9

The Release of Peace Be Still

Since the October 12, 1963, issue of Cash Box contains a Savoy ad that lists volume 3 as among the company’s “new and best-selling albums,” it’s clear that the record company didn’t waste any time rushing the new Sunday Service album out to distributors and retailers.¹ Still, there’s a nagging sense that Savoy Records didn’t have as much faith in this volume as in the other two, at least initially, as company records show that it placed an order for only three thousand copies to be pressed. Savoy typed up the label copy on September 23, 1963, and at least on the first draft, did not include “Peace Be Still” as the album’s subtitle. The song title was subsequently added to the copy in ink pen, suggesting the omission was an honest mistake, or perhaps the office was awaiting confirmation from Mendelsohn or Roberts on the target single.

Notwithstanding a presumed lack of enthusiasm from its record company, Peace Be Still began turning heads even before its release. “I can remember visiting the home of my friend Rev. Lawrence Roberts,” gospel program producer George Hudson wrote, “to hear an unreleased, new album about which he seemed to be quite excited. As I walked in the house, Rev. Roberts and several members of the Angelic Choir were listening to a recording of a song called ‘Peace Be Still.’ And that was my introduction to what was to become the greatest team in Gospel record history.”²

Using Michel Ruppli and Bob Porter’s Savoy Records discography as their source,³ one that mined the original Savoy files for its data, Cedric Hayes and Robert Laughton identified each selection on Peace Be Still by matrix number so one can differentiate between the session sequence and the final album sequence.

Side A:

SJC63–277⁴      Peace Be Still

SJC63–276      Jesus Saves

SJC63–278      I Had a Talk with God (identified erroneously on the album as “I Had to Talk with God;” the original label copy had the correct title)

SJC63–279      Where He Leads Me

Side B:

SJC63–284      Shine on Me

SJC63–283      The Lord Brought Us Out

SJC63–282      I’ll Wear a Crown

SJC63–285      I’ll Be Caught Up to Meet Him

SJC63–286      Praise God

The two unissued tracks discussed earlier were assigned these matrix numbers:

SJC63–280:      God Is Enough

SJC63–281:      My All and All

By breaking up the selections on the album, Roberts, Cleveland, and Mendelsohn had an inkling that each song on Peace Be Still could stand on its own, but only “Peace Be Still” was released as a single. It is possible that the length of the single’s stay on the charts, as well as the fact that the following Sunday Service album, I Stood on the Banks of Jordan (volume 4), was recorded less than twelve months later, persuaded Savoy to not release additional singles from Peace Be Still.

“Sunday School Surrealism”: The Album Cover

Herman Lubinsky was smitten the first time he laid eyes on the colorful and vibrant Dali-seque oil paintings that the artist, known simply as Harvey, was selling at a local street art festival. He decked the walls of his office at Savoy Records with Harvey’s oils—“every visible inch,” according to record man Arnold Shaw.⁵

For decades, Harvey was something of an enigma among enthusiasts of his cover art, largely because he signed each work simply as “Harvey,” with no surname, and the album credits cited him likewise. When I spoke to Reverend Lawrence Roberts in August 2006 about the mysterious Harvey, all he could remember is that the artist was a young man who did contract work for Savoy Records.⁶ Thanks to research by John Glassburner and Robert Rogers, and interviews with Harvey’s half-sister Margo Lee Williams and his son Keith, the shroud of mystery surrounding Harvey has been lifted. His name was Harvey Scott Williams.

Like Roberts, Harvey Williams was African American and a product of an arts-focused high school education. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on September 12, 1927, Harvey was the second child of Emma (Scott) Williams and Herbert Randell Williams. Emma was one of the first African American members of the Women’s Air Corps (WAC) in World War II; Herbert became one of the top deputy collectors for the Port of New York and received the Gallatin Award, the US Treasury Department’s highest civilian service honor.⁷

Demonstrating artistic proclivities at an early age, Harvey was accepted to the High School of Music and Art on West 135th Street in New York City—the same school that would inspire the hit musical Fame. By the time Harvey graduated, the United States was involved in World War II. Rather than begin a commercial art career, he entered the army to fight the Axis.

While in the army, Harvey married Elizabeth Butler, the daughter of a funeral home director. They had one child, Keith Van Williams. Upon his discharge, Harvey went to work at his father-in-law’s funeral home, but in 1951, he resumed his art studies on Saturdays at New York’s Art Students’ League. He focused on painting the human form because portraiture was a lucrative way for an artist to make a living. The number of Harvey album covers for Savoy Records that feature well-defined hands clasped in prayer, or the “Hand of God” reaching down through billowy clouds, comes from Harvey’s almost scientific fascination on perfecting the human figure on canvas.

