M.C. Ted Brooks (1915-1997), the grandfather of rap music made the first rap music video, “Noah,” in 1946.

Although millions have viewed the video on YouTube, very little has been written about Brooks’ life and career.

The obscure short film of “Noah,” featuring the gospel jubilee vocal group the Jubalaires  is part of the Prelinger Archives, an eclectic collection of films relating to “U.S. cultural history, the evolution of the American landscape, everyday life and social history.”

Founded in 1982, the archives contain over 60,000 “ephemeral” films—all the movies we never saw—commercials, educationals, industrials, amateur movies, art films, shorts, and “soundies.” Their website explains, “Typically, ephemeral films were produced to fulfill specific purposes at specific times, and many exist today only by chance or accident.” Finally, these obscure and largely forgotten films in this extensive collection are seeing the light of day after languishing in the vaults for decades.“

In the days before television, half a century before MTV, the earliest music videos were called “soundies.” These short, two or three-minute black-and-white 16mm or 35mm films starred popular (and not so popular) entertainers who lip-synched to audio playback of their recordings. Today, soundies provide opportunities to see now-forgotten performers in their prime. In some instances, the soundie is the only surviving film clip of a given artist’s work.

In the 1940s, soundies were viewed ­on coin-operated motion picture jukeboxes found in saloons and hotel lobbies in the days before television. Since many of these machines were placed in African American communities, a lot of soundies featured Black entertainers performing pop songs, blues, jazz, and religious music.

Jubilee is an entertaining genre of African American gospel quartet singing, characterized by its upbeat tempo, lyrical expressions of joyfulness, syncopated timing, modern close harmony, and vocal acrobatics not usually found in conventional “flatfooted” black spirituals.

Although practically forgotten in our time, the gospel jubilee vocal group the Jubalaires of Jacksonville, Florida, made dozens of recordings and were heard on thousands of live radio broadcasts. They appeared in Hollywood movies and as guests on prime-time television. They performed live before for hundreds of thousands of fans.

The Jubalaires gospel jubilee quartet’s soundie “Noah” was produced and directed by William Forest Crouch (1904-1968), a white man married to a Black woman, who produced more than eighty soundies for the Soundies Distributing Corporation of America in Chicago, between 1941-1948.

In”Noah”, we see four young, clean cut Black men, with their permed hair slicked back, immaculately dressed in matching double-breasted pin-stripe suits, fashionable at the time, replete with folded pocket handkerchiefs, and matching silk neckties. They stand before a crudely sketched backdrop, like something out of a cartoon for children, depicting Noah’s Ark of legend.

Accompanied by Bill Lee Johnson’s driving guitar, the quartet launches into a syncopated up-tempo jubilee gospel number. Tenor John “Shorty” Jennings sings serenely for few lines while the other three singers chant rhythmically behind him.

In the online comments on the YouTube video, someone has written of the diminutive John Jennings, “That short dude seems to be the most honest guy on Earth.”

Then the group’s 30-year-old baritone Theodore “Ted” Brooks steps forward to begin his sermon. Brooks is not a tall man, just 5′ 6″ and about 150 pounds, but his presence is large. He has a pencil-thin moustache and the elegant long fingeres of a concert pianist. Unsmiling and serious as a heart attack, we can see the wide gap between his top two front teeth, one of which is capped in gold, and there’s a small scar visible just to the left of the corner of his mouth, giving him the “gangsta” countenance of a modern-day rapper.

Brooks’ syncopated fire and brimstone sermon is unmistakably rap music to any twenty-first century listener. He fiercely half talks/half sings syncopated rhyming couplets, percussively chopping up the rhythm with shifting dynamics and emphatic hand gestures. His confident presentation is utterly compelling; you can hardly take your eyes off the guy. Alas, it’s over all too soon—but one cannot help but watch the video again, so thrilling is the performance. Mesmerized, I have viewed this video more than fifty times.

As of this writing, the Jubalaires two and a half minute soundie of “Noah” has garnered well over 6.7 million views as well as more than 10,000 comments since it was first posted to YouTube in 2008. Though it was filmed nearly eighty years ago, many of the YouTube comments refer to it as the “first rap record.”

There are, in fact, a number of examples of earlier recordings of gospel jubilee quartets singing a hip, syncopated rap-like narrative, that predate the Jubalaires’ “Noah”—most notably those made by Willie “Bill” Thomas Johnson (1913-1980), the lead singer, narrator, guitarist, and songwriter of the influential and long-lived Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet—later the Golden Gate Quartet—who are known to fans as “the Gates.” In 1947, Johnson would leave The Gates and join Ted Brooks and the Jubalaires.

The Gates, who began recording in the 1930s, brought a rhythmic blues beat and jazz rhythms to conventual gospel standards—what Willie Johnson called “vocal percussion.” According to Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, “The Gates were able to maintain rhythmic propulsion without recourse to repeating words or echoing phrases; the ‘movement’ was sustained by the suggestion of a chant, and the steady beat of the bass singer Orlandus Wilson.”

In fact, the Jubalaires arrangement of “Noah” is closely based on Willie T. Johnson’s vocal arrangement of the same song recorded by the Gates on December 14, 1939 (Bluebird B-7962), six years earlier. The Gates were a great influence upon Ted Brooks and his fellow Jubalaires, as well as practically every other gospel group in America at that time.

Although the Jubalaires 1946 recording of “Noah” is not the earliest example of what is now recognized as rap music, it’s certainly one of the best. But if you listen closely, you can also hear the influence of jazz, country blues, southern sacred music, and fire and brimstone southern preachers in the arrangement.

Some YouTube viewers comment on how Brooks’ rap contains no four-letter words, no degrading or abusive references to women, and no glorification of weapons or violence—except for the destructive power exercised by the mighty hand of God.

Brooks’ performance of “Noah” is such an inspired retelling of one of the most well-known and oldest stories, many YouTube viewers confess that, like me, they have repeatedly viewed the video—it’s pretty irresistible.

But other YouTube viewers felt it necessary to modify this seeming perfect soundie by reposting their own remixed versions of the Jubalaires’ “Noah” video, in which the add a heavy-handed and unnecessary drum machine track which destroys the magic of what the vocal quartet and  guitarist have achieved. Regrettably, these added rhythms only get in the way of Brooks’ perfect timing and syncopation, making it all he more important to seek out the original version with only Bill Lee Johnson’s acoustic guitar accompaniment.

Although he doesn’t appear in “Noah,” the Jubalaires were founded by Julian Caleb Nathaniel Ginyard, Jr. (1910-1978). Born in St. Matthews, Calhoun County, South Carolina, Ginyard’s father was an illiterate sharecropper who grew up before the Civil War during the last decades of American chattel slavery. As a child, Ginyard sang spirituals with his mother Lovie, who could read but could not write, in the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir in St. Matthews.

Known as “Junior” and “J.C.,” Ginyard worked menial jobs in Orangeburg and Fayetteville. As a teenager, he picked oranges and was employed as a laborer on a local road building crew. But jobs were harder to find during those years of the Great Depression.

In late 1932, Ginyard moved to New York City, where he landed a plum job as the chauffeur for one of the founders of United Parcel Service, a white man named Evert “Mac” McCabe. But a few months later, McCabe was shot dead by his jealous wife. Suddenly out of a work, Ginyard returned to Jacksonville where, in 1935, he married Janie Elnora Wilson (1914–1998). Their first child, Lovie Elenore, named for Ginyard’s mother, was born in 1937.

Ginyard supported his small family working as a presser at Arrow Cleaners on Beaver Street in Jacksonville, where his wife Elnora was employed as a maid. In 1938, Ginyard began driving a cab for the New Deal Cab Company, a Black owned business in Jacksonville that hired Black drivers.

“If you were black,” said Ennis Davis, an urban planner in Florida, “no matter how much money you had, you had to live in a black neighborhood.” Brooklyn was one of the Black neighborhoods in Jacksonville.

Ginyard joined the Brooklyn Royal Society, a local charitable organization that raised money for good causes. To that end, Ginyard formed a group of harmony singers to perform at fundraisers, eventually organizing, around 1934 or ’35, an acapella spiritual singing quartet called the Royal Harmony Four.

The group sang primarily what were then called “negro spirituals” and work songs in a restrained, flatfooted close harmony style. (The term “flatfooted” refers to the days when sacred singers remained nearly motionless, before gospel performers began gyrating, dancing, and using hand percussion.)

One of the men who sang with Ginyard was slow-speaking, ever-smiling Charlie Newsome. Although Newsome briefly sang tenor with the Royal Harmony Four, he later worked as the groups’ road manager and is remembered as a truly gifted promoter. According to James Bodie Davis (1916-2007), founder of the Dixie Hummingbirds gospel group, “Charlie Newsome could talk the horns off a billy goat!”

The original tenor singer in Ginyard’s Royal Harmony Four, Willie Sylvanus Wright (1912-1995) was born in Jacksonville, on October 15, 1912. His brother, Elijah was the quartet’s original bass singer. Ginyard first met the brothers Wright while working on a strawberry harvesting crew around 1934.

At the March 1983 Triumphant Gospel Singers Association Quartet Reunion in Jacksonville, Florida, 70-year-old Willie Wright told folklorist Doris J. Dyen about the formation of the original Royal Harmony Four:

I was living on Jackson Street in Brooklyn, and I heard Ginyard and [my brother] Elijah and they were singing a duet and I got interested in the two. And they asked me if I could sing tenor. So, I told him, ‘Yeah I think I can.’ So, we got together, and we’d sing together, the three of us, and finally we met another guy named Johnny Gordon, he sang baritone for us. And after Johnny Gordon, we had a fellow by the name of Son Mack; he used to play guitar for us.

We weren’t broadcasting then but, you know, we were just learning. After that we would go to rehearsals … Paul Fountain [a gospel singer in Jacksonville] he came by there on Jackson Street and heard us rehearsing and he said, ‘I wonder who’s that tenor singer? He’s something—I got to see him!’ And I didn’t know he was talking about me!

