Heavenly Voices

Heavenly Voices
The “jubilee” sound of the Golden Gate Quartet

Norfolk’s Golden Gate Quartet was arguably the greatest of the jubilee singing groups spawned in the first decades of the 20th century, despite vigorous competition from a region filled with definitive and wildly popular quartets with names like Silver Leaf and Norfolk Jubilee.

In a gospel recording career that started with Bluebird in 1937, the teenaged Golden Gate Quartet — original lineup: William Langford (first tenor) Henry Owens (second tenor), Orlandus Wilson (bass) and Willie Johnson (baritone) — helped popularize the “jubilee sound,” a looser and more beat-conscious form of religious singing that left echoes in high school hallways and barber shops across Hampton Roads, and the nation, for generations to come.

Although the buttery-voiced Langford would depart in 1940, and Johnson would follow in 1948, the Gates consistently fused stop-on-a-dime rhythm-beds and matchless tone to material that, today, can be heard as pure Civil Rights protest — as in “God Told Nicodemus” and the scathing “No Restricted Signs,” which boasts a bopping melody and a proper damning of segregation. They sang at FDR’s last inauguration at the President’s request, starred in several wartime Hollywood films (Hit Parade of 1943), flirted with secular material (like the wartime “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’”) and were a constant force on radio throughout the ‘40s. More importantly, their pumping, cascading vocal arrangements set the stage for a genre known as doo-wop music.

Ironically, a reconstituted version of the group would settle in France in the heady days of the rock ‘n’ roll and doo-wop they’d inadvertently inspired. A version of the Golden Gate Quartet still thrives in Europe, singing in the classic “jubilee” style for a more appreciative audience in a foreign land. In their original incarnation, these Booker T. Washington High School graduates left a rich catalog that could seriously be called the most consistent and awe-inspiring in all of black vocal music — one that holds up today not only as history but as inspired, and inspirational, listening.

— Don Harrison

Recommended on CD:
Immortal Songs (Galaxy Sound of Jazz {Import})
Radio Transcriptions 1941-1944 (Document {Austria})
The Complete Works in Chronological Order Vol. 1-6 (Document {Austria})

— Originally published in 64 Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2001.