Margo Lee Williams, former editor of the Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, believes that it was Ernest Feine (1894–1965), Harvey’s art teacher at the Art Students’ League, who influenced her brother to emulate surrealism in his commercial paintings, which he exhibited in a few places around Manhattan. A photo in a July 1959 issue of the Pittsburgh Courier depicts Harvey and his father viewing one of his works, Gift of the Magi, which was exhibited at the Ceceile Gallery on West Fifty-Sixth Street and earned its Ceceile Award. Harvey also exhibited his work at the Greenwich Village Art Festival. It was there that Herman Lubinsky allegedly discovered the young man’s work and began purchasing his canvases for his Newark office.⁸

Whether to save on the expense of cover portraiture or to emulate record labels such as Verve, Columbia, and Clef that employed talented cover illustrators such as David Stone Martin, Alex Steinweiss, and Jim Flora, Lubinsky employed Harvey around 1961 to design record album covers for Savoy Records and its subsidiaries. In 2006 Roberts explained that “Mr. Lubinsky would give [Harvey] a song, or myself or Mr. Mendelsohn would give him a title song of the album, and he would go off somewhere, back home, draw a picture, bring it back, and we would produce that cover.”⁹ A single parent, Harvey took his son Keith with him on his trips to Savoy, where he would receive $25 in cash for each cover he delivered. Although the majority of Harvey’s approximately 175 album covers were for Savoy’s gospel roster, he also painted fascinating covers for early 1960s Savoy jazz albums by the New York Jazz Quartet and Sun Ra.¹⁰ “I thought they were cool because they were different,” Margo said. “In many ways, it was my first real introduction into modern art on a personal level.”¹¹

Nevertheless, it was the outsized crosses, the Hand of God reaching down from the heavens, the roman numerals of the Ten Commandments buzzing around their stone tablets, staircases and railroad tracks leading into the ether, and Bibles floating weightlessly above landscapes reaching into infinity that marked Harvey’s work. “Savoy’s albums looked like no others,” noted David Peterkofsky in the introduction of his For Keeps podcast in early 2019, on which Harvey was the subject. “Landscapes that seemed like equal parts Norman Rockwell and Salvador Dali, of all people. In retrospect, Savoy’s 1960s artwork might best be described as ‘Sunday School Surrealism’.”¹²

For the front covers of the first two volumes of the James Cleveland and Angelic Choir Sunday Service collaborations, Harvey painted variations of the quintessential country church, complete with picturesque steeple, nestled among acres of green grass. In the foreground, the church’s welcome sign contained the album title and artist details. If First Baptist of Nutley resembled the simple edifice in Harvey’s painting, the pastoral setting looked nothing like the neighborhood surrounding First Baptist Church, which was residential. It didn’t matter. The cover art enabled listeners who had never been to Nutley to imagine the music emanating from a little wooden church atop a grassy knoll. In many ways, the image graphically depicted what the music attempted to evoke—nostalgia for the traditional (i.e., southern) religious experience. This use of artistic paradigms to evoke authenticity and nostalgia is not unlike the practice by African American jubilee groups and gospel quartets of incorporating the words southern, south, or Dixie in their names, even if they were headquartered in Chicago or New York City. Zion Hill’s L&N Gospel Singers, as we have seen, took their name from a railroad line that brought southern migrants to the urban North. And, as has been noted, evoking southern religion and its association with a principled folk culture helped people ripped from their roots to regain some sense of groundedness in an unfamiliar land.

With his experience painting the human form, Harvey probably found the Peace Be Still assignment as uncomplicated as the first two Sunday Service volumes. It was certainly one of the most explicit representations of an album title in Harvey’s Savoy portfolio. Taking the biblical premise of the title track for his inspiration, Williams portrayed a white-robed Jesus standing alone at the bow of a one-mast wooden boat, arms outstretched to calm the dark clouds and churning waters. The disciples sit huddled in the stern, their faces and bodies nothing more than impressionistic smudges of pigment. Although Harvey’s Peace Be Still oil on canvas is not nearly as eye-popping as other examples of his work, it is probably the best known and most viewed simply by virtue of the album’s substantial ongoing sales.

