[msb-alumni] Clarence fountain, founder of blind boys of Alabama dies on June 3 at 88

From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2018 17:00:39 -0400

BlankClarence fountain, founder of blind boys of Alabama, Dies at 88

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A founding member of the Grammy-winning gospel group
the
Blind Boys of Alabama has died. Clarence Fountain was 88.

Fountain died Sunday in a hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he had been
taken Friday, manager Charles Driebe of Atlanta said in an email Monday.

The group won four Grammys, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a National
Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship, and were members of the
Gospel Music Hall of Fame. Their cover of Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole” was
the theme song for the first season of the HBO series “The Wire,” which used a
different artist or group each season.

Fountain is survived by his wife, Barbara. The family planned a private viewing
Monday at their church, with a public funeral Tuesday at a larger church, which
had not yet been chosen, Driebe wrote.

Fountain stopped touring with the group in 2007 because of complications from
diabetes, but sang on their 2017 album, “Almost Home,” according a statement
from Driebe’s Blind Ambition Management. It said the album grew out of the
realization that only Fountain, the group’s longtime leader, and its current
leader, Jimmy Carter, remained of the original members.

“These men were both raised as blind, African American males in the Deep South
during the Jim Crow years, and they were sent to a school where the expectation
for them was to one day make brooms or mops for a living,” Driebe said “But
they’ve
transcended all that. The arc of their lives and of the band reflects the arc
of
a lot of changes in American society, and we wanted to find a way to capture
their experiences in songs.”

Fountain and friends started their first singing group as students at the
Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind in Talladega, where Fountain was
enrolled when he was 8. The Happy Land Jubilee Singers sneaked off campus to
sing for soldiers at a nearby training camp.

“Buoyed by the praise (and money) they received, the group left the school in
1944 while still in their teens,” Driebe wrote in the news release about
Fountain’s death.

They were still called the Happy Land Jubilee Singers when they had their first
hit single in 1948, “I Can See Everybody’s Mother But Mine.”

The name they used for the rest of their careers came from a double billing
later in 1948 with another group of blind singers, the Jackson Harmoneers — an
event promoted as a battle between the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and the Five
Blind Boys of Mississippi.

“The crowd loved us, the name stuck, and things took off for us,” Fountain
said,
as quoted in the news release.

After a series of concerts with the Jackson Harmoneers, he said, Ray Charles’s
manager offered a big touring deal if they would cross over to other genres.
“There was no way we were going to go pop or rock,” Fountain said. “Who needed
it? Our bellies were full, we had no headaches, we were happy. At least I was
happy, singing real gospel.”

They signed with Specialty Records in 1953, but left after five years because
of
more pressure to sing secular music. They sang in 1960s benefits for the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr., and kept singing hard-driving gospel, even as it became
less popular.

They won national acclaim in 1983 for the Off-Broadway stage production of
Gospel at Colonus, an adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus at Colonus set
in
a black Pentecostal church. Morgan Freeman played young Oedipus, and the Blind
Boys sang the part of the blinded Oedipus. The play received two OBIE awards
and
was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award.

The group’s first Grammy nomination came in 1992, and they won their first
Grammy for best traditional gospel album in 2001 with “Spirit of the Century,”
their first release with Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records.

They won Grammys in 2002, 2003 and 2004 for “Higher Ground,” ″Go Tell It on the
Mountain” and “There Will Be A Light,” the last a collaboration with Ben
Harper.
The lifetime achievement came in 2009. They recorded with artists including Lou
Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Waits, k.d.lang, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Susan
Tedeschi, Aaron Neville and Mavis Staples.

Driebe quoted Fountain: “My theory is do something good in the end and that
will
close out your longevity. After that, you can go on home and sit down.”

*****

Clarence Fountain; led Blind Boys of Alabama . By Daniel E. Slotnik New York
Times .

NEW YORK -- Clarence Fountain, who sang gospel music fit to call down the
heavens as the leader of the award-winning Blind Boys of Alabama for more than
60 years, died Sunday at a hospital near his home in Baton Rouge, La. He was
88.
The Blind Boys' manager, Charles Driebe, said the cause was complications of
diabetes.

The Blind Boys of Alabama sang a raucous, exuberant style of gospel that mixed
harmony vocals with impassioned call-and-response shouting intended to rouse an
audience into a religious fervor.

Explaining the group's sound to The New York Times in 1987, Ray Allen, a
folklorist and music historian, said it had evolved from the more staid style
known as jubilee gospel into one that is distinguished by "a prominent lead
singer shouting and preaching and backed by a rhythm-and-blues band."

