“I Do, Don’t You” – Kergyma Community Choir

“I Do, Don’t You”
Kergyma Community Choir
From the Kergyma Music Group album Choir Life (Deluxe Version)
(release date: June 24, 2021)
www.kergyma.org

By Robert M. Marovich

I appreciate when a contemporary gospel group pulls out the hymnbook and updates an old standard for today’s audiences.

That’s what the Kergyma Community Choir does with “I Do, Don’t You.” They and lead singer Darnell Williams (of the Williams Singers) give the hymn such bounce that one could mistakenly think it was written last year.

But the hymn on which this version is based, Melville Miller and E. O. Excell’s “I Know a Great Savior, I Do, Don’t You,” is more than 100 years old. Hearing William Nix, Jr., brother of the Reverend A. W. Nix, sing it at the 1921 National Baptist Convention in Chicago inspired Thomas A. Dorsey to write his first gospel song, “If I Don’t Get There.”

The Connecticut-based community choir has been in existence since 2001.