Read Online Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick - Free Book Online Page B

Jays, and Rebert Harris was with the Soul Stirrers. Groups would walk in on other groups and get called up to do a guest number, and they would try to take over the program. So it was very competitive.” But, as Alexander was quick to point out, the spirit of cooperation offstage was just as prevalent, and it was the Stirrers who took the Pilgrim Travelers out on their first national tour and the Travelers who returned the favor by introducing the Soul Stirrers to California. Onstage, said J.W., it was nothing short of open warfare, with each group doing everything in its power to wreck the house, but offstage there was a sense of shared enterprise, the clear knowledge that they were all doing their best to make their way in a world fraught with dangers, a world in which they were thrown together not just by choice of vocation but by the unavoidable accident of race.
    It was in this spirit that sometime in the winter of 1947-1948, Rebert Harris and Charlie Bridges, the lead and second lead singers of the Soul Stirrers and the Famous Blue Jays respectively, along with an Oakland, California, gospel singer and entrepreneur named Abraham Battle, put together an organization conceived as a kind of clearinghouse for the advancement of quartet singing in general and the training and education of gospel groups in particular.
    The National Quartet Convention was, in Rebert Harris’ words, an attempt to “professionalize” the field. “I listened to other groups, and I felt, along with the other Soul Stirrers, that they needed a change from what they were doing at that time. They wasn’t being accepted by the public because of their language, their pronunciation, their diction—all of that was completely out of order.” What Harris and Bridges and their respective groups did was to establish an organization, and an annual convention, at which courses of instruction would be offered not just in singing technique but in how to present yourself to the public, how to meet people and book and publicize your appearances, how to carry out the business of music in a dignified way, in a manner, as Rebert Harris saw it, that was “spiritually educational,” not the scattered “vaudeville-type” approach that he felt at the time was all too prevalent.
    The first convention was held at the St. Paul‘s Church of God in Christ at 4528 South Wabash, and seven states were chartered. Not long after that, the association established its “national headquarters” in the same storefront location at 3838 South State out of which the Young Men’s Christian Club had long operated as an interdenominational gathering place. It rapidly became a focal point for the teenage gospel movement, a drawing card every weekend and a kind of central casting call which the Stirrers and Blue Jays frequently attended, along with any other well-known quartet that might happen to be in town. J.W. Alexander would always recall the first time he saw Sam singing with the Highway QCs on one such occasion. The QCs did not impress him all that much—in his view they didn’t yet have their own sound—but the young lead singer, for all of the evident influence of Harris upon him, had “something special, he had a particular charisma. People just liked the guy, they could relate to him. I thought to myself:
this guy’s a jewel.
”
    The Soul Stirrers appeared to have something of a different reaction to the brash young quartet, at least as the QCs saw it. From their point of view, Harris and the other Stirrers were just jealous. They never heard a word about it directly from the older group. But every time they showed up at a Soul Stirrers program and the people would clamor for them to sing, naturally—because what else would they be doing there?—the Stirrers acted as if they didn’t even know their young protégés were in the house, and then, when the QCs’ fans started to chant their name, Harris would call them up for one song, and one song only. It may