Despite the remarkable number of gospel album covers Harvey painted for Savoy, he himself was not particularly religious. He believed in God but was not a churchgoer and preferred listening to classical music and Frank Sinatra. He knew he could not support his family from his artwork. A literal starving artist who survived several failed marriages, he taught at the Art Students’ League while holding onto his full-time job as a riveter. Through the struggle, the activity of creating art was liberating. “Looking back on it,” Margo recalled, “the years he was involved with his art, those were really positive times for him.”¹³

Photographer Robert Rogers, an album art aficionado, dedicated his master’s thesis to an examination of the work of Harvey Williams. He told David Peterkofsky during the January 2019 For Keeps podcast that the money Harvey made from selling his artwork barely covered weekly household expenses. “His art was being recognized,” Rogers said. “He was an up-and-coming artist. He had the credentials. The family always felt like he should have charged more and pressed him to value his art more. I think it was just part of the struggles of being an artist that he had to realize that this couldn’t sustain his life, and this couldn’t sustain his family that he had. He had a young child at the time and had to care for him…. He only worked [on his art] for a short period of time.”¹⁴

Williams precipitated his own mystery by signing Peace Be Still and his other album artwork as simply “Harvey,” leaving off his surname. “Harvey had a huge ego,” Margo said. “He wanted to be known by one name, like Picasso, Matisse, or Twiggy. He may have been amused now at the idea he was a mystery, but at the time, NO WAY! He loved whatever celebrity he achieved.”¹⁵

Naturally, then, Harvey was proud of his album covers. “We always saw everything once it had become a cover,” Margo recalled. “As soon as a cover would be created, he would bring that and show that to us. He was absolutely thrilled with the idea that he was on these gospel album covers. He was immensely proud of having that distinction.”¹⁶ Margo added that “after he divorced Keith’s mother, Harvey was a riveter. For a while, he tried to survive on art, including doing paintings for rich patrons, signing their names so they could impress friends with their ‘hidden’ talents. His problem wasn’t that he never made money, it’s that he spent it faster than he could make it. Eventually, he went back to the funeral business.”¹⁷

Rogers told Peterkofsky that later in Harvey’s life, “his son and daughter- in-law presented him with some brushes and a canvas so he could paint again, but he’d contracted rheumatoid arthritis so bad that he couldn’t even hold a brush. So when they gave it to him, he just wept and knew that he could never paint again.”¹⁸

Harvey Scott Williams died on January 24, 1987, and is buried at Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island, New York. Williams’s work has since garnered an avid following among album-art enthusiasts. Today, Savoy gospel albums with Harvey covers fetch prices on Internet auction sites that far outweigh those of contemporaneous releases. Nearly thirty years later, the family discovered gospel music enthusiast’s John Glassburner’s website dedicated to Harvey’s album cover art and learned, to their delight, that their relative was a cult figure. “I’m thrilled to know,” Margo wrote, “that his work will not end in oblivion.”¹⁹

“The world that Harvey lived in didn’t have gravity,” Rogers said. “Everything floated around and it just sort of came to be…. Gospel at this time kept people together, and the fact that he pushed these boundaries that led into arguably more and more abstract art, and letting the cover be a nice place as a soapbox to present something that was different, to present something that was a little edgier, to present something to sort of push you into that third effect, where it was music and art but collectively it was a feeling, it was an emotion. He was like a shooting star. He came out with these brilliant images and this vibrant color, but flared out so soon and never to be seen again.”²⁰

Although its ads did appear in issues of Cash Box in late 1963, Savoy had dramatically reduced its budget for advertising in the trade magazines. Radio play and word of mouth were the two principal ways Peace Be Still, in album and single format, was marketed. Veteran gospel radio announcer Linwood Heath remembers vividly when the song first hit Philadelphia. In early 1964, Heath was apprenticing at radio station WDAS, answering phones and previewing records for announcer Reverend Louise Williams, the “Gospel Queen of Philadelphia.” “There was no [promotional agent] calling radio stations at that time saying, ‘Did you get so and so, did you give it a listen?’” Heath said. “Savoy and Peacock would mail us a box of albums or 45s and you just had to go through them.” He continued that “Peace Be Still”

by the Angelic Choir was sent to the station, along with some other recordings, by Savoy. When we played [it on the radio], there was something about it that just struck us. There was something about the atmosphere and the words, and yet it’s a song in the hymnbook, but I never paid attention to it. The phones just lit up, they just lit up. People wanted to hear more and more, but at that time [Williams] didn’t repeat any songs. It was just captivating to us in Philadelphia. It did something to us, the whole album; people were just buying that album. They just loved “Peace Be Still.”²¹

Record retailers played Peace Be Still in their stores. That’s how gospel songwriter and musician A. Jeffrey LaValley first heard it. He was twelve years old and traveling home from a visit to Madisonville, Kentucky: “We stopped at a record store on the South Side of Chicago and it was playing in the store. The piano got my attention first, then I heard the choir and was blown away. I had to have it. It was the first LP I ever bought.”²²

