Clance!

{... for the Oxford American, now revised ...}


Nobody fronts on Clarence Fountain.

Sixty-three years as a gospel singer, a man learns something, and what he doesn’t learn he’s crafty enough to convince you that he knows anyway. You’ve got to believe him, just as he believes in Him. Sure, he’s a mere mortal vessel – like all the members of his group, the Blind Boys of Alabama, the most widely heard and flat-out exuberant of extant old-time houserocking black gospel harmonizers. But the man has trace elements of Tabasco in his blood. He is blind, yet he has seen. He gets up there every night, and he hollers, and he moans,
and he vamps, and he prances, kicking up a leg and swerving around on one foot and then the other, placing his hands on his hips in a gesture of playful defiance – getting sassified – a regular dandy for the Lord, with those lapels as wide as dove’s wings, that growl swelling from deep in the back of his throat only to become subsumed into the ether of praise.

That’s what it’s all about. How much is there to know, really? Fountain and his surviving original bandmate – George Scott – who first sang together at the Talladega Institute for the Blind, and Jimmy Carter, who came along later, are in their 70s now. Pop culture, with its unpredictable warp and woof, has embraced them with an enthusiasm no one could quite have expected. Sheer longevity and relative good health seems to have guaranteed the singers some of that, as if they were indefatigable emissaries from some now-intangible theme park of Southern consciousness: Jubilee Land! But instead of declining into, say Branson, Mo., cheesiness, the Blind Boys sharpened their vision. They got game. Twenty years ago, when they performed as a Greek chorus in Bob Telson and Lee Breuer’s off-Broadway hit The Gospel at Colonus, they were part of a conceptual coup: How clever to hire a blind gospel group for a downhome retelling of the Oedipus myth? Even there, though, that fusion of bedrock New Testament gravitas that the Blind Boys represent, pre-Christian tragedy, and the composers’ pop-R&B sensibilities was a touch prophetic. The audience for so-called “roots” music wasn’t as focused then and jam band culture was still the nearly exclusive province of the Grateful Dead. The gospel tent at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, where the Blind Boys were as eminent and electrifying as the Rolling Stones, still felt like a well-kept secret among the hung-over rock fans who gathered there among the genuinely faithful, sheepishly pulling on a cold Dixie Beer and calling it a sacrament.

These days, the Blind Boys bring the gospel tent to the beer drinkers. They record for Peter Gabriel’s label. They’ve won back-to-back Grammy Awards. They cover songs by Tom Waits and Prince and even the Rolling Stones, with an ear for the spiritual message – the yearning, perhaps – embedded in the secular. Or, at least, they find the most gospel-friendly material from performers whose absorption of gospel feeling is evident, even as they walk in sin.

This is not a big thing to Clarence Fountain. This is the natural thing. “I’m singing gospel and that’s the end,” he says. Fountain is propped up in bed, as lunchtime nears in a Day’s Inn hotel room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He’s still in his underwear – the silky stage duds are stashed in the closet – but he’s got those pitch-black hundred-dollar wraparound shades that only a blind man can wear with such authority. (Two-thirds of your onstage presence, he insists, “is how you dress.”) He’s dragging a bit. A head cold has littered gravel over his red-carpet baritone, and a late night at the Jammy Awards -- the Oscars of post-hippie rock – has him off to a slow start. The Blind Boys shared the stage with Robert Randolph, the astonishing sacred steel guitar player who backed them on last year’s Higher Ground album, and that amplified whine was too loud for Fountain. “Ooooh, God,” he says, making a shushing noise. “I’m not singing rock’n’roll. You might hear a rock’n’roll tune. But listen to me. See what I’m singing about. I’m not singing about ‘Darling, I love you’ or ‘Bring it on home to me.’ No. I’m singing about the Lord. So ever how I turn a song around, it doesn’t matter, I’m still singing about the Lord. Pick the right song at the right time and you hit the jackpot. You can make a song. Make sure you’re singing the right words, and singing them at the right time, and singing about what you singing about. My forte is to sing about God. He said the cattle of a thousand years belonged to him. So if he can keep the cows going, I know he can keep me going.”

He might be right. One thing that’s immediately obvious, comparing the group’s older recordings to more recent collections, is the greater complexity of arrangements and instrumentation, and the blossoming variety of the vocals. These albums, with their phalanxes of special guests and session aces, risk the “all-star blues revival” syndrome in which elder “legends” who have never claimed their due are trotted out with rock stars du jour. The legends get a nice paycheck. The rock stars fulfill an adolescent fantasy. The music stinks. Not so the Blind Boys. If, at times, the productions are a touch over-calculated, the singing always brings it back home. And Fountain is too danged ornery for it to be any other way.

Look at Sam Cooke, he says. Sam Cooke, a memory, a moment of eternity on an all-night oldies station. Sam Cooke made his choice. Clarence Fountain made his. “Me and Sam was buddy buddies. We recorded for the same label. When the man gave him a contract he gave me one too. He offered me one, I just didn’t take it. I thought it was a thing that he shouldn’t have done. But listen, you can’t control people. Y’know? They have a mind of their own. And I think that the Lord gave me a few more years, just for that particular thing that I did. I ain’t saying it’s true! But I’m here, and he gone. Sound like I could be right, y’know. So, I’m here. He give you longevity. He give you what you deserve. Hezekiah prayed to him to give him 15 more years. He was sick on his deathbed – heh! – God gave it to him. Y’know. I feel like he done the same thing for me. Yeah.”

In a few hours, Fountain will be back onstage. There’s a big show at the Bowery Ballroom. Randolph, an ordained minister who favors cornrows and sports jerseys, will be back rocking that pedal steel for the jammy constituency. The Blind Boys will be in their element. And Clarence Fountain will be laying down the Word. He’ll sing Mick Jagger’s words, too, and cut up when you ask if he ever broke bread with the man who begged “Sympathy for the Devil,” as he has with another British rock star, a man named for an archangel.

“I never met Mick Jagger,” Fountain says. “If I did I’d tell him give me some of my money!”

He’s tickled now. Gospel, the singer will tell you, was the first music. But Clarence Fountain is having the last laugh. He incarnates something we all feel and know, those of us who are given to feeling and knowing, those of us who are never more vulnerable and wise then when the speaker cones tremble and a mighty voice tumbles from on high. When that happens, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that gospel and blues and R&B and rock’n’roll – and by extension hip-hop, even when it’s all abstract Timbaland bleep-blip -- are all guided by an essential transformational energy. It’s that alchemical flash of the spirit that takes an ordinary observation – “Bring your sweet loving on home to me,” “Don’t wanna walk and talk about Jesus, I just wanna see his face” – and makes it gigantic, the heart’s loudest thrum of desire, and whether it’s carnal or spiritual, it feels very much the same. The Blind Boys stay grounded in the Rock of Ages, but they found a way to satisfy those of us who still subscribe to the way of all flesh. And make our hearts thrum, just a little bit louder now.