The brothers Wright and Ginyard played a gig in Green Cove Springs, where Ted Brooks lived. Wille Wright remembered that Brooks “heard us sing and he wanted to join us. And Brooks came on back to Jacksonville along with us and we never did bust up. We stuck together.”

Theodore “Ted” Brooks—known to his bandmates as “Brooks”—was born on July 4, 1915, in Madison, Florida, sixty miles east of Tallahassee. His mother, Ruby, was just fourteen years old when Ted was born. Although her education ended after fifth grade, she was a literate and religious woman. At the age of sixteen, Ruby married an illiterate Georgia-born farm laborer named John W. Wilson.

When Ted was six years old, Ruby gave birth to Ted’s half-sister, Fannie Mae Wilson. Although Ted and his sister attended the local public schools, he began laboring in the nearby orchards owned by a white man named W. V. Stevens when he was just nine years old. Ted attended the local public school, completing the eighth grade.

It is unknown if Ruby divorced Ted’s stepfather or if he died. When Ted was still in primary school, Ruby married Willie Oliver. Born in Edison, Georgia, in 1898, Oliver was a bricklayer, employed by the Mason Lumber Company in Jacksonville. He was only semi-literate, signing his draft registration card with an X—”his mark.” When he started work on an extended construction project on the west bank of the St. Johns River, thirty miles south of Jacksonville, the family relocated to Green Cove Springs where they homesteaded until Ted was fourteen and a half years old. In Green Cove, Ted’s mother joined the local Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, becoming active in the choir and usher board.

Ted Brooks told Doris J. Dyen in 1983:

I wished I could sing like her [his mother]. We had a junior choir at the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, of which I was a member. And also, after I become ten years old, we had a children’s organization within the BYPU [Baptist Young Peoples Union] system, and I become a little ‘Junior Deacon,’ and that type of thing…

[T]his was where I had the first quartet, which was the Mount Pleasant Jubilee Singers. And I organized that group from … the different singers singing in the choir. But I had so much other work to do as a little junior deacon, you see—you have to go down and see how the kids are doing … in Sunday School, when we get there, we’d have a little meeting about what the kids are not to do, and so on. An awful lot of work to do! But I certainly enjoyed it because I didn’t know anything else, other than the spirit!

At that time, the only name I knew for it was “quartet singing.” They didn’t have any special name, at least not to my knowledge. They didn’t have a lot of the rhythmic type of spirituals that they have now [it was ] all vocal, acapella…We had pretty good ears. If we heard something and liked it, we jumped on it, but do it our way, though. When I left Green Cove Springs at fourteen and a half years old—oooh, it was hurting me so bad because I was so used to church activities, as far as working [singing] was concerned.

In 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression, the average radio cost $139, more than 7% of the average American’s annual salary. A few years later, one could buy a radio for less than $50. By 1938, four out of five American homes had a radio.

By the end of the 1930s, Jacksonville’s population exceeded 173,000, making it the biggest city in Florida. The Royal Harmony Four began their broadcasting career on Frank J. Reynolds’ tiny local radio station, WMBR, in Jacksonville, in 1939.

“We went to Tallahassee,” tenor singer Willie Wright remembered, “the capitol of Florida, and we sang there. Oh, we had people lined up in the streets, going to our program. During that time, we were in rehearsals every day for three to four, to sometimes five hours. And it was so wonderful, and we got along so sweet with each other!”

Ted Brooks remembered that after he arrived in Jacksonville, he got a job delivering water for the Wadesboro Water Company of Orange Park. Later, he worked for the Southern Dairies, at Stockton and Dennis Streets in Jacksonville. To accommodate their performing schedule, they soon realized that as a taxicab driver, Caleb Ginyard had the most flexible work hours. So, he got Brooks a job with his employer, the New Deal Cab Company, and Willie Wright drove for the Lincoln Cab Company. Willie’s brother Elijah didn’t drive at all, so he rode around in the cabs driven by the other quartet members. Willie Wright explained:

And we would ride until it was time for our program. We would pick up our cab at four o’clock in the afternoon and our program began at 8:00 or 8:30 at night. We would drive cab until that time. And when the time came for us to go to that church, we were there. We parked our cabs, dressed in our uniforms, and we went to church, and we all went to the minsiter, and we prayed before we sang. And then we got up and we went and sat on the pulpit, and our theme song was ‘Precious Lord.’

And during that time, me and Brooks, we stood very close together. I used to love to sing behind him, better than I did behind Ginyard, because Brooks had more of a—you know—jumping tempo for singing. Brooks was the baritone, and I was the tenor, and Ginyard was the leader, and Elijah was bass.

“On the radio show, we used to sing American folksongs, plus spirituals,” Ted Brooks reminisced in 1983, “so many different types of songs. We did some comic songs in church: ‘The Preacher and the Bear.’ But now that type of song is very ‘difficult’ for ministers—they don’t want to hear that type of song.”

After work, the members of the quartet would go off in Ginyard’s cab to some secluded spot to practice their vocal arrangements. One sultry night, in 1938, a white Jacksonville policeman discovered the four young Black men harmonizing in the taxicab and hauled them in for disturbing the peace. Nervous, but on their best behavior, they stood before the judge in the courtroom. Ginyard calmly explained how they were simply rehearsing. As evidence of their innocence, they offered to sing a few of their arrangements for the judge.

John Dew, the mayor of Jacksonville happened to be in the courtroom at this moment, and he and the judge were quite impressed with the quartet’s singing. Dew asked the judge to sentence the four Black men to sing at a local civic luncheon.

Thereafter, Mayor Dew arranged for the quartet to be employed as singing waiters at the Seminole Hotel, an elegant establishment at the corner of Hogan and Forsythe Streets in downtown Jacksonville. The Royal Harmony Four wore “white duck pants … with a red streak down the side,” Ginyard remembered, “and a little red vest like the Phillip Morris boy used to wear.”

Born in 1925, the legendary Ira Tucker, Sr. was for seven decades the lead singer for the Dixie Hummingbirds. He remembered catching the Royal Harmony Singers’ gig at the Seminole Hotel: “They’d stand right in between [the tables] and do a song. I had never seen anything like it before,” he remembered.

Ted Brooks reminisced, “At the Seminole Hotel … we started singing there from five to seven, during the dinner hour. After that, then we had to go downstairs to the (shall we say?) “lounge”—to the ballroom—and we had to sing there until four o’clock in the morning. We had our uniforms, white and red.”

According to Brooks, a concert promoter in Jacksonville named Jack Duke was instrumental in getting the Royal Harmony Four their early bookings. “Well, you know, we were the first colored quartet that sang in the white hotels here,” Brooks explained. “Other than our daily … broadcasts from WMBR, we were getting so famous through Mr. Duke, he decided to try us in different places—that is, to ‘open the door’…”

The luxurious fifteen-story Hotel George Washington stood at the corner of Adams and Julia Streets in Jacksonville. Brooks recalled, “The first hotel we sang to, was the Washington Hotel for conventions (druggist conventions and so on). And the next hotel we sang was the Mayflower. We sang there several times.”

According to Ginyard, as singing waiters they were such a big draw for the Seminole Hotel, the appreciative owner gave them a used Chrysler Royal automobile that seated six, a one-thousand-dollar advance (about $23,000 today), and a salary of $25-30 a week. He advised the young men to move north to avoid the stiff competition between gospel quartets in the deep south.

“Charlie Newson was right there with us,” Royal Harmony Four tenor Willie Wright stated emphatically. “He was our manager. Everywhere we went, he was with us. And sometimes Charlie would go ahead of us and book programs and tell us where to stop. You know, sometimes he’d leave Jacksonville and go down to Apopka, Florida, or Gainesville, or Leesburg, and book programs for us and call us up and tell us where the first, second, and third program were. And we’d just travel like that. We went all over Florida.”

Reverend Robert Brown was born in 1913. He grew up in Jacksonville, joining the Dixie Jubilee Singers gospel quartet in the early 1930s. They toured in the southeast: Florida and Georgia, going as far as Tennesse, and Virginia, in the days when Caleb Ginyard and the Royal Harmony Singers were working the same regional circuit.

The Dixie Jubilee Singers performed on four different Jacksonville area radio stations every Sunday morning: WPQ from 7:00 o’clock to 7:30, WRHC from 9:00 to 9:30, WIVY from 10:00 to 10:30, and WJHP from 11:00 to 11:30. Brown remembered:

We were very popular at one time, when quartets weren’t as plentiful as they are today… We were the first negro quartet to ever record out of Florida in those days, in the 1940s. Then we met Mother Patton … she’d go on ahead of us and book the programs, and we would follow.

So, we had our work pretty well cut out for us. Then, after the broadcast on Sunday morning, a whole lot of times, we would travel 200 or 250 miles and sing a program on Sunday night. Plenty of times we’d come back and there’d be just enough time to change clothes and go to work…

[But] the Jubilaires—they just broke up families and jobs and everything and went up north. But we wasn’t able to do that.

Dixie Jubilee Singers

Now, the Dixie Jubilees had a chance to go but all of us had families—we wasn’t single mens, like them. And we had good jobs. So, we just wanted to stay here with our families and work, and sing as a hobby, because we loved it.

We travelled for many years, locally with the Dixie Hummingbirds, in our younger days, when we weren’t as popular, and they weren’t as popular. But we weren’t able to leave our families the way they did. So, we just stayed locally, where we could come back home.

Brown remembered how his group, the Dixie Jubilee Singers, performed a benefit concert to help the Dixie Hummingbirds raise money to buy a car so they could go to go to Philadelphia in 1942. The Dixie Hummingbirds—known to fans as “The Birds”—were based in South Carolina. Charlie Newsome began booking them in Jacksonville around 1938, around the time the year thirteen-year-old baritone Ira Tucker Sr. joined The Birds.