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, “Peace Be Still” inspired a teenaged Richard Smallwood. “I heard it on the radio and immediately fell in love with it,” recalled the award-winning gospel composer of “Total Praise,” a song that has gone on to become as popular, if not more so, than “Peace Be Still.” “‘Peace Be Still’ had to be played four or five times a day, and it was probably one of the most requested songs, if not the most requested song, during that period. Any time of day you turned on the radio, you’d wait just five or ten minutes, [and] you’d hear it. ‘Peace Be Still’ was like [Walter Hawkins’s] ‘Changed’ or ‘Going Up Yonder’ during that day. It was like the biggest song in the country.”²³

Although Smallwood was familiar with the hymn—“I had to learn all the hymns in the hymnbook when I was growing up,” he said—he was entranced by the arrangement and especially by John Hason’s piano accompaniment. “That was my first time even hearing about the Angelic Choir. Of course, I went out to the record store and bought it, and played the grooves smooth. It eventually became my favorite James Cleveland record ever. That particular record caused me to go back and find the other volumes and then every volume after that until they didn’t do any more.”²⁴

At the time, Smallwood was a member of Pleasant Green Baptist Church, where the pastor was the Reverend Cleavant Derricks, composer of the popular gospel song, “Just a Little Talk with Jesus.” The Pleasant Green choir learned “Peace Be Still.” “‘Peace Be Still’ was not ‘Peace Be Still’ unless you did that signature [piano] intro,” Smallwood said. “As soon as you played the first three notes, the church would go up because they knew what you were getting ready to play. They knew that’s what it was.”²⁵ In his autobiography, Total Praise, Smallwood wrote that he became “a great admirer” of pianist Hason, “and for a while [he] influenced my approach to gospel piano playing.”²⁶

The song attracted international interest after Savoy authorized a 45-rpm version of “Peace Be Still” to be released in France on BYG Records; the title track was backed with “The Lord Brought Us Out” on the flip side. Meanwhile, a British Savoy release of Peace Be Still contained the aural components of the US release but used a photograph of a singing James Cleveland for its album cover instead of the Harvey artwork.

As far as the Reverend Lawrence Roberts was concerned, one of the best sales outlets for Angelic Choir singles and albums was First Baptist Church. Members would purchase records for themselves and for friends, he told Birdie Wilson Johnson. “When I had James’s first album [volume 1], … [w]e could sell 2,000 in a given period of time right quick.”²⁷

But not every listener was won over initially. Joe Peay was somewhat disappointed with Cleveland and the Angelic Choir’s recorded rendition of “Peace Be Still.” “The sound wasn’t right,” he said, years later. “The choir, the voices, the microphones were not positioned right. You didn’t get the full choir sound, especially the way that I heard it with Victory Baptist Church, as well as our [Southern California Mass Choir]. Oh my God, we’d make the walls shake! No one, in my opinion, could replace Thurston with that song. He was a performer as well as a singer. He was a formidable person.”²⁸

Nevertheless, on August 22, 1964, Billboard published the “Top Ten R&B Gospel Singles and LPs” as selected by the Reverend Louise Williams of WDAS, and Peace Be Still sat atop of it. Had Roberts seen the chart, he would most certainly have smiled knowing that his choir of “Mary, Jane, and John Doe from up the street, down the street, and around the corner” had bettered in sales the formidable Voices of Tabernacle, whose latest HOB release, He’s So Divine, sat one position below, at number two.²⁹

Radio station WLOK of Memphis, Tennessee, ranked “Peace Be Still” number four on its “Top Spiritual Selections” chart for September 7, 1964 (Mitty Collier’s cover of “I Had a Talk with God,” as “I Had a Talk with My Man,” was number two on the survey’s pop list that same week). Also in September, Miami, Florida, religious announcer Reverend Ira McCall listed “Peace Be Still” among the top three gospel songs making noise on WMBMAM.³⁰ Nearly a year later, “Peace Be Still” was still number one in Billboard, but the album had dropped to number two on the Top Selling Spiritual LPs list, behind Cleveland and the Angelic Choir’s follow-up Sunday Service album, I Stood on the Banks of Jordan.³¹ In fact, Sunday Service volumes 3 and 4 flip-flopped between the number one and two positions during the brief period in 1964–65 when Billboard sporadically charted sales of gospel singles and LPs. Among the artists joining them on the list were the Staple Singers (“Hammer and Nails”), the Caravans (“Walk around Heaven All Day”), and the Consolers, a husband-and-wife duo from Miami, Florida (“Waiting for My Child”).

Meanwhile, Savoy Records had live recording fever. On Saturday, September 21, two days after the Peace Be Still session, Savoy engaged audio engineers to hook up their equipment at Bailey Temple Church of God in Christ in Detroit, Michigan, to record the Southwest Michigan State Choir. Composed of singers from the Southwest Michigan Jurisdiction of the Church of God in Christ, the Southwest Michigan State Choir, led by Mattie Moss Clark, generated more volts of electricity when singing to an appreciative congregation in Bailey Temple than they did on their 1961 debut LP for Kapp, Lord Do Something for Me, recorded in a Detroit studio.

