had soulfulness. He was the Ray Charles of gospel. But Charles Craig had the innovation and the musicianship.²⁵

Clency and his fellow music ministers were not the only ones moved by the Voices of Tabernacle. So was Detroit beautician and entrepreneur Carmen Caver Murphy. Murphy’s House of Beauty salon had been a successful Motor City enterprise since its establishment in 1947. In the late 1950s, she formed a record label called HOB (House of Beauty) to capitalize on the plethora of local music talent. Initially releasing singles of pop music and rock-and-roll, Murphy entered the gospel field after Detroit deejay Jack Surrell, her unofficial artists and repertoire man, called to tell her about an amateur recording he had made of the Voices of Tabernacle. Surrell put the phone receiver next to his tape player and let Murphy hear “Calvary,” led by Hulah Gene Dunklin Hurley.²⁶

The timing could not have been better. Murphy’s father, Bishop Henry L. Caver of Chicago’s Christ Temple Church, had passed away and she wanted to honor him. Thinking that a recording of religious music might be the kind of tribute her father would have liked, Murphy cobbled together the funds to record the Voices of Tabernacle on HOB’s first full-length album.

The Love of God by the Voices of Tabernacle, and the album’s title track, a Cleveland-led arrangement of Leroy Crume’s Soul Stirrers hit from 1958, exceeded Murphy’s and Surrell’s expectations. Billboard called the 125-voice choir “one of the great spiritual choruses performing today.”²⁷ Cleveland’s soaring, expansive moans on “The Love of God” anticipate his emotional vocal leads with the Angelic Choir. Gospel enthusiasts credit The Love of God as the initial entry of the church choir in the battle for religious radio dominance and record sales, a position held, at that time, by quartets, soloists, and piano-led groups.

While in Detroit, Cleveland rekindled his working relationship with the Meditation Singers, a group that now included future soul star Laura Lee Rundless and future gospel choir leader (and Cleveland collaborator) Charles Fold. Cleveland accompanied and sang with the Meditations on a handful of selections he produced for Specialty Records at Chicago’s Universal Recording Studio on July 8, 1959.²⁸ But the timing was poor; at the same time that the Meditations recorded at Universal, Specialty owner Art Rupe was winding down the label’s recording activities. As a result, only two Meditation Singers Specialty sides saw the light of day; the rest weren’t heard until decades later, on a Specialty Records reissue CD.²⁹ Nevertheless, Billboard bestowed a four-star rating upon that one Specialty disk, “My Soul Looks Back and Wonders,” released almost simultaneously with HOB’s The Love of God.³⁰

Despite his achievements as a songwriter, arranger, choir director, group leader, accompanist, and music minister, Cleveland sought a solo career. He had wanted that for a long time. He told an audience of gospel announcers in 1974 how, in the early 1950s, he sat for thirty-two straight working days in the waiting room of Chicago’s Vee Jay Records, hoping for an audition—to no avail. He added that when Vee Jay came looking for him six years later, it was six years too late. “I’m glad I am with Savoy,” he told the announcers. “Vee Jay went out of business. Many a precious gem is thrown away because of lack of recognition. We must be able to recognize and polish the nugget.”³¹

Savoy wasted no time polishing the nugget. The week after Cleveland’s signing, Roberts and Mendelsohn hustled him into the studio for a recording session, backed by his erstwhile colleagues, the Gospel All Stars.³² The six sides recorded that day were coupled into three singles and marketed throughout the remainder of 1960. A month later, the company advertised the first release, “Just Like He Said He Would” / He’s Alright with Me” in Billboard. Sparing no superlatives, Savoy cited the disc as “the greatest spiritual ever made.”³³ However, the most remarkable cut from the session, “Just to Behold His Face,” is a beautifully passionate reading of Lucie Campbell’s 1941 gospel composition. Letting loose in his tear-stained foghorn, Cleveland gives the song the same emotional reading he lent to “The Love of God.”

It was evident that James Cleveland was on his way to becoming a gospel solo artist, but his choir directing days were not over, at least as far as Savoy was concerned. The company understandably hoped he would produce the same magic for Savoy that he had for HOB. He couldn’t use the Voices of Tabernacle, because they were signed to HOB, but he was working with another choir. Annette May Thomas, daughter of gospel star Brother Joe May, had invited Cleveland to move to Los Angeles and replace her as music minister at the city’s New Greater Harvest Baptist Church. It was a new congregation, established four years earlier by the Reverend T. M. Chambers Jr., son of the Reverend T. M. Chambers Sr. of Los Angeles’s Zion Hill Baptist Church.³⁴ Cleveland accepted Annette’s invitation, but transporting the entire New Greater Harvest church choir, an untested one at that, from Los Angeles to one of Savoy’s preferred recording studios in New York would have been impracticable.³⁵ On the other hand, there was a local church choir with recording provenance that happened to be signed to Savoy. So, sometime in 1962, on the recommendation of Fred Mendelsohn, Cleveland approached Roberts about borrowing his Angelic Choir for a recording. Years later, Roberts recalled their conversation:

James called me to ask if he could record with me. And I told him I would be happy to record with him, but I would appreciate it if he would do it differently. And he asked me how. And I said, “Let’s record it live in church.” And the reason I thought of doing that was because [he] had recorded with a choir out of Detroit called the Voices of Tabernacle. But I knew my choir could not meet the standards of the Voices of Tabernacle in a studio session. They were all professional singers and I just had Mary, Jane, and John Doe from up the street, down the street, and around the corner. But I knew if you put them in the church atmosphere, we would do well.³⁶

Cleveland expressed reservations. It would be more difficult to edit technical errors out of a live recording than out of a studio session. But Roberts was persistent. “I always felt that when you have to clean up a song too much,” he said on a videotaped interview, “you lose some of the fervor that the original interpretation of the song may have had.”³⁷ Still, Cleveland did not know of any gospel choirs that had recorded a live album in a church, in front of a congregation. He may not have known about them, but gospel choirs had indeed recorded live in-service albums, including one right there in Newark.