10

I Stood on the Banks of Jordan

In 1964 Savoy sought to capitalize on the runaway success of “Peace Be Still,” still dominating gospel radio and record sales, by producing a fourth volume of the Sunday Service series. Since First Baptist Church was still under construction and the popularity of Peace Be Still suggested that a larger crowd might be present for the next recording, Roberts scouted out an area church with sufficient accommodations. He selected St. John’s Baptist Church in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, where he was friends with the pastor, the Reverend Sterling E. Glover.

Founded in 1907, St. John’s Baptist Church was rebuilt and reopened in 1960 in an African-inspired circular shape to evoke “the Oneness of God.”¹ Although the church was a hearty drive from Nutley and Newark, it was worth the trip because of its size and newness. Besides, on February 13, 1964, Roberts and Savoy had recorded an album by the church’s Inspirational Choir. Recorded live in the church, the Inspirational Choir was remarkably gifted for an amateur church ensemble.² The choir’s Savoy single, “It Is Well with My Soul” / “Sometimes My Burdens Are Hard to Bear,” culled from the album, demonstrated vocal and emotional depth. Satisfied with St. John’s acoustics, Roberts received permission from Glover to record the next Cleveland–Angelic Choir album there.³ Recognizing the visibility that the recording would lend his church, Pastor Glover was undoubtedly all too eager to assist.

Caught up in Angelic Choir fever, George Hudson joined the live audience for volume four, I Stood on the Banks of Jordan. He described the scene at St. John’s that Thursday evening, May 14, 1964:

That night the Church was filled, and an air of expectancy hung over the audience. After about a ten-minute wait, the crowd burst into applause as the members of the Angelic Choir began filing into the choir loft. Rev. Roberts then took up his position in front of the choir, and James Cleveland removed his coat and seated himself at the piano. There was a hush throughout the Church, then James Cleveland began to sing “I Stood on the Banks of Jordan,” joined by the choir singing “To See the Ships Go Sailing Over.” From that point on, I was a witness to (and a part of) the most electrifying service I have ever experienced.⁴

Apparently the service was electrifying for more than just Hudson. In 1990 Fred Mendelsohn shared a recollection of the recording session with the Gospel Music Workshop of America newsletter, The Score:

Due to the success of Peace Be Still, there was a tremendous crowd of people [at the session]. We had a drummer there, he wasn’t our regular drummer, but he was very “spirit filled.” Everytime [sic] James would turn around (James would be directing and arranging as he was singing), he would look at the drummer—who was seated on a pedestal. The drummer got so full of the spirit, he forgot what he was supposed to be playing, and actually fell off the stand! When that happened, the crowd went up!⁵

Volume four was scheduled for release in September 1964,⁶ producing two singles, both written by Cleveland: “No Cross, No Crown” and the elegiac two-part “I Stood on the Banks of Jordan,” which provided the album its subtitle.⁷ “Stood on the Banks” is based on a spiritual arranged in 1918 by Harry T. Burleigh as “I Stood on de Ribber ob Jerden” and in 1941 by Southernaires radio quartet singer William Henry Smith as “I Stood on the River of Jordan.” Bootsy revealed that it was her husband, not Cleveland, who arranged the spiritual for the Angelic Choir: “Another song was needed for the album. James was hesitant in doing the song. That is why the intro was played so long. On the album, James took credit for writing the song. Being that Roberts wrote last minute, he didn’t have time to copyright it.”⁸