The Birds and the Royal Harmony Four were rivals in the southeastern territory. When the Royal Harmony Four made their first trip north to Philadelphia, at the end of 1940, Charlie Newsome went with them as the group’s road manager. But their big Chrysler Royal broke down in a blizzard before they reached Philadelphia. They were broke, they spent the night in a park.

“We got to a filling station,” Willie Wright remembered. “We didn’t know anything about the antifreeze that goes in cars. We was about out of gas and we didn’t have no money. So, the car was about to burn up, when we pulled into the station.”

But Ted Brooks was the group’s secret weapon.

“In the meantime, we know we didn’t have no money. I don’t know if it was me or Charlie, when the [service] man come back to the car, told Brooks to, ‘Hit a number!’ and Brooks hopped right up and started singing!” Willie Wright laughed out loud. “And the man filled our car with gas and give us antifreeze, and we motored on into Philadelphia!”

Lifelong Florida residents, the Royal Harmony Four were unfamiliar with the kind of winter that awaited them “up north.” They had no experience driving on the black ice.

“We got headed right down on Gerrard Avenue [in Philadelphia,],” Willie Wright remembered. “And the ice was about that thick! I think I was driving … the car slid over and if it hadn’t been for this iron banister, we’d of went over into the Schuylkill River.”

Ginyard knew that the Deep River Boys, a Black gospel vocal group from Virginia, had a weekly program on KYW in Philly. Willie Wright explained:

Our first residence was 1704 Cambridge Street. We went to Philadelphia, to KYW at 1619 Walnut Street, and we sat there for three of four days waiting for someone to ask us “What did we want?” So, finally a big, tall gray-headed man came by, and he said, “What are you fellas sittin’ up here for?”

So, Charlie Newsome got up—our manager—and he said, “We came here for an audition.” The man said, “Well wait a minute, I’ll be right back.” So, I said, “Brooks: as soon as he come back, hit ‘Gospel Train!’ Let him hear us before we go in.”

And Brooks—soon as he saw him comin’ back up the aisle in the station—Brooks throwed up his hands and sang, “My Lord she go Ho-Ho!”

Master Control Board, KYW, Philadelphia 1938

And the man stopped and looked at us and he said, “Y’all sound all right!” He called one of the announcers in there and he sent us into the studio. He had us to sing three numbers: I think Brooks sang “Gospel Train.” And Ginyard sang “Little Wooden Church on the Hill.” And then, I think, our bassist [Willie’s brother, Elijah Wright] sang—he didn’t sing it but he “bassed” it—’Please Don’t Drive My Children Away.'”

Later on, after we stayed there a while, they gave us a program at night called Night Dreams, a haunted program, we’d talk all kind of, [in a deep, spooky voice] “Hello there, who are you? This is Elijah Wright.” I would get so tickled, I’d laugh on the program! And Brooks would touch me and say, “Shut up, Will!”

Oh, we had a wonderful time. Our theme song, when we first got there went:

Oh, look at there, ain’t she pretty / Oh, look at there, ain’t she sweet /

Look at her eyes look at her clothes, look at that eye / Boy – ain’t she a beauty?”

So, we sang that, and we got well-known around Philadelphia—the suburbs and towns.

Ted Brooks didn’t read music—nor, for that matter, did Errol Garner, Judy Garland, Eric Clapton, Elvis Presley, Irving Berlin, Lionel Bart, Michael Jackson, Johnny Mercer, Frank Sinatra, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, or Taylor Swift.

Rather, he learned (and often composed) each arrangement by ear. When they were starting out in Jacksonville, the Royal Harmony Four sang strictly a cappella (without musical accompaniment). In Philadelphia, the quartet members began taking singing lessons from a teacher named Harlan Burns. “Then, we began to sing with music,” Brooks remembered. At this time, guitarist Abe Green began working as the group’s first accompanist.

In Philadelphia, the Royal Harmony Four were booked to share the bill with their Jacksonville rivals, the Dixie Hummingbirds in a “battle of the bands,” at the Mother Bethel AME (African Methodist Episcopal) church in Philadelphia, very likely arranged by Charlie Newsome. An African American tabloid in Philly called it a “quartet war.” Admission was steep—sixty-five cents for adults and thirty-five cents for children.

The Dixie Hummingbirds moved from South Carolina to Philadelphia in 1942, making it their permanent home. They landed a daily broadcast on WCAU. This led to a booking at New York’s Cafe Society, an engagement that lasted for six months.

According to historians Charlie Homer and Karen Caplan, the Golden Gate Quartet—The Gates—had their own popular radio show on CBS radio in New York City and would often travel to Philadelphia to catch the Royal Harmony Four in concert.

The four members of the Royal Harmony Four idolized the Gates.

In The Gospel Sound – Good News and Bad Times (1971), Tony Heilbut acknowledges the Golden Gate Quartet as “the jubilee group with the impressive close harmonies that first turned America onto swinging pop gospel versions of the spirituals we learned in public school.”

Heilbut observed that The Gates’ syncopations were borrowed from the African American Holiness churches in Tidewater Virginia. But The Gates’ harmonies were considerably more jazz influenced than other gospel vocal groups of the late 1930s. And, like the Mills Brothers, The Gates used acapella vocal sounds to convincingly imitate horns and reeds heard in jazz bands.

In 1934, four Black students from Booker T. Washington High School founded the Golden Gate Jubilee Singers at Eddie “A.C.” Griffin’s barbershop in Norfolk, Virgina. Willie T. Johnson, who led the quartet, took “run of the mill, slow beat, old Fisk songs” and “gave them a beat, changing the sound of traditional Negro spirituals…”

Jubilee traces its roots back to the Fisk Jubilee Singers, an African American a cappella ensemble organized in 1871 as a fundraising performance group for Fisk University, a Black college in Nashville, Tennessee, founded by the American Missionary Association.

The Gates were a particularly polished and versatile quartet. They got famous after John Hammond booked them at the December 24, 1939, Carnegie Hall “From Spirituals to Swing” concert. But some local preachers believed The Gates were singing “the devil’s music.”

Willie T. Johnson trained his quartet members to sing clearly and annunciate every word. The Gates signed with RCA Bluebird Records, gaining them national exposure. Johnson managed their act and their money—their collective income went into a general fund from which each member was paid $100 a week.

The Gates repertoire included novelty songs, spirituals, gospel jubilee numbers, work songs, as well as originals by Willie T. Johnson that sounded like (and felt like) old spirituals. Johnson, a former law school student and ex-pastry baker, was one of the founding members of The Gates. He sang both baritone and lead. One reporter described The Gates’ repertoire as, “loose-boned gospel songs and spirituals.”

By the early 1940s, The Gates had extended bookings at New York City’s Café Society. Presenting spiritual entertainers in a secular setting introduced white audiences to Black gospel music and allowed Black performers to finally make some good money playing a premiere venue.

Many New York City clubs, like the Cotton Club were then segregated venues where white audiences were entertained by Black performers. The novelist Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) remembered, “There were brutes at the door to enforce the Cotton Club’s policy which was opposed to mixed [interracial] parties.”

But Barney Josephson (1902-1988), the progressive Jewish owner of Café Society was a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party who flaunted his policies regarding integrated audiences. Josephson told New Yorker columnist Whitney Balliett (1926-2007):

The head waiter told me that the people that table 41 would like to see me. There were two couples at the table, and one of the men said, “Do you allow niggers to dance with white women in this place?”

”Sir,” I replied, “we do not use that word in here. Furthermore, there is a law in this state against discrimination, and we abide by it.”

Café Society was the first nonsegregated nightclub in Manhattan. The doorman dressed in a tattered jacket with white gloves from which the fingertips had been cut off. Café Society’s slogan was “the Wrong place for the Right people.”

Barney Josephson booked the best Black entertainers in the industry: Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Leadbelly, Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, and Hazel Scott, just to name a few.

“John [Hammond] brought in the Golden Gate Quartet,” Josephson recalled, “and they made the blood rush up my arms which brought the goose pimples out, when they sang…”

But Josephson disliked The Gates wardrobe—matching purple suits and bowties and brown buckle shoes, and, for their costume change, “white flannel tails with black silk lapels with a black stripe running down their trousers.” Josephson thought “both outfits look like they belong in a minstrel show.” He gave Willie Johnson some money and sent the men to Bond’s Clothing Store to buy “four blue surge suits, all alike, white shirts, with any kind of blue tie you like that would go with the suits, and four pairs of black shoes.”

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt liked to hang out at Café Society with her son, Franklin Jr., where she befriended The Gates, whom she’d heard on their national radio program. She arranged for them to sing at Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 inauguration, making them the first Black musical group to perform in Constitution Hall, much to the consternation of the Daughters of the American Revolution. On several special occasions, the Gates were invited to sing at the White House.

The Gates repertoire and their close-harmony arrangements—especially Johnson’s pulsing, syncopated narrative style—greatly influenced the Royal Harmony Four. In the spring of 1941, The Gates played Fay’s Theater in Philadelphia with the Royal Harmony Four. Caleb Ginyard remembered, “Mr. Willie Johnson told us, ‘Look, I heard your group… Why don’t you go to New York and take over the job that we just left?…tell Mr. Barney Josephson and Mr. John Hammond, the chiefs of the Café Society Club…that we sent you to go to work.'”

John Henry Hammond (1910-1987) was a wealthy white record producer and civil rights activist who promoted Black entertainers while scouting talent for Café Society. He loved the Golden Gate Quartet. He later claimed to have discovered Benny Goodman, Aretha Franklin, and Bob Dylan.

John Hammond knew the Royal Harmony Four from their recordings. He was a fan. They auditioned for him and were immediately booked to play Café Society, to substitute for their heroes, The Gates. He booked them for two weeks and billed them as the Café Society New Quartet Uptown the Royal Harmony Singers.

The four singers were each paid fifty dollars a week. At Café Society, they worked with the Trinidad-born pianist Hazel Scott who’d performed there regularly since 1939 and had developed a loyal following there. The Café Society audience loved their versions of songs from The Gates’ repertoire.