Indeed, the result of the Southwest Michigan State Choir’s September 21 session, the Savoy album Wonderful Wonderful and its up-tempo single, “I Thank You Lord,” cemented the reputations of Clark and the 250-voice mass choir.³² It launched the Moss and Clark family gospel music dynasties—Bill Moss and the Celestials, the Clark Sisters individually and collectively, and soloists J Moss, Bill Moss Jr., and J. Drew and Kierra Sheard among them—as well as additional successful live in-service recordings from the choir spanning the 1960s that introduced such leading vocalists as Ora Watkins-Jones, Rose Marie Rimson-Brown, LaBarbara Whitehead, Donald Vails, and Vanessa Bell Armstrong.

Fred Mendelsohn became a believer. He told Billboard in February 1965, “You get something extra in a live recording—as in a church. The result may not be as perfect as a record made in a studio, but it has what is perhaps more important—sincerity and soul…. The buyers know exactly what they want, and they want authenticity.” The same article indicated that Savoy was increasing its output of ‘live’ recordings as against studio recordings.”³³

To increase its output of live recordings, Savoy commenced a church- choir-signing spree. In addition to the Angelic Choir and the Southwest Michigan Mass Choir, Savoy added to its roster the Banks Brothers’ Back Home Choir of Newark’s Greater Harvest Baptist Church; evangelist Rosie Wallace and her Church of Love, Prayer, and Deliverance Choir; and the choir from the Church of God in Christ of Toledo, Ohio, which featured a young Rance Allen on bass guitar. If Peacock Records was the premier label for gospel quartets, Savoy Records was becoming the premier label for African American community and church choirs.

By this point, Savoy wasn’t the only record company specializing in live in-service albums of African American church choirs. One woman made it her label’s business model. Arkansas-born Idessa Malone (1913–87) became the first black woman to own a record company when she launched her Staff label in Detroit in 1947. Malone built her industry reputation recording the sounds of the Motor City’s postwar jazz and blues scene; in late 1948, her recording of “Bewildered” by the Red Miller Trio hit the top spot on Billboard’s Best Selling Retail Race Records and Most-Played Jukebox Race Records chart. By 1960, after tussles with her business partners, Malone did a 180-degree turn. She transformed Staff Records into a religious label, recording sermons, talented organists, and the singing of amateur church choirs and groups. Among the first choirs she recorded was the one at Chicago’s Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, founded in 1950 by civil-rights leader Reverend Doctor Clay Evans. Malone took the choir into the city’s Universal Recording Studio in 1962 and 1963 to cut their first two albums, which were released on the Fellowship imprint. But for the remainder of the 1960s and into the 1980s, Malone focused on live services recorded at churches. The congregations sold the albums to raise money for their general fund, building fund, or a special project—much as the Angelic Choir was using proceeds from the sale of its own releases to build a new church.

Ultimately, Malone’s albums came closer to capturing authentic in-service worship experiences than did the Angelic Choir’s recordings, those of Thurston Frazier and the Voices of Victory, or any other contemporaneous releases. That’s because her albums tended to follow the order of service with fidelity: the choral singing, the prayers, the sermon, and the altar call. But because the choirs were not professional, or even semiprofessional, and some edifices lacked the optimal acoustics for recording, Malone’s reproductions of Sunday-morning worship resulted in little commercially viable or radio-friendly material. Rare exceptions were “It Is No Secret,” a Reverend Doctor Clay Evans solo from one of the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church Choir albums; and “Great Consolation” / “A Prayer” by the Reverend C. T. Nelson of Greater Friendship Baptist Church of Cleveland, Ohio, which affected gospel radio in 1966. Nevertheless, Malone inspired a do-it-yourself recording industry among African American churches that recognized the economic potential in cutting a “vanity” record and selling it to support their ministry. Studios and record companies like Mark Recording, Custom Recording, Designer Records, Sound-O-Rama, and other whosoever-will-let-him-come shops were happy to accommodate the increased influx of traffic.

The vanity press phenomenon in gospel music received an enormous boost when a young Edwin Hawkins of Oakland, California, produced an album by his newly formed Northern California State Youth Choir of the Church of God in Christ. Their custom-made Let Us Go into the House of the Lord, recorded in June 1968 at the Ephesian Church of God in Christ in Berkeley, California, opened with a softly rocking remake of a hymnbook staple, Philip Doddridge’s 1755 “O Happy Day That Fixed My Choice,” as “Oh Happy Day,” with lead vocals by Dorothy Morrison. The choir’s objective was to sell enough albums to pay its way to the 1968 Church of God in Christ Annual Youth Congress, but Hawkins got more than he bargained for when a San Francisco disk jockey began playing “Oh Happy Day” on the radio. Soon stations nationwide added the song to their playlists and “Oh Happy Day” became a national hit, the first officially recognized salvo of the contemporary gospel music era.³⁴ Record companies battled over the rights to sign Hawkins and his group (Buddah Records won). Like “Peace Be Still,” “Oh Happy Day” demonstrated how an old hymn could be revived and rearranged to represent the musical tastes of a new generation of worshippers.