By the time the singers and musicians got to “Banks of Jordan,” the fifth song on the program, the choir was fully caught in the spirit, their shouts punctuating the air as Cleveland reacted with his own “Lord, help us.” His raspy-voiced and tear-stained solo on “Jordan,” especially as he raised the title line, “I stood on the banks of Jordan,” and the Angelic Choir responded with “to see the ships go sailing over,” its members sounding emotionally spent at first but gaining in energy, was a fitting complement to “Peace Be Still.” In fact, many similarities exist between “Jordan” and “Peace Be Still.” For example, both use ships and water as metaphors. Both are extended theatrical epics, both feature Cleveland as lead singer and chief storyteller, and both rise and fall in dynamic intensity before arriving at a peaceful conclusion. Cleveland’s commentary prompts encouragement from choristers such as “Sing it from your heart,” and “Go ’head, James!” and hair-raising squalls from one female voice, possibly Gertrude Hicks. (Soprano Bernadine Hankerson’s top notes are easily distinguishable.) This time, however, the struggle is not with a raging storm but with the heartache caused by a permanent separation from loved ones. The Jordan River serves as the metaphorical boundary between earth and heaven, where ships ferry passengers across from the earthly to the heavenly realm. Cleveland sings mournfully about his mother being on board a ship headed for the Promised Land. He wrenches as much melodrama as he can out of the narrative as, once again, the Angelic Choir represents a congregation of correspondents.

By the January 30, 1965, publication of the Billboard Hot Spiritual LPs chart, Peace Be Still was number one and I Stood on the Banks of Jordan was number two. By March, the LPs swapped positions on the album chart.⁹ But if Peace Be Still was the lead sales generator, I Stood on the Banks of Jordan was the album that provided James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir with their first Grammy Award nomination in 1965, in the Best Gospel or Other Religious Recording category (Tennessee Ernie Ford took home the statuette for his album, Great Gospel Songs).¹⁰ Cleveland and the Angelic Choir would receive another Grammy nomination in 1968, when “Bread of Heaven” from volume seven (Miracle Worker) of the Sunday Service series made the Best Gospel Soul Performance category. Nevertheless, the honor remained elusive: that year, Dottie Rambo, the sole Caucasian in the Soul Gospel category, took home the honor for “The Soul of Me.”¹¹

A Grammy may have eluded the Angelic Choir, but in 1967, when Billboard published its “Cream of the Catalogs” list, a special feature that recommended twelve hundred LP titles of all genres for record dealers to restock, Peace Be Still was one of only a handful of African American gospel albums, and one of only two Savoy releases, on the list.¹²

The Church That the Choir Built

By early February 1965, volumes three and four were battling one another on the national record charts; enough money seemed to have been raised at last to ready the new First Baptist Church building for occupancy. But one week before the membership was to march into its new church, one section caught fire. “The church was electric—the baseboard had electric coils,” Bootsy said. “One of the carpenters, his cord fell down into the coils and caught on fire. It burned one side of the church. So we had to redo that section.”¹³ Years later, Roberts confided in Angelic Choir member Yvonne Walls that just before the fire occurred, he had been gloating over what he had accomplished. It was a humbling and expensive reminder that the building was not his doing alone. Pride goeth before a fall. Nevertheless, with his characteristic humor, Roberts told Walls that the portion to survive the fire was God’s portion of the project; his portion was the charred section that needed rebuilding.¹⁴

A frenetic but ultimately successful effort to fix the fire-damaged area followed, and the new First Baptist Church opened for Sunday morning worship on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1965.¹⁵ The modern A-frame edifice with colorful stained-glass windows and three cascading arches commanded the corner of Harrison and Memphis, on the footprint of the original structure.

Volume five, Give Me My Flowers, was the first James Cleveland and Angelic Choir Sunday Service album to be recorded in the new First Baptist Church. Fittingly, the album opens with Cleveland surveying the beautiful church from his position in the pulpit and congratulating Roberts and his congregation on its completion.

A bigger church edifice couldn’t have come at a better time. The nationwide popularity of the Angelic Choir was resulting in overflow attendance at First Baptist Church’s Sunday services. Church membership grew from twelve in 1960, when Roberts became pastor, to more than twenty-five hundred by his retirement from the pulpit in 1995. In addition to registered members, visitors from Newark and elsewhere would drop in on the Sunday morning service just to hear Roberts preach and the Angelic Choir sing.¹⁶ Phyllis Morris wanted to be in the Angelic Choir so badly that she joined First Baptist for that reason: “Everybody knew the Angelic Choir, and the Sundays that they sang, you couldn’t get in the door. If you were not [there] by 10:30 [a.m. for the 11:00 a.m. service], you couldn’t get in! You couldn’t find a parking space, you couldn’t sit upstairs. Wasn’t enough seats; you had to go downstairs. They would pull down a [video] screen.”¹⁷ Bernice Paschal, another church member, concurred, telling Birdie Wilson Johnson that the church was so packed on many Sundays that she and her family had to listen to the service from outside the building.¹⁸ Thus, during the 1980s, the church built an extension to include more seats to accommodate the growing membership and visitors. Isaac Brown said they sold pavers inscribed with donors’ names to pay for the extension.¹⁹

