Prayers & Popcorn

In the Deep South, which to many music merchants has long looked like arid territory, a profitable but unsung musical monster is flourishing. Billed as "Gospel and Spiritual All-Nite Sing," it is colloquially called "gospel boogie" or, more earthily, "jumping for Jesus." It takes the form of regular shows in Southern cities, featuring vocal quartets and attended by capacity crowds who come to be entertained and, occasionally, converted.

In Atlanta's Municipal Auditorium last week, the month's downbeat for uplift filled all 5,200 seats (at $1.25 to $1.60, children half price), and later the total was swelled by 1,300 standees. Things got under way when beefy Wally Fowler, a bushy-browed master of ceremonies from Possum Trot, Ga., asked everybody to "turn left, then turn right and shake hands; I want you to be good neighbors." Then he led the crowd in Love Lifted Me and Amazing Grace. After a short talk about the evils of materialism and intellectual confusion, he led another hymn, shouting between the lines: "Don't you just love this fellowship together?"

Then the entertainment began, swinging from rowdy boogies to fervent waltzes, all in praise of the Lord. First was the Gospel Melody Quartet, then the Harmoneers, featuring Tenor Happy Edwards in eye-rolling low comedy, the LeFevre Trio (Eva Mae and Urias LeFevre plus Little Troy Lumpkin) in an almost solemn harmonization of In My Father's House Are Many Mansions. After that came M. C. Fowler's own group, the white-suited Oak Ridge Quartet, then the Blackwood Brothers, who brought down the house with Have You Talked to the Man Upstairs?, and Atlanta's own Statesmen, the local favorites. Among the evening's repertory: Riding the Range with Jesus and Everybody's Gonna Have a Wonderful Time up There. As the evening wore on, the program offered more pratfalls than prayers, but the all-white audience loved it, happily munching popcorn and swigging soda pop, clapping and stamping in rhythm.

Nothing to Something. After 1 a.m. the crowd's feverish excitement and the broader horseplay onstage began to simmer down. The music became more spiritual, and the children in the audience dropped off to sleep. By 2, half the crowd had drifted away, and at 2:15 the singers were packing their effects into their Cadillacs for the trek to the next night's stand.

The gospel singers have a tradition that reaches back some 200 years to frontier days when countryfolk made up their own words to familiar secular tunes. Eventually, new tunes were written for community sings, camp meetings and revivals. The custom took root in the South, where musical evangelists and composers published volumes of their own songs. One of them, a trombonist-singer named Homer (Brighten the Corner Where You Are) Rodeheaver, managed the music for Billy Sunday. Gospel songs, he wrote, "are not written for prayer meetings, but to challenge the attention of people on the outside . . . They are used simply as a step from nothing to something."

Spreading the Word. In Nashville, six years ago, Wally Fowler staged the first all-night sing, switching from profitable ($75,000 a year) hillbilly music to "dedicate my singing to the Lord." Today, there are a dozen full-time gospel groups roving the countryside, singing about 250 engagements a year. Top quartets get about $400 an appearance, for an annual gross of about $20,000 a man. Although some of the quartets record for RCA and other big companies, their best sales are on small Southern labels, and Southern sheet-music sales are often in the millions.

Gospel fans are so loyal that in Nashville, the night Billy Graham preached to 16,000 revivalists, another 4,000 preferred to attend a gospel sing. Next month, flushed with success, some pioneering gospel quartets plan to spread the word in cooler territory: Michigan and Indiana.

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