Essential Gospel: Classic Recordings – Week 122

“If I Had a Hammer” – Five Blind Boys of Alabama

from House of Blues CD: I Brought Him With Me (1995)

Pete Seeger’s and Lee Hayes’s iconic “If I Had a Hammer” receives its best treatment ever at the hands of the Five Blind Boys of Alabama on one of the quartet’s live CDs, I Brought Him With Me. Recorded live at the House of Blues in San Francisco, January 14-16, 1995, the song is the highlight of a project with many outstanding tracks. If, however, you have had the good fortune to see the quartet do “Hammer” live (as I have, twice), you know it’s more of a showstopper than any CD can evince.

After Clarence Fountain does a little preaching, the song begins with the swift rhythm so often associated with quartet singing. The group does an opening verse, then Fountain gives the solo over to veteran Blind Boy Jimmy Carter who grabs a note and holds it for what seems an eternity, or at least until he can no longer breathe, garnering the kind of applause that typically follows a superb jazz solo.

Then, without warning, Carter is off the stage and into the audience, one of the quartet’s on-stage assistants following close behind to maneuver the microphone chord. While the instrumentalists play a melodic motive over and over, Carter navigates aisles like the gospel pro he is, singing as if he were alone in the rapture, but shaking hands extended to him and receiving pats on the back from audience members with aisle seats. Meanwhile, bodies are springing out of seats to catch a better view of the non-sighted, bald, elderly, diminutive Carter as he breaks into sanctified, call-and-response shouting.

If the audience wasn’t questioning its former notions of the limitations of the visually disabled by then, Carter — now thoroughly surrounded by enthusiastic audience members — challenges them again by jumping up and down, breaking into athletic holy dancing in the main aisle. By this point, everyone in the theater is standing, clapping and shouting. When the spirit is at its peak, Fountain encourages Carter to rejoin the quartet on the stage, and the group finishes the song together with harmonies just as tight and rich as at the beginning of the performance.

“If I Had a Hammer” live makes the emotional quality of most other styles of music pale in comparison.