"Vocally, it made use of stronger rhythms and vocal techniques, such as
moaning,
melisma, falsetto, and trance-induced kinds of behavior that had obvious
antecedents in Caribbean or West African worship," Allen continued.

"The jubilee groups, by contrast, stood up straight and didn't move around
much.
The Blind Boys, he said, "were at the
forefront of the transition.

Mr. Fountain, who had a deep, versatile voice that became weathered over the
decades, often sang lead. When he did, he could
sound as explosive as James Brown. (Driebe said it might be more accurate to
say
that Brown sounded like Mr. Fountain.)

The Blind Boys had their roots in the mid-1940s at a segregated school for the
blind in Talladega, Ala., where Mr. Fountain and five friends formed a group
they originally called the Happy Land Jubilee Singers.

Renamed the Blind Boys, the group was well established on the gospel circuit by
the time many other performers, including Otis Redding, Little Richard, Sam
Cooke, and Brown, became famous for moving from gospel to secular music.

Mr. Fountain said that over the years some producers had tried to persuade him
and the group to make pop records, but he refused.

"I didn't turn my back on the Lord," he said on the NPR program "Morning
Edition" in 2001. "I said I wanted to sing gospel music and I wanted to sing it
for the Lord."

Still, the Blind Boys' foot-stomping sound appealed to secular audiences -- and
to secular artists. They worked with Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson,
Neil Diamond, Tom Waits, Aaron Neville and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver.

The Happy Land Jubilee Singers shortly before the group was renamed the Blind
Boys of Alabama in 1948. From left were Johnnie Fields, Mr. Fountain, J.T.
Hutton, Ollie Thomas, George L. Scott and Velma Traylor.

Beginning in the 1990s, the Blind Boys became more open to covering songs by
artists like Mr. Reed, the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Cliff, Bob Dylan, Prince and
Curtis Mayfield, as long as the lyrics did not betray their spirituality.

The results could be striking. In one instance the group sang the lyrics to
“Amazing Grace” over the Animals’ arrangement of the traditional song “The
House
of the Rising Sun.”
The Blind Boys Of Alabama "Amazing Grace"CreditVideo by Pannellctp Traditional
Gospel Music

“I’ve taken the theory that music is music, and all you have to do is just sing
it and keep your lyrics clean and you’re on your way,” Mr. Fountain said on
NPR’s
“Weekend Edition” in 2002. “So we try to put the gospel feel to it, and it
makes
it much better than it was when it was rock ’n’ roll, you know?”

In 1994 the Blind Boys received a National Heritage Fellowship from the
National
Endowment for the Arts. Their “Spirit of the Century” won the 2001 Grammy for
best traditional gospel album, and they went on to win four more Grammys before
receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy in 2009.

They collectively sang the part of Oedipus in “The Gospel at Colonus,” a
musical
retelling of “Oedipus Rex,” which starred Morgan Freeman and was presented on
Broadway in 1988.

They performed all over the world and visited the White House repeatedly,
singing for Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Mr. Fountain did not perform for Mr. Obama; he retired from touring with the
group in 2007. But he still sang on occasion, Mr. Driebe said, most recently at
a performance with Marc Cohn and the Blind Boys in Baton Rouge in May.

Mr. Fountain was born on Nov. 28, 1929, in Tyler, Ala., to Will and Ida
Fountain
and grew up in Selma. His father was a sharecropper. Clarence lost his vision
when he was 2 after a caregiver tried to cure an eye infection with a lye-based
solution.

He was sent to the Alabama School for the Negro Blind in Talladega (now part of
the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind) when he was 8.

He joined a boys choir there before forming the Happy Land Jubilee Singers. By
the late 1940s the group was touring full time, and in 1948 they changed their
name to the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. They have used variations on that name
ever since, including Clarence Fountain and the Blind Boys of Alabama.

The Blind Boys lineup has changed over the years. The last surviving original
member is Jimmy Carter, who is still touring with the group.

Mr. Fountain married Barbara Robertson in 1999. She survives him. His survivors
also include several children.

Mr. Fountain said in a 1993 interview that he did not mind performing in
secular
venues because “God is everywhere, and we think he’s in the nightclub too, if
you bring him in there.” By the same logic, he said, he saw nothing wrong with
bringing the energy of a rock concert to a revival tent.

"If James Brown could come in here and do the twist, and do the mess around for
the Devil, then I feel like it’s all right if I stand up here and mash potatoes
for God," he said at one live performance, moments before launching into "Look
Where You Brought Me From."

[msb-alumni] Clarence fountain, founder of blind boys of Alabama dies on June 3 at 88

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