Music: Goldert Gate in Washington

Christ is seldom mentioned reverently in a nightclub, and His story has never been made into a floor show—until last year in Manhattan. Since then the gospel story, sung in a spiritual called John the Revelator, has regularly evoked pin-drop silence in both downtown and uptown branches of Barney Josephson’s Café Society. John the Revelator is one of the hit songs of a Negro group named the Golden Gate Quartet, whose hushed voices, to the rhythm of reverential thigh-slaps and foot-taps, make spirituals sound—in the jazzmen’s phrase—out of this world. Recently a Café Societarian, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., took his mother to hear the Golden Gate boys.

Last week Mrs. Roosevelt deftly slipped the quartet into the program* of the Inaugural Gala, an omnium-gatherum of music and anti-Fascist vaudeville last Sunday night in Washington’s Constitution Hall. That hall, owned by the D. A. R., two years ago was forbidden to Negro Contralto Marian Anderson. Last week the D. A. R. moodily approved the Golden Gate Quartet.

Tenors Willie Langford and Henry Owen, Baritone Willie Johnson and Basso Orlandus Wilson began singing together in Norfolk, Va.’s Booker T. Washington High School, got on local radio programs even before they graduated in 1935. They had already been on records (Bluebird) and the radio before they were discovered, barnstorming the South, by crew-cropped Jazz Pundit John Hammond. He presented them to Manhattan more than a year ago, and Café Society shortly signed them. Tenor Clyde Riddick took Willie Langford’s place in the quartet.

By no means so wild, vocally and harmonically, as Mitchell’s Christian Singers (an earlier Hammond find), the Golden Gate foursome have one trick all their own. In story-songs—which their best ones are—the narrator is Willie Johnson, who always wanted to be a preacher. When the time comes for Baritone Johnson to narrate, the quartet rhythmically deploys, slapping and tapping the while, closes ranks after he steps up to the microphone. Besides their manual and pedal percussion effects, the Golden Gate Quartet beat out the rhythm by precisely controlling the intake and outgo of their breaths. Their most popular songs are Samson, Noah, Job, Jonah, Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jericho, and a secular number—The Preacher and the Bear—with an old snapper: Now Lord—if you can’t help me, for goodness sake, don’t you help that bear.†

* On the program: Contralto Risë Stevens, Baritone Nelson Eddy, the National Symphony under Dr. Hans Kindler, Irving (God Bless America) Berlin, Actors Mickey Rooney, Raymond Massey, Charlie Chaplin, Actress Ethel Barrymore. Master of Ceremonies: Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

† By permision of the copyright owner, Jerry Vogel Music Co., New York city.