Although “Peace Be Still” engendered no controversy when released, the same couldn’t be said about “Oh Happy Day.” “Black deejays are divided on when and if to play the record, calling it irreverent to play among r&b disks or to dance to because of its sacred message,” wrote Ed Ochs in the May 10, 1969, issue of Billboard. “Del Shields, WLIB deejay and jazz columnist, cautions the industry to ‘go slow and take into serious consideration the deep sensitive feelings of the black people and their reaction to the manner in which this record would be programmed,’ but adds that the record ‘clearly shows that there is a swing back to the spiritual reclamation.’”³⁵

Though not citing “Oh Happy Day” specifically, the reference is obvious in Reverend Lawrence Roberts’s opening statement for a 1969 two-sided Savoy single, “Oh What a Day.” “I heard one of our old songs being played on a rock and roll [radio] show,” he declares. But as indignant as Roberts is on hearing a “Zion song” on a rock-and-roll radio program, he proceeds to rework the Hawkins arrangement of “Oh Happy Day” into “Oh What a Day” and passes the lead microphone to the Reverend Charles Banks and Dorothy Norwood, who are supported by none other than the Angelic Choir of First Baptist Church. It’s a peculiar statement by an artist whose “I Can’t Believe It” was played on nonreligious radio a decade earlier, but it does demonstrate the pushback that Hawkins and his contemporary gospel song received from the church community.

Notwithstanding the critical and commercial acclaim for their Sunday Service albums and other releases, Roberts and the Angelic Choir never lost sight of the fact that, in the end, their portion of the sales was to cover the construction of their new church. But after Cleveland took his royalties and Savoy recouped its expenses, what remained was insufficient to meet construction costs. To finish the job, the Angelic Choir had to tour the country as often as possible. The members spent long hours traveling from coast to coast, stringing together a series of one-nighters from Nutley to Los Angeles. “We traveled all over,” Bootsy remembered. “We did nightly concerts with James Cleveland all the way to California. It took us a week to get there, but we were doing a concert every night and all the money we raised we sent it home. [One time] Freeman [Johnson] had to come back early, and my husband gave Freeman a bag of money, and he took that money back home, gave it to our trustees.”³⁶

“We would fly sometimes, other times we would just drive,” Robert Logan said. “The choir usually traveled by bus, a reliable bus company out of Hackensack, New Jersey. I remember one of the longest drives we had, we went from Nutley to Erie, Pennsylvania, which is way up on Lake Erie. One particular tour in the early sixties, we left Nutley on Friday night and we reached Washington, DC, went to Kingsbury, Virginia, and to Chicago, Illinois. That’s a lot for a weekend!”³⁷

“We would go sometimes on an engagement far away, get off the bus, go home, shower, and go to work,” recalled Bernadine Hankerson. “Sometimes you took your [traveling] bags to work or you’d get fired!” added Raymond Murphy.³⁸ First Baptist covered all traveling costs, but it did not compensate the singers and accompanists. All profits earned from performance fees went directly to pay down the First Baptist Church construction loan.

To relieve the long, tiring hours spent on the road, the Angelic Choir liked to play practical jokes on their leader. Remembered Vivian Carroll, “When the Angelics would go out to sing, and [Roberts] would preach, he would tell the congregation, ‘I would like to introduce my wife, Dolores “Bootsy” Roberts.’ Dolores and about ten of us would stand! We never knew who it was going to be. He would look around and say, ‘Would the real Dolores Roberts stand up?’ We would play that joke with him a lot, but he never knew when we were going to do it. That’s what made it funny!”³⁹

Roberts wasn’t without turning the tables on his choir. He told Birdie Wilson Johnson,

I never will forget the last time we were at the Apollo Theater, when I got the money that had to go to First Baptist. As a joke, I gave each choir member an envelope, those little brown envelopes that you used to get for anniversaries, and told them, “Here is something for you for this week’s service.” There was a note in there that said, “I love you, thanks so much for helping us to build First Baptist.” They were throwing brown envelopes at me the whole night!⁴⁰

But like other African American artists of the era, the Angelic Choir was not immune to the insidious indignities of Jim Crow laws while touring the South. Roberts related one such incident to Johnson:

