The Jones Family Singers – The Spirit Speaks

The Jones Family Singers

The Spirit Speaks
Arts + Labor (2013)

By Bob Marovich for The Black Gospel Blog

Gospel music is blessed with family groups whose lifetime of singing together in the living room, in churches, auditoriums, and festivals are evident in their tight harmonies and seamless musicianship.

But for every Winans, Clark, and Hawkins Family, there are thousands of other families not in the national spotlight who toil just as hard, if not harder, in music ministry.

One such group is the Jones Family Singers of Bay City, Texas.

The ten-member group has its origins in the Sensational Zionaires, named for Mount Zion Church of God in Christ in Markham, Texas, where the group’s patriarch, Bishop Fred Jones Sr., is pastor.  Before his call to ministry, Baptist-born Fred Jones played guitar for the Gospel Messengers of Houston.

In the well-written and uplifting liner notes to The Spirit Speaks, the Jones Family’s first recording in many years, Michael Corcoran (This Is My Story) places the family’s music in historical context.  Corcoran also describes how he introduced filmmaker Alan Berg to the Joneses.  Berg saw the potential of a documentary, but needed fresh music from the group.  Cue producers and indie rockers John Croslin and Eric Friend, and The Spirit Speaks was born.

The album is a newly recorded collection of some of the group’s most popular songs over the past twenty to thirty years.  The ten tracks—especially “Going Home” and “Leaning on You”—reprise gospel music’s gritty soulfulness of the 1970s and 1980s and traditional gospel’s reliance on Biblically-based lyrics.  Songs such as “Down On Me” and “You Woke Me Up This Morning” are hand-clapping, aisle-walking rousers, while the superb female lead on the slower “I Am” is an absolute pew melter.

Well produced and executed, The Spirit Speaksis Sunday morning music forged in the kiln of Holy Ghost fire.  Traditional gospel with a capital T, it will please fans of sacred old-school as well as the myriad crate diggers who groove on the beefy guitar-drum-bass backdrop that adorns Carter- and Reagan-era gospel.