Trying to Get Ready: Wings over Jordan (tbgb review)

Trying to Get Ready
Wings over Jordan
Gospel Friend 2008
www.gospelfriend.com

As a radio announcer who programs vintage gospel music, I can say from experience that I get more requests for the Swan Silvertones, Gospel Clefs and the Wings Over Jordan Choir than any other gospel groups.

Fortunately, the Swans’ King, Specialty and Vee Jay catalogues have been well anthologized. The lack of interest in reissuing the Clefs Savoy recordings is a pity and a shame (and an enigma), and what of Wings Over Jordan? The choir’s nationally syndicated radio program was compulsory listening when it debuted in the late 1930s. Many African Americans who grew up in the 1940s remember walking to church on warm Sundays and enjoying the choir’s weekly broadcast as it emanated from open windows along the way. Yet the choir’s significant recorded output has long been out of print, and not commercially available on CD.

Until now, that is. Gospel Friend of Sweden has answered the call with Trying to Get Ready. The 25-track, handsomely illustrated retrospective covers the choir’s early 1940s sessions through its 1953 session for King Records that produced the album Amen.

An especially fascinating inclusion on Trying to Get Ready is an Armed Forces Radio Services transcription of the choir from 1945. Most WOJC fans will not have heard this recording since it was broadcast more than sixty years ago. In fact, the CD’s opening track, “Walk Together Children,” comes from this transcription disc, sweeping listeners back in time, reminding us what an exciting, electric experience it was to listen to radio back in the days before television, the Internet, and various other means of communication and entertainment.

WOJC founder Rev. Glenn T. Settle’s intoned introductions to some of the spirituals have always sounded to me like the very Voice of God, and of course there’s the choir’s signature humming motif, at once mournful and hopeful. Once you’ve heard it, you never forget it.

Besides the long-forgotten Armed Forces Radio Services transcription, the special treat on Gospel Friend’s reissue is hearing in CD crispness the powerful soprano solos of Mildred Pollard on “I’m Going to Sit at the Welcome Table” and “He’s All and All to Me.” Pollard assisted the project by contributing rare photos and data to the superbly annotated and illustrated booklet written by gospel historian and Gospel Friend co-founder Per Notini. These tracks suggest that Pollard could have become a gospel singer outside of the WOJC, but as Notini’s text notes, she decided to leave the choir and touring to start a family, and that was that.

My only suggestion for the compilation would have been to include record label information with the session personnel information, which by the way is as complete as you are going to find.

Gospel Friend has filled other significant gospel reissue gaps in the past, releasing the only CD dedicated exclusively to the famed Echoes of Eden of the St. Paul Baptist Church of Los Angeles, as well as top-shelf treatments of Clara Ward and the Ward Singers, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s singing partner, Madame Marie Knight. Maybe they ought to tackle the Gospel Clefs.

NOTE: Any CDs on the Gospel Friend label should be obtained online through City Hall Records, USA: www.cityhallrecords.com.

Four of Four Stars