November 28, 1929 June 3, 2018

With Fountain at the helm, the Blind Boys rose from humble beginnings to the pinnacles of musical achievement – winning multiple Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and an NEA National Heritage Fellowship, as well as being inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame and performing at the White House.

Born in Tyler, Alabama on November 28, 1929, Clarence Fountain grew up in a churchgoing and musical family in Selma. At age eight he was enrolled at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind in Talladega. There he joined a large boys choir. Inspired by weekly radio broadcasts of the Golden Gate Quartet, he and five friends decided to start their own singing group. Calling themselves the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, they snuck off the school campus to perform a cappella for soldiers at a nearby military training camp. Buoyed by the praise (and money) they received, the group left the school in 1944 while still in their teens.

Early on, the Blind Boys emulated the jubilee harmony style of gospel singing, but eventually became forerunners of the ‘hard’ gospel sound. This style featured a shouting and preaching lead singer (usually Fountain), accompanied by fuller instrumentation. The band became known as “house-wreckers,” a term that referred to their ability to rouse a church audience into states of spiritual ecstasy. Fountain said, “You have to feel the spirit deep in your gut, and you have to know how to make someone else feel it.”

By the late 1940s the Blind Boys were touring full-time, performing for segregated audiences in churches and schools. Under Fountain’s direction, the Blind Boys had their first hit recording in 1948 on the Vee-Jay label with the song “I Can See Everybody’s Mother But Mine.” At a concert in Newark, New Jersey that year the band, still known as the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, performed on the same bill as another group of blind singers, the Jackson Harmoneers. Clever promotion billed the event as a battle between the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. As Fountain told it, “The crowd loved us, the name stuck, and things took off for us.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms4LbE18P3U