From August 22, 1941, to October 23, 1942, the Philadelphia Inquirer the Royal Harmony Four broadcast their thirty-minute live radio program each Friday at 6:30 pm on KYW. The show was heard all over the eastern United States.

Four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, on December 11, 1941, the Royal Harmony Four made their first recordings for the Decca Record Company in New York City. Their first session produced one 78 rpm record of “Jezebel,” with “I’m On My Way to Heaven Anyhow,” on the flipside, which was released in February 1942, Ted Brooks’ sang lead on their recording of Gospel Train, which came out that autumn.

The members of the Royal Harmony Four abandoned their friends and family in Jacksonville and forged new lives in Philadelphia. Back home in Jacksonville, nine hundred miles away, Ginyard’s wife, Elnora, gave birth to their son, Caleb III. But her husband hadn’t been home in months.

Ira Tucker Sr., known to fans as Tuck, sang with the Dixie Hummingbirds for an incredible 70 years. He remembered the days when he was still a teenager, during the Great Depression. “Back then,” Tuck explained, “Philadelphia was a home base to a lot of gospel singer: The Angelics. The Ward Sisters. The Sensational Nightingales … In addition, the city was strategically located along the Boston—New York—Baltimore—Washington corridor.”

“When [Ira] Tucker arrived,” wrote Anthony Heilbut in The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times, “he brought something new to gospel. Unlike the earlier ‘flat-footed’ singers who stayed positioned in one spot, Tucker would run around the auditorium before getting down on his knees and rock prayerfully.”

“I started this hip-slapping all the quartets do,” the modest Tucker admitted.

The Philadelphia Enquirer’s 2008 obituary for Ira B. Tucker, Sr. stated, “Mr. Tucker brought showiness to the Hummingbirds with a preaching style and a high-pitched scream. With his signature baritone and flashy presentations, he ran up and down the aisle, jumped from the stage, spun around, tore off his coat and landed on his knees—all without sacrificing his sensational sound.”

At this time, some of the quartets that specialized in religious music would perform popular or secular programs under a different group name. When the Dixie Hummingbirds performed in nightclubs, they were billed as The Jericho Quintet. When the broadcast on WCAU, they were The Swanee Quartet. The Royal Harmony Four also performed simultaneously and somewhat confusingly under several names, for several years, sometimes billed as “The Florida Boys.”

As World War Two began in earnest, Ginyard changed the group’s name from The Royal Harmony Four to the Royal Harmony Singers. He got them booked at a Pennsylvania military camp. There, a high-ranking naval officer caught their show and was duly impressed. According to the British musicologist Opal Louis Nations, this naval officer “used his influence to find a useful, regular engagement for the Royal Harmony Singers. The group was required to show up at a particular pier at 12:00 noon, every day to sing in their dress suits at a barge launching ceremony for the general public. Before lunchtime the group was required to look like shipbuilders working a shift, and to pretend they were lifting and carrying in the assembly shop. This entailed a lot of dramatic skill and walking around.”

Charlie Newsome, the road manager for the Royal Harmony Singers had also booked many Dixie Hummingbirds concerts in Florida before they moved to Philly. According to The Birds lead singer, Ira Tucker Sr., Charlie Newsome got the Royal Harmony Singers a radio show on WCAU, a 50,000-watt, clear channel station that was number one in the Philadelphia ratings. Located in the Delaware River Valley, the station’s 500-foot tower weighed over 37 tons and its signal reached as far as the state of Illinois. It was a CBS network affiliate that broadcast the most popular programs of the day, such as Vic and Sade, Fred Allen’s Texaco Theater, Mr. Keen Tracer of Lost Persons, the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, and Amos ‘n’ Andy.

In the years between World War One and World War two, when hundreds of thousands of Black families left the South and relocated to northern American cities, radio stations began broadcasting programs targeted at the growing African American community.

The January 25, 1941, issue of the New York Amsterdam News, the oldest Black owned newspaper in America, reported on the cross-cultural appeal of black gospel groups like the Southernaires on the radio: “Originally their audiences were almost exclusively colored because of the nature of their work, but the good word spread, and the caliber of their performances made them ambassadors of the spiritual to all races … Their work is nationally loved because it is so essentially American.”

These Black gospel programs proved so popular, the February 23, 1943, issue of Billboard magazine reported on the competition between Philadelphia radios stations, stating that “religious programs on Sunday mornings,” had the highest ratings in that time slot, with WCAU’s broadcast of the African American spiritual program Wings Over Jordan one of the “outstanders.”

But the Golden Gate Quartet was still the most famous Black gospel group in America. They were among the first groups to take black gospel music into concerts halls and television, to tour Europe, and to later appear on the Ed Sullivan and Arthur Godfrey TV shows. Ira Tucker, Sr. of The Birds once described the well-rehearsed, sophisticated vocal and microphone techniques employed by the most famous, and arguably the most entertaining jubilee gospel group of their generation, The Gates. “They used to snatch their words. At the end of a song, they blended harmony and would hold a note sometimes for fifteen seconds.”

The Gates appeared in a few movies during the Second World War, Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), Hit Parade of 1943, and Hollywood Canteen (1944). They were also in the Danny Kaye vehicle A Song Is Born (1948), in which they sang the title song with Louis Armstrong and Virginia Mayo, and “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” Sadly, Willie T. Johnson was drafted and left the group in 1943. and does not appear in Hollywood Canteen or A Song is Born.

During World War Two, The Gates demonstrated that jubilee singing could encompass songs that were comic, romantic, and even topical. In 1943, they made recordings of “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer” and “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’“—a Willie T. Johnson original about Joseph Stalin’s efforts to prevent Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

By the end of the war, gospel songwriters had entered the realm of progressive political ideas. When President Franklin Roosevelt died in April of 1945, Otis Jackson, a local spiritual singer in Jacksonville, wrote a progressive gospel song called, “Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt,” recorded by the composer and accompanied by members of Jacksonville’s own Dixie Jubilee Singers. The song was also recorded on by the incomparable Rebert H. Harris and the Soul Stirrers.

In 1947, The Gates recorded “Atom and Evil,” written by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer (composers of One Meat Ball) a cautionary tale about the dangers of nuclear energy narrated by Willie T. Johnson.

In 1951, the Silas Steele and the Spirits of Memphis Quartet recorded a song about the specter of nuclear warheads called “Atomic Telephone.” The song ends with the chilling lyric, “It can cure the sick or destroy the people/With one sweep of power known by God alone.”

But Frank Loesser’s “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”—a hit record from the Second World War—was inspired by a speech given by a naval chaplain after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December of 1941. At their second recording session, the Royal Harmony Singers recorded a version of this song for Bob Rolontz’s Key Records on Broadway in New York City. Rolontz knew the quartet from Philadelphia—his dad owned radio station WCAU, where the quartet had a regular program. The Royal Harmony Singer’s recording of “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” reached number ten on the American Rhythm & Blues Billboard chart on November 14, 1942. The following year Kay Kyser’s bland and flavorless version of the same song became the number one song on the hit parade.

In early 1942, gospel singer and concert promoter Thurman Ruth (1914-2002) invited the Royal Harmony Singers to play their first concert in New York City, at one of Ruth’s Selah Jubilee Singers’ programs.

Around this time, John “Shorty” Jennings permanently replaced Willie Wright as the group’s tenor singer. George “Biggie” McFadden, a far more effective and inventive bass singer replaced Elijah Wright.

At last, Ginyard had the perfect combination of voices he’d been looking for.

On Thursday, October 26, 1943, the Royal Harmony Singers returned to Decca Records in New York City with Ginyard-lead, Jennings-tenor, Brooks-baritone, and McFadden-bass. (Apparently, Elijah Wright was also singing with the group on this session.) Musicologist Opal Nations explained that “by now the boys had adopted a bluesier sound and had added rhythm accompaniment. For some reason, Decca chose not to issue the proceedings.”

By the mid 1940’s, the Royal Harmony Singers had taken over for the Golden Gate Quartet on their fifteen-minute Sunday morning show on CBS Radio in New York City. And they appeared daily on Arthur Godfrey’s popular radio program.

When the group decided to add another tenor part, Orville “Crazy Legs” Brooks (no relation to Ted Brooks) joined them in early 1944. On March 16 of that year, they returned to Decca Records in New York City, recording a memorable version of the traditional African American spiritual “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel.”

In December 1944, they cut their first secular song for Decca, “When It’s All Over but the Shouting”—an original composed by Ted Brooks and their new tenor singer, John Jennings. Prior to this recording, the Jubalaires stuck pretty closely to the standard Willie T. Johnson jubilee singing arrangements from The Gates repertoire. (Listen to their May 1945 Decca recording of the traditional spiritual, “Go Down Moses.”) But now, they were beginning to have their own swinging sound.

Orville Brooks appears in the 1946 soundie,“Noah,” standing just behind little John Jennings. Born in Fruitland, Maryland, on January 27, 1919, he grew up with four sisters. His father was an illiterate laborer in a sawmill, who later became a farmer and a homeowner. Orville and his siblings, like their mother, could read and write but Orville’s grandparents were illiterate. In 1929, when he was ten years old, Orville joined a vocal quartet at his elementary school, with fellow African American students George Collins, and Ted and Pete DeShields. The Fruitland Harmonizers sang together every day until they graduated from high school. After graduating, Orville worked for John H. Dulany and Son, a local processor of frozen and canned vegetables. Around 1943, he sang with Bill Langford’s Southern Sons quartet before joining the Royal Harmony Singers a year later. They were booked for a Sunday afternoon program on WMCA in New York City, the home of disc jockeys Hal Jackson and Symphony Sid Torin, who played records by Black artists. Shortly thereafter, the Royal Harmony Singers relocated to New York City, where they all lived together in a large, rented house—a remarkable domestic accomplishment, in and of itself.

Orville Brooks, the new lead singer, sang sweetly on their secular hit “I Know (That You and I Will Never Meet Again),” composed by group members Ted Brooks and John Jennings and recorded with Andy Kirk’s orchestra. On this on November 27, 1945 record date, they sound more like the Ink Spots than The Gates. The song on the flipside of this 78-rpm record is a swinging number called “Get Together with the Lord.” A third track recorded during the session, “Soothe Me,” was not released.

