Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
The Swan Silvertones
My Rock/Love Lifted Me
(Ace/Specialty, reissued 1991)
Take time to celebrate the voice and work of Claude Jeter, the Swans’ revered and influential lead singer, who died on January 6 aged 94.
Whereas Sam Cooke, Johnnie Taylor, Lou Rawls and many others quit gospel quartets for wider fame and wealth in secular soul and pop careers, Claude Jeter repelled all blandishments and stayed steadfast and true to his first calling. Blessed with a gorgeous tenor that swept into falsetto to great effect, Jeter formed the Four Harmony Kings in 1938. By turns they were renamed the Silvertone Singers (to avoid confusion with another act) and finally The Swan Silvertones. Their best recordings, made in the ’50s and ’60s for Specialty and Vee-Jay, included many Jeter-penned gospel classics – How I Got Over, The Day Will Surely Come, He Won’t Deny Me – often featuring his interplay with the tougher tenor of Solomon Womack or raspy hollering of Rev Robert Crenshaw. And why should we audiences outside the gospel field give a hoot? Well, aside from the fact that they often sing like a crazed rock’n’roll quartet, there is a keynote couplet from Jeter’s composition Mary Don’t You Weep – “I’ll be a bridge over deep water if you trust in my name” – used by Paul Simon as the root of his most famous song, and you can hear the phrasing of Jeter’s tenor and falsetto leads echoed in the singing of Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Smokey Robinson and Eddie Kendricks, to name but the four most obvious soul giants. Hear his arrangement of I’m Coming Home or final verses on I Cried for imperishable proof. Claude Jeter never stepped outside the world of his church, but his voice still resounds in soul and pop across the years.
Geoff Brown
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 21/01/2009
Further Listening
The Soul Stirrers – Jesus Gave Me Water (Ace/Specialty, 1993)
The Sensational Nightingales – The Best Of… (MCA, 1995)
The Dixie Hummingbirds – The Best Of… (MCA, 1995)
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