We were on the way home from South Carolina doing a concert and one of our members got sick on the bus. We called for help and a white patrol car came up to aid us. And when he saw a bus full of black folks, he must have thought we were on a civil rights campaign. We explained to him we were gospel singers en route back to our church in New Jersey and he said, “Well, I will call you an ambulance.” And he sped off and left her lying on the ground with all our choir members around. About ten minutes later we saw this light coming up the highway. It was a hearse from a local funeral home that they had sent to cart her to the hospital.⁴¹

The singer survived the ordeal, but sending a hearse instead of an ambulance to aid an African American experiencing a health emergency was a stark reminder of the long road ahead for achieving equality in America. The good news was that “ninety percent of [the mortgage payoff] was from the singing and traveling of the Angelic Choir,” Roberts reported. ”And this was done through the Civil Rights Movement and the torturous things that were going on in the South.”⁴² In the end, a combination of record sales, touring, and church contributions paid off the fifteen-year mortgage in five years.⁴³

Everywhere they went, the choir sang “Peace Be Still.” And whenever the Angelic Choir had the opportunity to sing on a program with James Cleveland, they followed a two-selection formula: “Peace Be Still” and “Jesus Saves.” “They always tied those two together wherever we sang with [Cleveland],” Logan said. “Everywhere, those songs went together like a horse and carriage.”⁴⁴ Brenda O’Neal remembered one engagement where a choir appearing on the program before the Angelic Choir had the audacity to sing “Peace Be Still” first. “I’ll never forget it,” O’Neal said. “Reverend Roberts said, ‘Didn’t they look around and see we were sitting there?’ We went to laughing. We said, ‘We’re going to sing it right behind them!’”⁴⁵

The Angelic Choir even sang an abbreviated version of “Peace Be Still” on television. In 1964, the group appeared on TV Gospel Time, the first nationally syndicated gospel music telecast. Because James Cleveland was unavailable to join the troupe for the taping, Freeman Johnson, the Angelic Choir member whose voice and comportment most evoked James Cleveland, took the solo. “He sounded like James Cleveland—looked like a young James Cleveland!” Roberts told Birdie Wilson Johnson. “And even had a voice in talking like James Cleveland.”⁴⁶ From then on, whenever Cleveland was unavailable to join the choir on a gospel program, Johnson substituted as lead singer on “Peace Be Still.”⁴⁷

In addition to appearances “on all the TV networks in New York City at the time,” according to Logan,⁴⁸ the Angelic Choir sang in Philadelphia, Detroit, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas and even provided the music for a week’s revival at a church in Bermuda.⁴⁹

Perhaps the Angelic Choir’s most visually striking performance of “Peace Be Still” took place in 1964 at the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow Park. The appearance was part of an outdoor gospel program organized by Joe Bostic, gospel announcer at New York radio station WLIB. Robert Logan remembered this:

We were on the stage singing “Peace Be Still.” Freeman Johnson was singing James Cleveland’s part, and I was on the organ. For some reason, Lew Alcindor [basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar] was standing on the stage with us. As we sang the song, suddenly it became dark and cloudy. A lightning storm came up out of nowhere. It was surreal. Everybody in the choir stand was like, “Wow—can you believe this? It was like God was speaking from Heaven, telling us that this is what it was like [in the Bible story]!”⁵⁰

Linwood Heath witnessed the Angelic Choir at an early 1970s multiartist gospel musical program held at a stadium near Newark. James Cleveland, Albertina Walker, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and the Hawkins Family were among the headliners. The Triboro Mass Choir opened and the Angelic Choir followed. “For me, and it’s just my opinion,” Heath said, the Angelic Choir “were a regular church choir. There was nothing exceptional about them. Gertrude [Hicks] got her voice out there and she could sing, and they might have other singers that were good, but at that time it was just God’s doing of putting James [Cleveland] and them together.”⁵¹

If Freeman Johnson was Cleveland’s stand-in for the Angelic Choir, various groups served as stand-ins for the Angelic Choir when Cleveland was on tour. Anthony Heilbut remembers Cleveland fronting his pals the Caravans on “Peace Be Still” at an Apollo Theater appearance. In his memoir, Gene Viale recalled singing half of side one of Peace Be Still as a Cleveland Singer: “Finally, we moved on to the one everyone was waiting for, ‘Peace Be Still.’ … The audience was completely wrecked by the time [Cleveland] got through. I believe we then went into ‘To the Utmost, Jesus Saves’ and left the stage.”⁵²

Notwithstanding a growing national fan base, the Angelic Choir remained unfazed by their celebrity. “Everyday people. No stars,” Gertrude Hicks stated matter-of-factly. “And we were not star-struck,” Raymond Murphy added. “We were just a choir, and we enjoyed doing what we were doing—we didn’t care who it was with. We weren’t hung up on the names of James Cleveland or Billy Preston or Thurston Frazier. It was nice to work with them—we enjoyed working with them—but they were just as pleased and thrilled to work with us.”⁵³

