Spirit of the Century: Our Own Story

Long-running gospel music group the Blind Boys of Alabama team up with cultural historian Lauterbach (Bluff City) for a colorful chronicle of their journey from “the early days of Black gospel indies” to the present. Meeting at an Alabama vocational school for Black Deaf and blind children, the group, including original members Jimmy Carter, Johnny Fields, Clarence Fountain, J.T. Hutton, George Scott, Olice Thomas, and Velma Traylor (the roster would go on to shift throughout the group’s tenure), formed in 1939 as the Happy Land Jubilee Singers and began performing on the Black “gospel highway” that stretched from New York City to the Deep South in 1948. After lineup changes in the 1960s and ’70s, the musicians were cast in The Gospel at Colonus, a musical adaptation of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, in 1983; sang the theme song for the first season of The Wire; and went on to win five Grammy Awards. Unvarnished details of Fountain’s philandering and close brushes with the law add interest, but readers will be most fascinated by the vulnerable and often-moving recollections of how the bandmates’ “so-called handicap” shaped their career. While they had to be on guard to avoid being fleeced by shady concert promoters and management, their lack of sight also afforded them a unique advantage, in that “the Blind Boys don’t see their audience, they have to feel them.” Gospel fans will have a hard time putting down this crowd-pleaser. (Mar.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that the group disbanded in 1967.