Caleb Ginyard remembered, “We couldn’t use Royal Harmony Singers on CBS/Columbia, so we changed our name … to the Jubalaires.” Paul Kapp, the group’s general manager, who also managed the popular Black vocal quintet, the Delta Rhythm Boys, is often credited with naming them The Jubalaires.

Jubalaires is frequently mistaken as an expansion of the word “jubilee,” which refers to the unaccompanied, syncopated gospel quartet singing tradition the group embraced. But “Jubilaires” actually references Jubal, the father of all modern harpists and organists, whom many medieval scholars considered the ‘inventor of music’ in Christianity. Alas, little is known about Jubal, as he is mentioned just once in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament, in Genesis 4:21.

After Orville Brooks and John Jennings joined the group, the Jubalaires appeared in a total of five known soundies, including The Preacher and the Bear (1945), Brother Bill, (1945) and Noah (1946), all directed by William Forest Crouch.

The Jubalaires’ 1945 soundie of The Preacher and the Bear (a 1904 George Fairman’s composition), is now on YouTube, where it has garnered more than 1.6 million views. Caleb Ginyard provides the syncopated Willie T. Johnson-like narration, while Jennings, Ted Brooks, and McFadden hum, singing harmony on the “Gimme that old time religion” chorus.

The video provides a glimpse of lead singer Caleb Ginyard, handsome and relaxed, with a pencil-thin moustache and his permed hair slicked back, in the prime of his musical powers. You can see how much Ginyard learned from listening to Willie T. Johnson and The Gates’ 1937 recording of the same song.

The Kennebec Journal (Maine), reported in July 1945  “after a hard climb during the past 12 years [the Jubalaires] won a top place in radio…” The group was “heard 9:15 o’clock Monday through Friday mornings on Arthur Godfrey’s WGAN airshow.”  The article says they group is led by “slow-talking” Charley [sic] Newsome who has “a perpetual smile in his voice and never gets excited about anything except music.”

The Jubalaires accompanist on this program was guitarist Everett Barksdale, who worked with pianist Art Tatum from 1949-1956. “‘After we listen to a new song and get the feel of it” Newsome explains, “our guitarist…plays the melody and after we learn in down [by ear] we put in the things we feel about that song. Then we memorize them, and that’s our arrangement. Nobody can write an arrangement for us.”

The Saturday, December 8, 1945, issue of the Pittsburgh Courier reported:

New York: The CBS Jubalaires, heard regularly over the Columbia broadcasting system from station WABC from Monday to Fridays at 9:15 to 10:00 AM, and on Sundays on their program from 8:15 to 8:30, celebrated their 12th anniversary Sunday, November 25th, with a great program of songs and spirituals at the Golden Gate ballroom [at Lenox Avenue and 142nd Street in Harlem] before a packed house of more than 4,000 fans in the afternoon and an equally as large crowd at their evening performance. The Jubalaires will start a road tour broadcasting from the CBS station nearest their bookings. They will play Rochester, Albany, Philadelphia, and points West.

It was a given that one couldn’t really make a living singing in an African American gospel quartet without also having a straight job. Reverend Robert Brown, who sang with the Dixie Jubilee Singers in Jacksonville, during the Great Depression remembered:

You done it for the love of it. Plenty of times we would come in from work during the weekdays and travel 200 miles and sing a program—and would get enough money just to pay for the gas and pay for your laundry and what not. But we were dedicated to it, and we love it. And we enjoyed doing God’s work, hoping that out of our songs, would lift somebody’s soul and turn them ’round … That our song … made some soul—some broken heart happy. They got a feeling out of it. They got a meaning out of it. Maybe turned their lives around to the Lord. So, I don’t regret the nights that I stayed up and didn’t get any sleep and what all, the next day.

Some gospel groups tried to cross over into pop music, blues, or later soul music, most memorably Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, and Johnnie Taylor. But many gospel musicians were so religiously devout, they would not attempt secular or popular recordings.

James B. Davis, a deeply religious Black man who had been raised in the Holiness church, founded the Dixie Hummingbirds in 1928. He led the group with his firm hand, fining band members for four-letter words or taking the Lord’s name in vain, or for violations of dress code ($5.00 for the wrong tie, handkerchief, or socks, etc.) Davis didn’t allow any women to travel with the group, and he didn’t permit alcohol or tobacco. He was strict about punctuality and discipline. But 45 years after the group was formed, the Dixie Hummingbirds collaborated with Paul Simon, in 1973, on the hit record “Loves Me Like a Rock,” which peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart the week of October 6, 1973 (Cher’s “Half-Breed” was then number one). It remained in the Top 40 for 14 weeks and was certified a gold record, which exponentially increased The Birds international prominence and income.

 In the months after World War Two, I Know and I Don’t Know What I’d Do Without You, both secular songs recorded by the Jubalaires with Andy Kirk’s Orchestra, became national hit records. I Know was such a successful crossover hit in the spring of 1946, Charlie Newsome and Phil Kapp decided that it would be a good time for a road tour. But Arthur Godfrey, on whose program the Jubalaires appeared daily, wouldn’t give them time off for touring. In the end, only Orville Brooks, who sang lead on the song, was permitted to go on the road with Andy Kirk.

“The Jubalaires sound was innovative,” wrote Karen Caplan “featuring rotating vocal parts with jazzy, upbeat overtones that offered a versatile blend and repertoire. The Jubalaires went through a succession of guitar players including Abe Green, Everett Barksdale, and Roosevelt Howerton. In 1946, The Jubalaires acquired the talent of Bill Lee Johnson, whose eloquent guitar maneuvers complimented the Jubalaires’ harmony.”

Bill Lee Johnson’s solid guitar playing is heard on the 1946 soundie, “Noah.”

Born in Dothan, Alabama, on February 22, 1915, Bill Lee’s family relocated to Newark, New Jersey in 1916, where he lived for the rest of his life. He took up the banjo in high school, playing at house parties and in bands. He played guitar with a WPA six-piece combo during the Great Depression. After leaving the Jubalaires, he led the Lee Johnson Trio. He also worked for the City of Newark in the police and recreation departments, and ran the Alcazar Jazz Tavern in Irvington, New Jersey.

Bill Lee Johnson remembered when the Jubalaires once scheduled appearances for both their CBS radio program and a live show at New York’s Apollo Theater on 125th Street in Harlem, on the same date. To ensure the group wouldn’t be late, the management hired an ambulance using its flashing lights and sirens to race the Jubalaires from one venue to the next.

Willie T. Johnson, the former leader of The Gates, had always been a fan of the Jubalaires. He is not related to guitarist Bill Lee Johnson. But his friends and family called him “Bill.” To avoid confusion between the two men, Willie T. Johnson is referred to as “Willie” throughout this essay.

Born in Buford County, North Carolina on May 2, 1913, Willie Johnson had a profound influence on jubilee gospel singing. As a boy, he attended the Corinth Baptist Church in Jarvisburg where his uncle Obediah Olds, a first-generation African American, was an elder. Olds’ influence can be heard in Johnson’s music as Johnson’s daughter and biographer Chandra J. Johnson observed, “his creative interpretation and precise narration, his command of the storyline and timing is a fusion of natural rhythm and natural preaching.”

Five foot six inches tall and 186 pounds, Willie Johnson was drafted into the navy as a Seabee in 1943 and left The Gates. But without his steady leadership, the group foundered.

Discharged from service in January 1946 with a check for $403.16 in back pay, Johnson remembered, “As soon as I went into the army, I guess they [The Gates] figured I was expendable. And the money that was in the general fund, [they] just blew it… when I got back, and I asked them about the money, particularly [since] I was supposed to [get] a percentage… when I got back from the army, I rejoined [the group] again. But they were not the same group anymore… [T]he members hadn’t changed, but the attitudes had.”

Unfortunately, the vibe at Café Society had also changed during the war—now the club was under constant surveillance by the FBI. The agency’s file on Barney Josephson ultimately contained 2,100 pages and in the 1950s he would be blacklisted during the Red Scare.

Years later, the IRS sent Willie T. Johnson a $100,000 tax bill for alleged earnings 1943-46. It would take nearly a decade of stressful correspondence before he was able to convince them that he’d been in the military and not with The Gates during those years.

In the summer of 1947, The Gates were booked to appear at a Jacksonville, Florida venue with the Jubalaires. The Jubalaires were beginning their 22-state tour. But without explanation, at this concert in the Jubalaires hometown, The Gates members Orlandus Wilson, Clyde Riddick, and Henry Owens refused to sing. For Willie T. Johnson, this sort of behavior—from friends he’d known since high school—was “the last straw.”

That night, Willie quit The Gates and joined the Jubalaires, becoming their new manager.

The New York Age, the prominent newspaper of (and for) the New York City’s Black community reported on the Jubalaires in their Saturday, August 9, 1947, issue:

A quartette, according to Webster is ‘a group consisting of four.’ A lot Mr. Webster knows. The Jubalaires, are a quartet consisting of five men. If you want to make the error even bigger, you can run it up to seven by including the group’s manager–conductor­–emcee [and its accompanist]. This makes them a seven-man double quartet, if you care to look at it that way.

The group, featured Wednesday night over CBS [radio] on Rhapsody in Rhythm, have a second curve ball ready for you, as soon as you’ve mastered their peculiar system of counting heads. Nearly everybody automatically spells their name “Jubileers,” basing the spelling on the word, “Jubilee.” And that is very, very wrong. They’re the Jubalaires, and they take their name from Jubal, Biblical figure who is called the father of all harpists and organists.

That explains the name, but it doesn’t explain the numerical set-up. There are five of them, but only four sing on any given song.