On the other hand, the Reverend Doctor Stefanie Minatee, who grew up around the Angelic Choir, believed the troupe’s newfound celebrity did have some impact on their daily lives. “The Angelic Choir was one of the best-dressed choirs of their time,” Minatee said. “They were impeccably dressed every time they went out, and they knew it! They went out with the flair and style that was comparable to the way they sounded. They were trendsetters for the choirs of their day.”⁵⁴ Brenda O’Neal agreed: “We were very stylish back in those days, with those robes.”⁵⁵ But O’Neal also remembered how being fashionable could mean sacrificing comfort. Though the Angelic Choir’s appearance at New York’s Madison Square Garden was one of her greatest experiences, she said, “We had on lavender dresses with silver trim. I’ll never forget the silver shoes because my feet killed me that night—wearing those silver shoes!”⁵⁶

Lorraine Stancil was especially impressed by the Angelic Choir’s soprano section. “Reverend Roberts had this thing where if there was a little pause anywhere in any song, he would point his finger at those sopranos, and they would have to hit [a high] note.”⁵⁷ If only one soprano was needed to hit the high note, Roberts pointed to Bernadine Hankerson for the stave-topping note. Choirs still adopt that technique for dramatic emphasis.

By now, other church choirs, such as the one that sang “Peace Be Still” at the program they shared with the Angelic Choir, were paying attention to the ensemble from Nutley. As gospel promoter George Hudson put it in his liner notes, the Angelic Choir was now “the most imitated choir in America. The song arrangements that they have introduced are copied by Church choirs all over the country.” Lorraine Stancil believed it was because “Reverend Lawrence Roberts and the Angelic Choir set the standard for church choirs to do music that was simple but had a lasting impact on our lives. They were consistent no matter where they went. The songs they sang were just as effective years later. That’s the kind of choir they were; that’s the kind of leader he was.”⁵⁸

The Angelic Choir’s runaway success with “Peace Be Still” even prompted Thurston Frazier and the Voices of Hope to finally commit their version of Gwendolyn Lightner’s arrangement to vinyl. Recorded November 20, 1965, the Voices of Hope’s “Peace Be Still,” featuring Lightner on piano and future Cleveland musician Alexander Hamilton also in the band, was released on a Capitol Records LP titled Walk on by Faith.⁵⁹ That same year, veteran record producer Richard Simpson captured the Harold Smith Majestics gospel choir singing “Peace Be Still” live in Detroit’s Ford Auditorium. Simpson released the Simco single, like the Savoy single, as a two-sided 45. In December 1967, the Soul Stirrers gospel quartet joined the Majestics for a go at the song on Checker Records.⁶⁰ Not only does the Stirrers-Majestics arrangement on Checker follow the Angelic Choir’s recorded version with fidelity, but Stirrers lead singer Martin Jacox borrows Cleveland’s interjection, “Wake up, Jesus!” As several “Peace Be Still” singles were now in circulation, Savoy was justified in titling the Angelic Choir’s version “(The Original) Peace Be Still” on its 45-rpm singles.

In 1965 Joe Peay watched as Savoy Records’ Herman Lubinsky stepped onto the stage of the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. In front of an estimated six to eight thousand attendees enjoying a gospel program featuring James Cleveland and the Cleveland Singers, he handed James a framed gold record of Peace Be Still.⁶¹ In March 1966, Fred Mendelsohn reported to one hundred retail record dealers gathered in New Orleans for the Delta Dealers Convention that Peace Be Still had already sold more than three hundred thousand copies.⁶² He told Ebony in 1968 that while “everything [James] records will sell[,] … the album that’s our biggest seller right now? It’s Peace Be Still.”⁶³ By decade’s end, Peace Be Still was cited as James Cleveland’s biggest record to date, with annual sales of fifty thousand.⁶⁴ The accuracy of record sales reports is often as suspect as the heights and weights of football players in a college gridiron program. But if Mendelsohn’s numbers are even close to accurate, the estimated number of units sold by 1969 was somewhere between four hundred fifty and five hundred thousand. Although half a million sold was, at the time, sufficient to be certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), when gold status was conferred on albums with five hundred thousand units or more sold, there is no listing of the album or single in the RIAA database. In his seminal work The Gospel Sound, Anthony Heilbut put the sales figure even higher, at eight hundred thousand. “No record ever,” Heilbut wrote, “neither Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ nor the Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road,’ has so blanketed its market. With ‘Peace Be Still,’ Cleveland became the most important gospel figure since Mahalia Jackson.”⁶⁵