washerman's dog: Swan Silvertones

Showing posts with label Swan Silvertones. Show all posts

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Once Upon a Time I Lost a Record: The Swan Silvertones

The Swan Silvertones
(Claude Jeter second fm left back row)

A couple recent posts have led directly to tonight’s. I was contacted by someone from Minnesota who put a comment into the Bob Marley post. We struck up a short conversation about our favourite record stores in the Twin Cities which produced some very sweet and dear memories from a time in my life that seems too far gone.

The post on Record Store Day also got me digging through my vinyl collection. It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon a real treasure that I found recently at my favourite second hand record shop down the road. The Swan Silvertones’ Get Right with the Swan Silvertones (1986) was my introduction to this freakishly good gospel group and the falsetto of Claude Jeter. I first picked it up at a record shop in east Minneapolis called The Electric Fetus in the late 1980s. It endeared itself to my ears and heart with great rapidity. I left it behind in Minneapolis when my life took me overseas but not before putting the Swans on to a C-90 cassette which I carried with me for the better part of 2 decades.

But about 10 years ago in an ill-fated fit of cleanliness I tossed all multiple hundreds of my cassettes out, not realising that there would come a day when you could turn those babies into MP3 files and enjoy the sounds forever. I have searched for this album for years but have not been able to locate it until the other day. It was a steal at $12 and let me tell you I am so happy all over again.

So to my new friend from St Paul and to the Electric Fetus, which is still in business all these years on, if the above photo is to be believed, I post this utterly essential gospel album for your edification.

From the liner notes comes the following:

Get Right contains some of the best of the many recordings that the Swan Silvertones made for Vee Jay records from 1956-1964 when they were at the pinnacle of their fame and singing ability. While they had recorded previously for both King and Speciality Records, it was the period of their Vee Jay recordings that brought the Swan Silvertones their greatest popularity.

Lead singer, Claude Jeter, has rightly been called “the master falsetto of the ages” and has been cited by numerous singers, like Al Green and Don Covay as a major influence. Jeter has only lacked the degree of fame of other great gospel leads of the 50s like Sam Cooke, Johnny Taylor and Lou Rawls because, at the time they were going into pop music, he was entering the ministry. This album presents the Swans in a variety of styles from the almost entirely a cappella version of The Lord’s Prayer, to the live, churchy feel of Near the Cross, to the raucous rock n roll sound of What’s the Matter Now?

Track Listing

01 Mary Don't You Weep

02 Get Right With God

03 Feed Me Jesus

04 Amazing Grace

05 Take the Lord With You

06 Near the Cross

07 The Lord's Prayer

08 What's the Matter Now

09 Saviour Pass Me Not

10 Is God Satisfied with Me

11 Peace in the Valley

12 Seek, Seek

13 Jesus Remembers

14 Bye and Bye

Here (320)

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Holy Ghost Pt 4: Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertones

Response to the Easter post on the Abyssinian Baptist Church Gospel Choir has been amazing. Obviously, a lot of lovers of gospel music out there toiling on the information highway! To encourage you along that journey, the Washerman’s Dog posts, on this wintry Sunday evening down at the bottom of the world, another stone classic of African-American gospel music.

The story tonight begins in Montgomery, Alabama where a skinny 8-year old boy named Claude Jeter, is informed by his mother that the family will be moving to Kentucky. A few months earlier, Claude’s daddy had died and the coal mines of the Bluegrass State seemed to hold some economic promise for the poor family. Claude attended school and by the time he was in high school was pulling a few shifts down in the shafts. But pulled by contrary desires to support his family and still be his own man, Claude, moved to find work in the deep, rich coal mines in West Virginia.

The work is dusty, dirty, tedious and difficult. To find relief, Claude, who is blessed with a special falsetto voice, and who has promised his mother that he will never use his gift for anything other than “praising the Lord”, gets an a cappella gospel quartet together called the Four Harmony Kings. It is 1938 and Claude Jeter is 24 years old. There aren’t that many options available to a poor black coalmining man in the United States at the time. The Four Harmony Kings keep singing around the mining towns of West Virginia and eastern Tennessee, making no money but blessing those who come to hear them at small churches and tent gatherings. The boys change the name of their group to the Silvertones and when, in 1941, the Swan Brothers Bakery in Knoxville, Tennessee sponsors them for a radio show, they become the Swan Silvertones.

Swan Silvertones

Little did the bakery realize that it had just been the catalyst for the launch of one of the most influential vocal groups in American music. As the saying goes: from little things big things grow.

The Swan Silvertones were a blend of strong, rough-edged gospel voices that included, in addition to Claude Jeter’s amazing falsetto/tenor lead, Solomon Womack (uncle of yet to come 1970’s R&B superstar Bobby Womack), crooner Paul Owens and ‘shouter/testifier’ Louis Johnson. For the first part of the group’s existence they sang in the traditional (for the time) a cappella quartet style, each singer contributing his vocal in an intricate rhythmic structure. And though they enjoyed a national reputation and made a number of recordings, in the 1940-50s, they made just enough to meet their expenses. And as with so many similar groups members came and left. Not everyone had the commitment of Claude Jeter, who continued to lead the group as the lineup changed.

In the 1960s the group was signed by Vee Jay Records who were keen to capitalise on the emerging R&B sound. For the first time the Swan Silvertones added guitars, drums and bass. Their sound became more contemporary and rocking; the guitar work of Linwood Hargrove was exciting and added a dimension that created a whole new audience for the Swans. Part of that new audience (black and white) included professional musicians who heard in Claude Jeter’s voice the tinkling of cash registers. Many approached him with many offers of secular fame and fortune but Claude remained true to his promise to mother to never sing but for the Lord. Others, like Sam Cooke, and Al Green, lifted much of Claude’s style and made reputations as male singers of the highest order. In what is probably their most famous song Mary, Don’t You Weep, Claude inspired by the Spirit, let’s rip: “I’ll be a bridge over deep water, if you trust in me, Mary”. Many years later a young Paul Simon incorporated the line into a song that would go on to become, Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Eventually, even the rockin’ style of gospel that the Swan Silvertones pioneered fell out of vogue and in the mid 1970s the group gave it up. Claude Jeter, still poor and with not many more options than back in the 1938, turned to full time Christian ministry. He moved to New York and in 2009 died of natural causes. Though not widely appreciated except by enthusiasts of gospel music, Claude Jeter left behind in the recordings of the Swan Silvertones a truly exceptional heritage.

This collection covers many of the latter period Swan Silvertones avec instruments. The account is opened and the listener is left in no doubt about the group’s mission statement with, If You Believe Your God is Dead, Try Mine. The guitar fretwork that drives the Swans on this track is as deadly as anything Nile Rodgers ever concocted for Chic. Other highlights include a moving Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, a powerful retelling of the Prodigal Son in I Got My Act Together, the iconic Mary, Don’t You Weep, and a stunning, smoking organ laced, live recording of Brother Claude shouting Amazing Grace.

Again, this is not music for Christians but music by Christians for the rest of us. Please partake and enjoy it again and again.