@EasyAce
If you have ever attended Protestant services in the South on a Sunday,you would know that Gospel has ALWAYS been on the dance floor. Gospel is where country and R&B came from.
@sneakypete *laughing* I should have said the
disco dance floor. The Clouds were also the first gospel group to be invited to play on
Soul Train in the 1970s. About a decade earlier they kind of shook up their circuit with a stage style where they busted so many moves while wearing similarly colourful stage suits that they got the nickname "the Temptations of gospel." (It took awhile, though, from what I've read, for the black gospel circuits to get a group of ensemble singers busting moves like theirs. They may also have been the first black gospel group to add a full rhythm section to their stage shows, beyond the once-standard accompaniment of just one guitar or one keyboard. Pretty good for a bunch of guys who hooked up as southern California high school classmates in the late 1950s.) And they had another dance hit around the same time as their eponymous one:
Error 404 (Not Found)!!1Granted I was Jewish, but I grew up in large part in a small city off Long Island (Long Beach, itself a long, symmetrically-streeted island off Nassau County's south shore) where I had plenty of occasions to pass by classic storefront black churches and the music coming out of there gripped me enough, at least as much as rock and roll and blues and soul did. It was a small jump from there to listen to stuff like the Clouds and, in time, the Soul Stirrers (when Sam Cooke was their lead singer, before he went solo and R&B) and Mahalia Jackson. Thanks to an art teacher in high school who played it during our classes a couple of times a week I'd also gotten into jazz, and one of the first jazz albums I bought was Duke Ellington's remake of his 1943 experiment
Black, Brown & Beige---with Mahalia Jackson singing the crucial "Come Sunday" segment. (Johnny Hodges, the Ellington alto saxophonist who'd previously made "Come Sunday" his feature whenever Ellington performed the suite, had left the Ellington group for a time when Ellington decided to have a crack at putting
Black, Brown & Beige onto an album, so Ellington called on Jackson and she delivered.) Going from there to her classic sides for Apollo between 1947 and 1954 wasn't that big a jump, and brother did
that lady have the goods!
I was also a fan of the Chambers Brothers and when I learned they'd begun as a gospel group I hunted some of that stuff down. If you ever get to hear
Barbara Dane and the Chambers Brothers, cut just before they shifted full on to R&B and then their "psychedelic soul" rock style, though their old gospel style never really left them vocally, you're in for a treat.