A frequently quoted aphorism about church membership is that good music brings people in the sanctuary and good preaching keeps them there. But for many First Baptist members like Morris, it was the other way around: “Reverend Roberts was such a dynamic minister, such a dynamic speaker. Adding the choir, it was like putting icing on a cake.”²⁰

In accordance with Roberts’s initial intentions, First Baptist Church served as a live recording studio. Besides the Angelic Choir’s own offerings, Evangelist Rosie Wallace and the choir from her First Church of Love, Faith and Deliverance recorded their 1966 Savoy album No One but Jesus in the new edifice.²¹ And on Sunday, March 24, 1968, not only did James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir record volume eight of their Sunday Service series in the new church, but the now Reverend James Cleveland delivered his first recorded sermon, God’s Promise, from the Nutley pulpit.

Not only did Roberts’s reputation in the gospel music industry draw national artists to sing at First Baptist, but tobacco fortune heiress, socialite, and philanthropist Doris Duke (1912–93) hired Roberts to be her voice teacher. Recognizing Roberts’s talent from listening to Angelic Choir recordings, and securing an introduction through the Reverend James Cleveland, whom she had initially approached about voice lessons, Duke sought out the First Baptist pastor. Roberts agreed to teach her and she joined the Angelic Choir in 1968. Curiosity seekers began attending First Baptist services just to catch a glimpse of the famous heiress. By the mid-1970s, the incessant swarm of media attention and gapers overwhelmed the seating capacity of the church and threatened the dignity of Sunday morning worship. Recognizing the toll her presence was taking on First Baptist, Duke politely resigned her spot in the Angelic Choir. Until her death on October 28, 1993, Duke’s affection for the Roberts family never wavered.²²

The Sunday Service recordings by James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir continued throughout the remainder of the 1960s. Between 1962 and 1969, the team recorded nine live albums and one studio album in 1968 of Christmas carols and hymns. “The Angelic Choir sang with everybody that was anybody,” Roberts said. “We went to Radio City Music Hall. We went to the Shrine Auditorium in California. We went to Madison Square Garden with Duke Ellington, Sammy Davis Jr., and Roberta Flack, for Duke Ellington’s birthday party. We were just a part of everything that was major during those years.”²³ “We took gospel where it hadn’t been before,” Freeman Johnson added.²⁴

The Angelic Choir also appeared at New York’s famous Carnegie Hall and the Apollo Theater. Robert Logan remembered the Apollo booking in particular. “When we were at the Apollo with ‘Peace Be Still,’ the line went around the block. I remember one week we did four different services on Saturday night. It started with a matinee and lunch, and afternoon and then late at night. That’s how big [‘Peace Be Still’] was.”²⁵ One Apollo show was memorable for more than the size of the audience. Etta Jean Nunnally recalled that Roberts got so excited during a portion of that program that he leaped off the stage, unaware that he was headed not for the main floor but into the gaping chasm of the orchestra pit. Nunnally laughed and commented, “He didn’t realize how deep the floor was, but the crowd caught him!”²⁶

Isaac Brown joined the Angelic Choir in the 1970s. Although many original members were still part of the ensemble, Brown remembered that they were “low on men” and that several men joined the same day he joined. His full-time job in law enforcement in nearby Montclair, New Jersey, made it difficult for him to make all the rehearsals and recordings (“I worked crazy hours,” he said), and to be on a recording, a member had to make all the rehearsals. Nevertheless, what caught Brown’s fancy was that the Angelic Choir was “one large family” and, trumpeter though he was who played in local bands, he enjoyed singing with the group as often as he could. He recalled that when they traveled to appear on gospel programs in the 1970s and 1980s, they sang their old hits, such as “Peace Be Still” and “Christ Is the Answer,” but Roberts would alter the arrangements from time to time, including accelerating the tempo. Slow or fast, the songs made Brown “feel great inside” to sing them “and to be around those who sang them for many, many years.