Let’s say the Jubalaires are doing Preacher and the Bear, or some similar comedy number. In that case, you’ll find Willie Johnson singing lead, John Jennings second tenor, Ted Brooks baritone, George McFadden, bass. On a folk song or spiritual, Caleb Ginyard takes over the lead, Johnson slides down from tenor to baritone and Brooks retires to the sidelines. A popular tune finds Jennings singing lead, with Brooks back in the lineup as second tenor, with Johnson singing baritone. Throughout all this shifting around, bass George McFadden is the only one of the five who stays put.

In addition to the five singers, there’s Charlie Newsome, who combines the functions of manager, conductor and master of ceremonies for the concert engagements. Charlie sang is a tenor with the Jubalaires back in the days when they did their harmonizing in the backseat of Ginyard’s taxicab. A throat ailment struck him during one of their professional engagements, and he hasn’t sung since.

Seventh member of the quartet is Smiley Trotman, pianist, who joined the group about four months ago.

Pianist Irving “Smiley” Trotman (far right) in Snub Mosley Band, 1944

Odd jobs here and there kept the cornmeal and oatmeal trickling in, and then Newsome landed the quartet a job on WCAU, the CBS station in Philadelphia. There was steak on the menu frequently, by the time a station executive decided they were ready to invade New York and sent them on their way with enthusiastic letter of introduction to a recording company.

Their longest network assignment was an extensive engagement on the Arthur Godfrey Show, which ended recently when the foursome yielded to many invitations for personal appearance and launched a 48,000 mile, 22-state tour of concerts and one-nighters. They still do church concerts and other appearances between Rhapsody in Rhythm broadcasts.

In February 1947, the Jubalaires began recording for Syd Nathan’s Queen Records, the so-called “race records” division of King Records, in Cincinnati, Ohio. According to Opal Nations, “This resulted in five and a half records (three songs being secular) issued between March and June of 1949.” Eight Jubalaires singles were eventually issued on Nathan’s King record label, as well.

The Jubalaires appear in the all-Black cast feature film, Ebony Parade (1947) with Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Dorothy Dandridge, Mable Lee, and Mantan Moreland, whom many consider one of the greatest African American film comedians of the early 20th-century. In the picture, the quartet sings “Brother Bill,” an irreligious novelty number set in the Maine woods. Ginyard, Jennings, Brooks, and McFadden stand before a hunting lodge fireplace, rifles in hand, clad in deerstalkers caps ala Sherlock Holmes. Brooks wears a jacket with an extra large print pattern reminiscent of one of Spike Jones’ suits. Bassman George McFadden’s suit jacket has several large dollar signs emblazoned upon it. Ginyard sings the verses, replete with lots of upward glances and mugging for the camera.

On Friday, January 31, 1947, South Carolina’s Aiken Standard newspaper reported, “In the 12 years the Jubalaires have been together they have a repertory of over 600 songs which they sing entirely from memory…”

Early in 1947, the Jubalaires quit the Arthur Godfrey Show to go on tour. Guitarist Bill Lee Johnson remembered how Godfrey begged them to stay: “He almost got on his knees. ‘Boys don’t leave me now,’ he pleaded. ‘We’ve got a couple of irons in the fire. We’re going to go commercial. Stay with us.'”

But they left the show for their tour of the southern states, then headed west to play gigs on the Pacific Coast. In terms of career moves, quitting the Godfrey radio show turned out be a significant missed opportunity for the Jubalaires. In December of 1948, Godfrey took his entire Talent Scout program from radio to television, becoming a pioneer in the new visual broadcast medium. Godfrey hired the Mariners, an integrated vocal quartet of Coast Guard veterans, to replace the Jubalaires.

Though Paul Kapp was no longer their manager, the Jubalaires still benefitted from his years of good will and support. Kapp also managed the popular Delta Rhythm Boys. At the end of their marathon tour, the Jubalaires reached Hollywood, California, in September of 1947 and learned that they’d been hired to replace the Delta Rhythm Boys on NBC radio’s Amos and Andy program in Los Angeles. The half-hour show was one of the most popular programs on American radio. It featured white actors portraying Black people using exaggerated vernacular minstrel-show dialect now considered politically incorrect. On the Amos ‘n’ Andy program, between April 1948 and May 1949, the Jubalaires sang: “When the Moon Goes Down,” “Brother Bill,” “Rise and Shine,” “Shadrack,” “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” “Ain’t It a Shame,” “Casey Jones,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Lonesome Road,” “The Long, Long Trail,” and “John Henry.”

As he had done with The Gates, Willie T. Johnson managed and booked the group. He kept the books and signed weekly paychecks. And soon he became the lead singer.

In 1948, the Jubalaires appeared in The Joint is Jumpin,’ a film featuring “the greatest cast of sepia stars ever assembled,” including John Mason, Hadda Brooks (no relation to Ted or Orville), Una Mae Carlisle, Olivette Miller, Bob Howard, the Phil Moore Four, the All-American Band, George Lawson and his Orchestra, Gertrude Sanders, John Oscar, Mildred Kirk, the dancer Frog Edwards, Slick and Slack, Charles Ray, and Barbara Browning. In the film, Willie T. Johnson sings lead on Long, Lean and Lanky and Casey Jones, backed by John Jennings, Ted Brooks, and George McFadden. Tenor John Jennings sings lead on Jube’s Blues. Ginyard sings lead on The Other Side of the Rainbow. Jimmie O’Brien accompanies the quartet on piano.

The Joint is Jumpin’ was directed by a white man named Harold “Josh” Binney. In 1923, Binney, then a failed director and actor, was convicted of defrauding investors in his film company and he served two years in a Montana prison. Twenty years later, he was a forty-year-old unemployed has-been, living with his Canadian wife, Clarabel, and three kids, in a rented house on Laurel Canyon Drive in Hollywood.

After World War Two, Binney had a second career directing musical “race films” starring African Americans for the All-American News film company, including, Hi-De-Ho (1947) starring Cab Calloway, Boarding House Blues (1948) with Moms Mabley and Dusty Fletcher, and Killer Diller (1948) starring Fletcher and Butterfly McQueen, remembered for her performance as Prissy in Gone with the Wind (1939).

The previous year, in January 1947, the Jubalaires recorded one record for Mayo William’s Harlem Records in Chicago. Later issues of the single were pressed with labels misidentifying the performers as the Dixieaires, a different quartet Caleb Ginyard formed in late 1946, with Johnny Hines-bass, Jimmy Moran-baritone, Tom Moran-tenor, and guitarist Abe Green, confusing generations of record collectors.

To further complicate matters, Ginyard’s Dixieaires would also record as the Royal Harmonaires and the Angel Voices. Neglecting the importance of a lasting relationship with a major record label (perhaps unable to secure one) Ginyard label-hopped without concern for contract or continuity. Consequently, the Dixieaires recordings are found on a dozen different labels including, Castle, Coleman, Continental, Exclusive, Lenox, Melford, Pontiac, Remington, Sit-In-With, Spirituals, Sunrise, and Time.

Ginyard focused his attention on his new group and would  leave the Jubalaires around 1950.

Although the Dixieaires made a couple of good singles, and had one hit record, Go Long, in 1948 (an unmemorable proto-rhythm-and-blues song featuring a disturbingly shrieking saxophone), they disbanded just as their album for Prestige Records was released in December of 1951.

Ginyard tried unsuccessfully to work as a soloist and then banded with his brothers to form the Southwest Jubilee Singers. In 1952, Ginyard organized an equally short-lived do-wop group called the Du Droppers.

In the middle 1950s, a handful of African American gospel performers were finally becoming recognized as national and international stars. Aligning himself with one on the most long-lived institutions in gospel, in 1956 Ginyard joined the Golden Gate Quartet—The Gates—for their first European engagement. They were a hit at the Olympia in Paris and Columbia Records signed them to a long and successful recording career. Black artists experienced greater acceptance in Europe and the Gates, including Ginyard, became expatriates, making their permanent homes on the European continent.

Singing lead with The Gates for the next sixteen years gave Ginyard the opportunity to come into his own as a mature and seasoned artist making the final chapter of his career his vintage season. “Those years with the Gates sparked the most brilliant repertoire of Caleb’s career,” Karen Caplan observed. “His addition to the group inspired the hallmark years of the Golden Gate Quartet as well.”

But his mental health was deteriorating, and Ginyard was ultimately asked to leave The Gates in 1971 due to “irrational behavior.” Apparently, he had become an embarrassment to his bandmates.

He settled in Basel, Switzerland, where, like the protagonist in King Vidor’s The Crowd (1927), he came full circle, attempting to hold onto his last job as a singing waiter. Ginyard died in Switzerland on August 11, 1978.

The tour of the west coast made a big impression on the Jubalaires. On Sunday, March 28, 1948, they performed as part of  Ring Salvation in My Soul, for an audience of 30,000, as part of the Easter Holiday Service at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. They returned to New York to fulfill their engagements, but as the weather grew colder, there was talk of getting out of Manhattan for good and settling in sunny southern California.

Ted Brooks, John Jennings, George McFadden, and Willie T. Johnson were in mutual agreement, but Bill Lee Johnson, their guitarist, didn’t want to leave Newark, New Jersey. Ultimately, in 1948, the quartet parted company with Bill Lee and headed west.

In Los Angeles, the Jubalaires lived as roommates in a house in Compton. Willie Johnson handled the finances, managing their wages from the Amos and Andy show. Although he’d been married before and had four children, in Los Angeles Willie met Willa Mae Burke at one of the Amos and Andy broadcasts and in 1951 they were married.

According to author and historian Doug Seroff, the Jubalaires cut quite a few 16-inch vinyl coded transcription discs for the Standard Program Library and World Record Companies. These discs contain about half gospel and half secular material. On some of the tracks, the singers are accompanied by pianist Jimmie O’Brien. These rare, oversized, user-unfriendly discs containing some of the Jubalaires best work and are so uncommon, this author has never seen one advertised for sale.

