By Jonathan Miles | June/July 2009 | Talk of the South

The Blind Boys at 70

The Blind Boys of Alabama takes their spiritual music into the mainstream

Listen to the Blind Boys singing "Free at Last"

One day last spring, when the sunlight was lancing the white clouds above New Orleans in that hallelujah way often depicted on the covers of paperback Bibles, the six members of a black gospel group called the Blind Boys of Alabama filed into the Piety Street Recording studio, in the city’s Ninth Ward, to record some backing vocals for a California singer, songwriter, and surfer named Donavon Frankenreiter. But there was a problem. The Blind Boys, who range in age from their forties to their seventies, and from twenty-twenty vision to completely sightless, had agreed to contribute harmony backing—something they’ve done for Ben Harper, Lou Reed, and others—before hearing the song. As they listened to it now, they wagged their heads no. The song was a love song, and, as the group’s manager, an Atlanta entertainment lawyer named Charles Driebe, explained, “We don’t do love songs. We do spirituals, and we do gospel.”

For the Blind Boys, who this year celebrate the seventieth anniversary of their founding, at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind in Talladega, it wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. They had recently rebuffed a request from Don Imus to record a version of “Bad Moon Rising” for a benefit album (“too apocalyptic,” Driebe said) and once turned down Jimmy Buffett (“song had some cussing in it,” one of the members told me). Frankenreiter, Driebe felt sure, would understand. The more pressing issue was what to do with the prepaid hours of studio time. After a late lunch of sausage po’boys (the Blind Boys seem to eat lunch at 11:00 a.m., then again at 1:00 p.m., then again at 3:00 p.m., before their dinner schedule kicks in), the band gathered in the recording room. Jimmy Carter, the eldest member and sole remaining link to the group’s 1939 founding, sat on a stool in the center, flanked by Bishop Billy Bowers, round and jovial, and Ben Moore, with the gray-goateed Eric “Ricky” McKinnie behind the drums.

With its pressed-tin ceiling, cypress-planked walls, and baroque chandeliers, the recording room had a slightly gamy feel, like the waiting room of a Storyville bordello. That impression was only heightened when the group’s guitarist, Joey Williams, played the opening licks to—wait, is that…yes, “The House of the Rising Sun,” a decidedly apocalyptic song about, well, a bordello. Yet whatever cognitive dissonance the melody provoked disappeared instantly when the Blind Boys started singing the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” instead, a mash-up that somehow, like so much of the Blind Boys’ music, melds down-home sanctity with a raw and gripping earthiness. It’s music that makes you dance, shake, sweat, and shout, then floods you with an unexpected and irresistible burst of grace. No love songs, but plenty of love.