You got pleasure from watching the people enjoy themselves. And to watch the members who had been there for many years receive the response from the people. I felt like it was somewhere I was supposed to be.”²⁷

One of Roberts’s own treasured memories of touring with the choir was a program at Detroit’s Cobo Hall after the 1972 release of the choir’s double album, Sunday Song Service. The album, reminiscent of the earlier live inservice recordings but without James Cleveland, included “Hold the Light.” This remake of the Roberta Martin Singers’ 1959 hit was about nine minutes long, more than half of it a sermonette, with Roberts taking Cleveland’s role in setting the stage for the song’s message. Roberts’s recollection is yet another indication of just how popular the Angelic Choir had become in little more than a decade: Detroit promoter and radio announcer Martha Jean (the Queen) Steinberg

had us in Detroit at Cobo Hall. I saw this long line of people standing out at Cobo Hall because we were staying at a hotel across the street. My choir and I thought it was a basketball game or something going on over there, and my organist [probably Robert Logan] and I went downstairs and across the street to find out what was happening. We said, “What’s going on, all these people here?” And they said, “We’re trying to get last-minute tickets to hear that man do ‘Hold the Light.’” Oh, I was floored!²⁸

In 1969 Roberts and the Angelic Choir received the Mahalia Jackson Memorial Award from the National Gospel Symposium of Music “for making the most substantial contribution to gospel music since Wings over Jordan,” a reference to the landmark radio choir from Cleveland, Ohio, whose national broadcasts over CBS radio were a Sunday-morning staple in African American households during the 1930s and 1940s. “We believe that music keeps the gospel alive,” Roberts remarked about the honor.²⁹

As the 1960s and the Sunday Service series concluded, the relationship between Lawrence Roberts and James Cleveland remained solid. Isaac Brown remembers Cleveland joining the Angelic Choir on a multiartist gospel program during the 1970s or 1980s, held at what is now the Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey.³⁰ But the two ministers’ relationship was heading into new territory. In 1967 Cleveland invited Roberts and other friends and associates to Detroit to share his vision for a national gospel music convention. The concept was based on the structure of the longstanding National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses but aimed at a younger generation and stressed music training and education. The Gospel Music Workshop of America (GMWA), Cleveland explained, would be a week-long convention with ample opportunities for gospel artists, choirs, musicians, and industry people to fellowship, take courses in such topics as vocal performance and—for the choirs—learn new songs to take home to their respective churches. Detroit hosted the first GMWA convention in 1968, but future confabs would move to various cities throughout the country. Roberts was named to the first GMWA board of directors and was its president in 1969.³¹

Roberts maintained his production responsibilities at Savoy Records until 1974, when he left to spend more time on his ministerial duties at First Baptist and with the Angelic Choir. A primary task was to train John Daniels to be his successor at Savoy. Bringing Daniels on board, Dennis Bines noted, likely could not have been done while Herman Lubinsky, who had died in Newark on March 16, 1974, was in charge. He would have fought against Roberts leaving and bringing someone in to take his place. But Daniels was far from a rookie in the gospel music world. Born October 14, 1936, in Red Level, Alabama, Daniels cut his musical teeth as a member of a family gospel group called the Daniels Singers (not the Apollo recording artists). He also sang with the Charles Taylor Singers and became music minister, choir director, and piano accompanist for the Cornerstone Church of Christ in Jersey City, New Jersey. Daniels established Glori Records in Jersey City in 1969. Living up to its motto, “The New Gospel Sound,” Glori gave a national platform to an ever-expanding circle of contemporary gospel groups and choirs formed in the immediate wake of the profound success of the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Artists who recorded for Glori included Bishop Kenneth Moales, Reverend Timothy Wright, Lloyd Reese, Robert Fryson and the Voices Supreme, saxophonist Vernard Johnson, and the Helen Hollins Singers. The second gospel album on Glori was by the First Baptist Church’s children’s choir, called the Little Angel Choir, accompanied by Gertrude Hicks and Robert Logan.

