Essential Gospel – Classic Recordings: No. 137

“There’s a Leak in This Old Building”
Brother Claude Ely
King 1282
1953

Good thing for Elvis that Brother Claude Ely was already signed to Syd Nathan’s King Records, because if an unsigned Ely approached Sun’s Sam Phillips in 1953, Ely, not Elvis, may have become Sam’s Golden Boy, a “white man who can sing like a black man.” Not that Ely would have easily eschewed his evangelizing to enter a world of hip-swiveling and cheesy movies, but make no mistake: Brother Claude was singing like the Hillbilly Cat when Elvis was still crooning “My Happiness” for his mother.

Listen to Ely’s October 1953 incendiary debut single for King, “There’s a Leak in This Old Building,” and you’ll hear him wreck a Whitesburg, Kentucky church in two-and-a-half-minutes with his hyperactive guitar strumming and bad boy blues vocals, a 1950s George Thorogood with an acoustic guitar.

The late historian W.K. McNeil wrote that Ely, who died in 1978, “put on records some of the most powerful country gospel songs ever made.” Well said. Great God almighty, “Leak” is a powerful record!