With Willie T. Johnson or Orville Brooks singing lead, tenor John “Shorty” Jennings, baritone Ted Brooks, and bass George “Biggie” McFadden, the Jubalaires made some of their best records. In 1948, they cut a secular record for Decca’s subsidiary, Coral, with Orville Brooks singing lead on, Waiting All My Life For You. Then Orville Brooks left the Jubalaires to become the new lead singer in the Golden Gate Quartet.

After seven years with The Gates, Orville “Crazy Legs” Brooks grew tired of singing spirituals. In 1953, he and Gene Mumford left the quartet to form a new rhythm and blues group called The Larks. In August 1954, the New York Daily News reported, “The leader, Orville Brooks, was asked when he personally decided to quit spiritual singing. ‘When I had to give three references on an application,” said Brooks, “and the only three names I could think of were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.’

In 1957, Orville joined the Ink Spots and seven years later, he was leading the group. In January 1965, Charlie G. Fuqua, who co-founded the Ink Spots in 1934, sued Orville for $10,000 for using his group’s name. In September, Brooks changed the name of his group to “Orville Brooks and his Rhythm Makers (formerly the Ink Spots).” Orville Brooks died August 30, 1997, in the Bronx, New York.

In March of 1949, the Jubalaires started six-week engagement at the Cotton Club in Los Angeles. That October, Ginyard, Jennings, Brooks, McFadden, and Willie T. Johnson appeared in the short film The Joint in Jumpin’ (1949).

In the Saturday March 5, 1949, issue, The New York Age printed an article entitled “Jubalaires a Corporation:”

The Jubalaires, the quartet singing for the second season on CBS’ Amos ‘n’ Andy, … [Willie] Johnson, arranger and second tenor, joined the group about two years ago.

After an 18-year association with the famous Golden Gate Quartet, Johnson went into the Navy, where he conducted a choir. When he came out, full of fresh musical ideas, he heard the Jubalaires and felt that they were the group to execute his ideas.

Morning Herald, Uniontown, PA, October 22, 1949

Willie Johnson is president of the Jubalaires, attending to all business matters, including keeping books, allotting a small weekly paycheck to each member and booking the foursome [sic] on outside engagements. The small weekly stipend is explained by the fact that the Jubalaires and their families all live together in one house. And they manage with as much harmony as they show in their inspiring songs.

All the Jubalaires’ manse [lodging], food, clothes, automobile upkeep, income taxes, rent and medical expenses come out of a common fund which is kept alive by a weekly check from Amos ‘n’ Andy.

In 1949, Jubalaires signed with Capitol Records in Hollywood. They recorded “Home, Home, Home” and “Blue-Ribbon Gal,” with the gifted jazz guitarist Johnny Smith. But ironically, Smith’s career as a jazz instrumentalist took off and the Jubalaires never worked with him again—check out Smith’s Man with a Blue Guitar album on Royal Roost Records.

But the staff at Capitol Records didn’t seem to know how to utilize their talents.  For example, the Jubalaires can be heard singing behind Kay Starr on her November 11, 1949, recording of “Tell Me How Long That Train’s Been Gone.” But alas, the record label reads “Kay Starr with Vocal Group and Orchestral Accompaniment”—the anonymous Jubilaires aren’t even credited.

Their third session for Capitol Records, in 1950 also missed the mark—they sound like the Mills Brothers, smooth and relaxed, and backed by a tasty guitar accompaniment on “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” a song was written for Disney’s animated 1950 film ‘Cinderella.’ One wonders what the Jubalaires thought about the songs Capitol Records was assigning them. The flipside is Cy Coben’s “The Old Piano Roll Blues,” on which the Jubalaires sing a Mills Brothers-ish vocal arrangement accompanied by an old-fashioned upright piano accompaniment.

Later that year, King released another Mills Brothers-ish single “Twelve O’Clock and All is Well,” an unmemorable composition performed as innocuously as possible by the Jubalaires.

This was several years before rhythm and blues reached a mainstrem white listening audience. In 1950 the best-selling records included “Goodnight, Irene” sung by the Weavers backed by Gordon Jenkins and his Orchestra, “Mona Lisa” by Capitol Records star Nat King Cole, and the “Third Man [Movie] Theme” played on the zither by Anton Karas.

In May of 1950, O.L. Elliott took over managing the Jubalaires. A month later, they finished their third year on the Amos ‘n’ Andy show. At this time, Ted Brooks was living on Blakely Avenue in South Los Angeles with his wife Thelma Lee Crisp (1933-2008).

The Jubalaires appeared in MGM’s second-rate musical feature, Duchess of Idaho (1950). The songs and plot are pretty forgettable.

That said, Van Johnson’s incredibly awkward dancing cannot be unseen. But the “Let’s Choo Choo Choo to Idaho,” number is worth watching (on YouTube, of course).

It is said that art often imitates life. The four Jubalaires—Willie T. Johnson, Ted Brooks, John Jennings, and George “Biggie” McFadden are cast as singing waiters working in a railroad dining car filled with white actors holding instruments, pretending to be musicians. Jennings and McFadden are glimpsed peripherally in the background as Connie Haines sings. Jennings silently serves a cocktail to a white passenger as Willie Johnson enters, cap in hand, and sings a few rhyming couples  in his trademark syncopated speech:

Pardon me folks, but if you ain’t observed

I’d like to announce that our dinner’s served

Glancing at the menu I’m prone to say

That the chef is a’cookin’ up a mess today

Now, the full course dinner in a work of art

And I most highly recommend the ala carte!

Bassman George “Biggie” Mc Fadden and tenor John “Shorty” Jennings join in. The song has the necessary locomotion and vernacular best suited to the Jubalaires. Ted Brooks’ entrance is the most memorable, as he confidently saunters over for a little song and dance. It’s quite delightful to see them in 35 mm and in Technicolor. They sing gloriously for 70 short seconds, so don’t blink.

It had only been three years since KTLA channel 5 signed onto the airwaves in 1947 as the first commercial television station in Los Angeles and the eighth in country. The dawn of television as an entertainment medium west of the Mississippi occurred in Southern California. Soon there were several local TV stations. By February of 1951, the Jubalaires had their own television program Saturday nights at 9:00 PM on L.A.’s KLAC, channel 13.

The December 15, 1951, issue of Billboard magazine praised the Jubalaires’s performance on their Capitol Records single, “David and Goliath”/”I’ve Done My Work,” which sounds a lot like some of Sam Cooke’s gospel recordings for Specialty Records.

But ironically, after successfully uprooting their lives and making the transition to life in Southern California, they had fewer performing opportunities. Television was eclipsing radio as the popular entertainment medium. Their former employers, The Arthur Godfrey Show and Amos ‘n’ Andy both made successful transitions (without the Jubalaires) from radio to television and remained popular. It may be that without Caleb Ginyard’s guiding hand and Paul Kapp’s oversight and vision, the Jubalaires weren’t getting the support and direction they needed.

Additionally, gospel singing groups like the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and that once specialized in jubilee, had developed a more energetic style known as “hard gospel,” and would later evolve into soul music. Jubilee was now considered old fashioned.

The Mills Brothers experienced a sensational career revival with their 1948 hit record “Paper Doll,” which held the number one position on the U.S. Billboard singles chart for twelve remarkable weeks.

In 1954, Crown Records released a 45-rpm record of the “Original Jubalaires” singing, “Dreaming of the Ladies in the Moon,” a composition surprisingly similar to “Paper Doll.” The record got special mention from Billboard magazine, which gave the record a mark of 78/100 in the April 17, 1954, issue, commenting that: “The boys here come thru with a strong reading on a bright ballad with an evocative flavor.” The reviewer compared their treatment of the song with the style of the Mills Brothers and predicted it could become a break-out hit. But it was not to be.

After a decade and a half of regular radio broadcasts, by 1955, as television became the dominant entertainment medium, they had less work. This seems strange when one considers that the biggest hits of 1955 included “The Great Pretender,” “Speedo,” and “Only You.”

The Jubalaires—Willie Johnson, Shorty Jennings, Ted Brooks, and Biggie McFadden ­—appear in the background for less than 60-seconds as the Navy Kitchen Vocal Quartet, dressed in white chef’s jackets and black trousers, singing background for white actors Tony Martin, Vic Damone, and Russ Tamblyn in the Hallelujah! number set in the ship’s galley, in the MGM musical Hit the Deck (1955). The scene is choreographed by Fred Astaire’s longtime collaborator, choreographer Hermes Pan, who, apparently phoned this one in. The Jubalaires are on for such a short time and they’re so far from the camera, we never get a good look at them filmed in CinemaScope.

With so little work, Willie Johnson accepted a part time job as a clerk in the local post office. Although he was raised Protestant, he wanted the best education for his children. His wife was Catholic and so their children attended Transfiguration Catholic School in Los Angeles. In 1955, Willie began working as a custodian for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

By 1959, Frankie Avalon, Elvis Presley, and Connie Francis dominated the pop charts. Willie T. Johnson, George McFadden, and Ted Brooks abandoned the Jubalaires and formed a new quartet called the Jubilee Four with Jimmy Adams replacing tenor John Jennings.

In 1960, Frank Sinatra quit Capitol Records to start his own label called Reprise Records—a name that captured his hope that the recordings would be “played again and again.” After recording background vocal tracks for an artist on Reprise’s roster, the A&R man brought the quartet in to record their own album Lookin’ Up—the Jubilee Four (1961). It featured a swinging and joyful version of Swing Down Chariot, a Willie T. Johnson arrangement from the repertoire of the Golden Gate Quartet effectively accompanied by a snare drum.

Best remembered for providing the voice of Baloo in Walt Disney’s animated feature film, The Jungle Book (1967), Wonga “Phil” Harris (1904-1995) had a successful career as an actor, bandleader, and vocalist. Like Bing Crosby, his on-stage persona was that of a congenitally hip white man, but he was in fact Indigenous, of Cherokee extraction.