Roberts, who shared his record production expertise with Daniels during the early days of Glori, knew Daniels was the right person to take his place at Savoy. “Reverend Roberts never left John out there by himself with Savoy,” remembered Bines, Daniels’s godson. “He always helped John and Savoy, whatever they needed.”³² Daniels even produced the final Angelic Choir album for Savoy, 1977’s The Missionary and the President—When I Get Home.

When Daniels formed Tomato Records, his next label endeavor, Roberts was there to assist again. In late 1978, the Angelic Choir recorded a double album, Unchanging Hand, for Tomato and From Us to You for Daniels’s New Birth imprint in 1980. From Us to You featured Lorraine Stancil on the Raymond Rasberry composition “Touch Somebody’s Life,” with David Cole accompanying on piano. Cole went on to success as one of the two Cs (along with Robert Clivilles) in the dance music troupe C + C Music Factory. Their 1990 single “(Gonna Make You Sweat) Everybody Dance Now” was a massive dance hit, landing at the top spot of Billboard’s Hot 100 singles list two weeks in a row. “Reverend Roberts would get so irritated with [Cole], ‘David stop doing that, don’t do that run no more!’” Lorraine Stancil laughed. David “would do it just to ruffle his feathers! But he was phenomenal and Reverend Roberts loved him dearly.”³³ Pop songstress Mariah Carey wrote her hit, “One Sweet Day,” in memory of Cole after his untimely passing in 1995 at age thirty-two. And sadly, Daniels’s new enterprise was short-lived. “John had gotten himself tied up with some unscrupulous people who took advantage of him,” Roberts recalled.³⁴

Outside of David Cole, the only other Angelic Choir member to venture into the popular music arena was Connie Pitts. Her “Working People,” recorded for HOB Records in 1974, is a funk-infused message song with strings and background vocalists that evoked in lyric, melody, and arrangement the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.”

Perhaps the greatest legacy left to gospel music by Peace Be Still and the Sunday Service series was how it altered the way albums of African American gospel music were recorded. Although gospel music is still produced in professional studios, a large percentage of new releases are recorded live in a church or a large auditorium. As Angelic Choir member Jacqui Watts- Greadington put it, the Angelic Choir’s live albums “paved the way for the Kirk Franklins, the Winans, and the people that are in front of audiences and doing it now. We were actually recording during church. It’s wonderful to go back and hear some of those voices, some of the older soldiers that have gone on. They were feeling the moment.”³⁵ “In the church,” said Brenda O’Neal, “people could really express themselves—as opposed to the studio, where when we ended the song we had to be still. We couldn’t say anything. It was a big difference.”³⁶

For Savoy Records, live-in service recordings became its key differentiator in the music marketplace. In fact, nearly as soon as the Sunday Service series had run its course, the company kicked off the James Cleveland Presents series. Savoy, on this series of albums, which debuted in 1970 with the first full-length recording by Helen Stephens and the Voices of Christ of Berkeley, California, gave Cleveland free rein to offer a record deal on Savoy to talented church choirs, groups, and singers he discovered at the GMWA and while traveling the country. They were often recorded live each in its own church. Fred Mendelsohn explained the whole process to Arnold Shaw: “On the album [Cleveland] sings one of the songs, and the artist takes it from there. The fact that he is on the album sells it and introduces a new artist. The follow-up is an album by the new artist alone. There’s no promotion. You send the new releases to the jockeys and wait. At times, a record will not take off until six months after it’s released, but then it will go on selling for sixty years.”³⁷

