The grain of sound

The Blind Boys of Alabama’s new release is called Echoes of the South. In the time since they recorded it last year, two of their six members — Ben Moore and Paul Beasley — have died and one, the great James Carter, has retired. This album has time in its bones.

The group was founded in 1939 by a bunch of teenagers as the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, and is the embodiment of that old saying about a garden spade: as the years pass, you can replace the worn-down blade, the snapped shaft and the broken handle, and somehow it’s still the same spade. The lineage from the original members — Clarence Fountain, George Scott, Vel Bozman Traylor, Johnny Fields, Olice Thomas and J. T. Hutton — to this latest incarnation, completed by Ricky McKinnie, Joey Williams and the Rev. Julius Love, is unbroken.

The producers, Matt Rose-Spang, Ben Tanner and Charles Driebe, stay out of the way and let the voices do the talking over a skilled and supportive but unobtrusive rhythm section at Nuthouse Studios in Muscle Shoals, in the group’s home state. That’s just what’s needed to provide the right ambiance for a set of songs with which the singers sound completely comfortable, from the rousing opening of “Send It on Down” to the sober closing invocation of Stevie Wonder’s “Heaven Help Us All”.

The Staple Singers’ “The Last Time” has a special resonance: “This may be the last time we sing/shout/pray together,” they sing, over the sparest of backings. “Friendship”, by Homer Banks and Lester Snell, hitherto recorded by Norah Jones, Roebuck Staples and Mavis Staples, again shows itself to be a modern gospel classic. Curtis Mayfield’s “Keep on Pushin'” is slowed down, and the composer himself would appreciate the way the economy of string bass, brushes and electric piano is deployed to highlight the dignified ardour of the voices.

And those voices: the sense of grain in every one of them, of surfaces worn by use, but never worn down, with a warmth now even more effective for the measured restraint imposed by age, suffusing an album to play anywhere, at any time, in any mood, for any reason or none.

* Echoes of the South by the Blind Boys of Alabama is released on Single Lock Records on 8 September.