Harris was a big fan of The Gates and his singing style was influenced by Wille T. Johnson’s syncopated delivery. In 1960 Harris incorporated the Jubilee Four in his nightclub act at the Las Vegas Stardust Hotel. The quartet had so little work in L.A., they jumped at the chance. But the gig involved a lot of driving. The act was so successful, the Jubilee Four continued to work with Phil Harris, mostly at Harrah’s in Vegas and Lake Tahoe, until the summer of 1967.

Willie Johnson’s daughter Chandra J. Johnson remembered her mother and older sister dressing to the nines on Fridays, getting ready to make the long drive to Las Vegas to hear her father sing with Phil Harris and the Jubilee Four. But Willie aways made the long midnight drive back to Los Angeles after the Sunday show because he had to be at work on Monday morning.

On May 21, 1961, Phil Harris and the Jubilee Four performed on the Ed Sullivan show in New York City. Broadcast on CBS at 8:00 pm on Sunday nights, it was one of the most popular programs on television. There’s a wonderful black and white video on YouTube of their performance of a double-time version “Old Time Religion.” Bass singer George “Biggie” McFadden wears his eyeglasses, and Ted Brooks sings marvelously—apparently, Harris didn’t require him to wear a toupee. As strange as it may sound, judging by this clip, Phil Harris and the Jubalaires had a great act. And we get a chance to see the physicality of Ted Brooks’ performance—he was indeed a dynamic and theatrical singer.

In 1964, when Harris hosted ABC TV’s Hollywood Palace, the Jubilee Four appeared with him.

Pop singer Andy Williams began production of his weekly variety show for NBC television in 1962. In a press release, the production company announced it would begin taping four episodes for the upcoming season on August 6, with guest stars including Judy Garland, David McCallum, Cliff Arquette (AKA Charlie Weaver), Vic Damone, Louis Jourdan, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Phil Harris, Bobby Darren, Robert Goulet, Woody Allen, and the Jubilee Four.

A 1965 color episode of the Andy Williams Show is now on YouTube in which Phil Harris and the Jubilee Four guest star singing their double-time version of “Old Time Religion.” Relaxed and charming, Phil Harris invites his host, Andy Williams, to sing along. Williams, hopelessly square and seeming incapable of swinging, sings a harmony. Then the Jubilee Four, dressed in matching blue blazers and ties, join in the fun. Ted Brooks, wearing his prime-time TV toupee, repeatedly places his hand on Williams’ shoulder and sings close to him, swinging mightily to wake the dead. As Brooks’ invades Williams’ personal space, Williams is clearly intimidated though he good-naturedly plays along. Brooks, even at the age of fifty, was still a powerful singer and very energetic performer. It is tragic that this is one of only a handful of shorts clips in which we can watch him do his thing.

The Jimmy Dean Show, an hour-long weekly music and variety television show, premiered on September 19, 1963, out of ABC Studio One in New York. The Jubilee Four appeared on the first episode singing Swing Down Chariot, and became regular music guests on the weekly program for the next twelve months. Again, it seems ironic that a vocal group based on the Pacific Coast had to travel across the continent to find work. Many complete episodes of the program are now on YouTube and each contains an appearance (or two) of the Jubilee Four, who recorded their second long playing album Favorites from the Jimmy Dean Show (1963) for Epic/CBS Records.

One of their 1963 appearances on The Jimmy Dean Show, featured the quartet singing a version of a traditional American folksongs called “The Foggy, Foggy Dew,” which Pete Seeger had recently recorded.

On Thanksgiving night, November 28, 1963, the quartet appeared on the Jimmy Dean Show, clad in plaid shirts, singing an unmemorable and unswinging holiday number entitled, “Home, Home, Home” with Willie Johnson croons the lead. Jim Henson and the Muppets guest star. The entire episode is on YouTube.

Dressed in black string ties and Colonel Sanders jackets, the quartet sings the African American holiday spiritual, “The Last Month of the Year,” on the December 19, 1963, broadcast of The Jimmy Dean Show. Ted Brooks sings lead on a few choruses. Bass singer George “Biggie” McFadden sings dramatically in the last thirty seconds of the arrangement. (The song was first recorded by Betty May Bowman and a group of African American women inmates at the State Penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi, for a WPA song collection project in June of 1939.)

A week later, on the December 26, 1963, Jimmy Dean Show, the Jubilee Four (dressed in the same Colonel Sanders outfits) sang a swinging version of the African American spiritual, “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel.” On this program, Jimmy Dean joined them in singing Willie T. Johnson’s syncopated 1930s arrangement for the Golden Gate Quartet of the traditional American folksong, “I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago.” Seated informally on upright wooden barrels, Willie Johnson and Jimmy Dean breezily trade verses.

As strange as it may sound, Elvis Presley was a big fan of the Golden Gate Quartet. While of furlough with the U.S. Army, Presley attended one of The Gates concerts in Paris in 1959 and went backstage to visit the quartet after the show. After Presley completed his tour of duty, he recorded his own version of The Gates 1940 recording, Swing Down Chariot.

There can be no doubt that Presley was instrumental in getting the Jubilee Four cast in Viva Las Vegas (1964), which starred Presley and Ann Margaret. The highpoint of the picture is bassman George “Biggie” McFadden singing Cheek to Cheek (The Climb)—not the one Irving Berlin wrote for Fred Astaire. McFadden’s vocal with the Jordanaires was recorded on July 10, 1963, at Radio Recorders, in Hollywood and the song was written by legendary R&B songwriters, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. But unfortunately, it’s just run of the mill rock and roll, and it doesn’t really work. Presley and Margaret and a dozen other white couples attempt awkward early 60s rock choreography while the Jubilee Four appear dressed in matching green dinner jackets that make them look, once again, like singing waiters.

The Jubilee Four’s association with Phil Harris continued until 1967, by which time the Doors, the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, and Wilson Picket were on the top of the American Billboard charts. But there wasn’t much work for Willie, Biggie, Ted, or Jimmy.

In 1967, Willie T. Johnson and his wife bought a two-story house on West 48^th Street in Los Angeles. But he caught her with another man, and they separated shortly thereafter. In 1970, Willie was promoted to Plant Manager of the newly constructed Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in the Ascot Hills of East L.A. He retired in 1978 at the age of 65. His children were grown, and he lived alone. Willie figured his musical career was over.

But unbeknownst to him, Ry Cooder, a big fan of The Gates, had a project in mind that was right up his alley:

Well, I was looking around to get involved with some gospel singers, trying to achieve something of the background singing that I heard on gospel records, particularly the Golden Gate Quartet, my favorite group. Not knowing that Bill [Willie T.] Johnson lived in L.A., had no idea. And I was introduced to one guy, and then to another guy, and finally led to Bill, himself. Which was really amazing to me. Never expected anything like that to happen. And right away, it was very gratifying to find that he knew so much about all kinds of black music, and all kinds of vocal music. So, we got together on an album that I did a couple years ago [Bop Til You Drop]…and again on this record [JAZZ]. It seemed to be a very good opportunity to actually sing some of this material. To me, it’s some of the greatest music I’ve ever heard — the Golden Gate stuff—and that whole Piedmont end area style of quartet singing. It’s very strong and it’s fun to do. For me, it’s so much fun to sit and play it and listen to it. And I guess that’s the main reason I do these things so I can hear what it sounds like.

For Cooder’s JAZZ album Willie Johnson summoned Jimmy Adams, the tenor from the Jubilee Four, Simon Alfred “Pico” Payne (1925-2002), who had sung with the Ink Spots, the Platters, and the Drifters, and Cliff Givens (1918-1989), who had sung with the Ink Spots, The Gates, and the Dominoes. Cooder invited the four singers to join him in Chicago for his 1978 appearance of the PBS TV show Soundstage. There’s an abridged version of the program on YouTube in which Cooder and Johnson converse for several minutes, and together they perform Bert Williams 1905 composition Nobody. It’s well worth watching. They also performed Ervin Drake’s, “There Are No Restricted Signs in Heaven,” though sadly, it has been edited out of the YouTube video.

In this video, Johnson appears conspicuously thin; he’d just begun cancer treatment. His daughter and biographer Chandra J. Johnson wrote, “when my Cooder rediscovered my father, he gave him something to live for. He reaffirmed the depth and breadth of Bill [Willie] Johnson’s impact on American music, something that may have been lost in the toil and struggle of an old man’s life.”

In 1979, Cooder brought Willie T. Johnson, Adams, Givens, and Payne, to New York City’s Carnegie Hall for a performance of songs from his JAZZ album. It had been four decades since Willie Johnson and The Gates appeared there as part of the From Spirituals to Swing concert.

Willie T. Johnson died a few months later.

For reasons that have never been explained, when Johnson left the military in 1946 and returned to the Golden Gate Quartet, he never secured the legal rights to his dozens of original lyrics, songs, or vocal arrangements used by The Gates. This seems more peculiar when one considers that he had studied law. Apparently, in 1947, around the time Willie quit the group, the quartet’s bass singer Orlandus Wilson hired an attorney and acquired copyrights to many of Johnson’s original arrangements and compositions, as well as their recordings and even the name of the group. This is why some of The Gates earliest works are today attributed to Wilson.

Johnson probably never took legal action against Wilson because he couldn’t afford an attorney. His daughter and biographer, Chandra J. Johnson remembered that, when the movies in which her father appeared were playing at a local theater, he was too frugal to take the family to see them.

In the early 1980s, after Johnson’s death, historian Doug Seroff gathered the surviving original Jubalaires for one last reunion in Birmingham, Alabama where, on March 19, 1983, Ted Brooks and Willie Wright, the first tenor singer with the Royal Harmony Four, were interviewed by Doris J. Dyen at the Triumphant Gospel Singers Association Quartet Reunion in Jacksonville.

Ted Brooks spent the last years of his life in San Bernardino, east of Los Angeles. He died on September 8, 1997, and was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery Inglewood, California.

A dozen years after his death, the video of the Jubalaires 1946 soundie “Noah” appeared on YouTube—and Ted Brooks became  an internet star. Although he died in obscurity, he has been discovered by a 21^st century audience larger than the one he enjoyed in life.