Alexander Hamilton, director of Cleveland’s Southern California Community Choir on Aretha Franklin’s 1972 Amazing Grace, explained the process to author Aaron Cohen: James Cleveland

had a contract on Savoy and it worked great. I think he had eight, ten albums a year he had to do. Way it worked was all he had to do was have his name on it and one song to get paid. Real smart of him—he would look around to the good groups and say, “I’m James Cleveland and will get you on Savoy.” We’d do one marathon, six, seven hour session and the album would be done. It would be ‘James Cleveland Presents …’” and he became known as the Star Maker.³⁸

James Cleveland Presents provided national exposure to a young generation of directors, songwriters, soloists, and choirs, many of whom were already active in Cleveland’s GMWA or would soon be. Several live in-service albums in the series became national best sellers at the level of a Peace Be Still. For example, in 1975 the Charles Fold Singers of Cincinnati’s first James Cleveland Presents album, recorded live, became a best seller largely on the popularity of a selection called “Jesus Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me.” Featuring Cleveland on lead vocal, this gospelized version of Jim Weatherly’s “You Are the Best Thing,” a charter for Gladys Knight, propelled the album to the top of the Billboard Top Gospel Albums chart and to gospel album of the year status on Billboard’s 1976 Talent in Action list. It remained on the magazine’s Top Gospel Albums chart four years after its release. Cleveland and Fold became two of the top-selling gospel artists of the 1970s. Successive albums with the Charles Fold Singers were part of Cleveland’s next multivolume live in-service album series. “Best Thing” remains a standard in the gospel choir repertory. Whenever it is sung, the song evokes exclamations of emotion similar to those on “Peace Be Still.”

In addition to being the biggest star in gospel music, Cleveland had become a pastor, organizing his own church, Cornerstone Institutional Baptist Church in Los Angeles, in November 1970. Cleveland built his church’s famous Voices of Cornerstone choir from teenagers and young adults. He also assembled the Southern California Community Choir from members of his and other Los Angeles churches, with Annette May Thomas as its first president and one of its principal soloists.³⁹ Later, in 1982, Cleveland organized the Los Angeles Gospel Messengers, a young adult choir created specifically to present songs by up-and-coming composers such as Quincy Fielding Jr., Calvin Bernard Rhone, Kurt Carr, and B. J. Fears.

In January 1972 Cleveland, having gone from being skeptical about the live in-church recording process to being its premier spokesperson, brought the Southern California Community Choir and one of its directors, Alexander Hamilton, to New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Over two days that month, Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir supported Aretha Franklin on her gospel album, Amazing Grace. The double album was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on July 14, 1972, a little more than a month after its release. Surpassing Peace Be Still as the best-selling gospel record of all time, Amazing Grace went on to win a Grammy Award and on August 26, 1992, it was certified Double Platinum by the RIAA, signaling sales of two million units.⁴⁰ A CD recording of the entire two-day session is available, as is the long-awaited documentary film accompanying the album.

Peace Be Still and the Angelic Choir even went to college. Jacqui Watts- Greadington, a music major studying with Professor Omar Robinson at Langston University in Oklahoma, introduced the Angelic Choir to her class. “My Aunt Bernadine [Hankerson] was an example for those of us majoring in opera,” Watts-Greadington said. “She was an example of the type of voice you should have if you were trying to be a coloratura soprano. It really meant a lot to me to be the only person from New Jersey and have the Angelic Choir, that I’d grown up with, be a part of our vocal music program.”⁴¹ Watts-Greadington would go on to join her aunt in the Angelic Choir.

Although it was not nominated for a Grammy, Peace Be Still was nonetheless inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. Five years later, it entered the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. Organized in 2002 and originally inducting fifty songs per year, the registry now inducts twenty-five recordings per year that showcase “the range and diversity of American recorded sound heritage in order to increase preservation awareness.” About the selection’s inclusion in the National Recording Registry, the Library of Congress said, “This enormously successful gospel recording influenced many later groups and remains an excellent example of gospel performance.”⁴² Iconic recordings inducted alongside Peace Be Still in the Registry’s third year included James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Hoagy Carmichael’s inaugural recording of “Stardust,” and Rosetta Tharpe’s 1944 recording of “Down by the Riverside.”⁴³