Down the Dixie highway, back home

Although I'd never heard a note of their music, there was no way I was going to miss the Dixie Hummingbirds' performance at the Great American Music Hall last night. With memories of another Sunday night four years ago when Solomon Burke sang in the same room for perhaps sixty people on the night the Giants lost the World Series, I headed down there expecting wondrous things and a too-small crowd. Gospel music on a Sunday night. Yes.

Take a look at that bio: The band's been together for seventy-eight years. Seventy-eight! No one onstage had actually been doing it for quite that long, but apparently frontman Ira Tucker joined in 1938 as a thirteen-year-old. (We're getting into Hackberry Ramblers territory here.) Although one of the singers, William Bright, could easily have been over 60, two of the four primary vocalists are quite young. Tucker introduced bass singer Cornell McKnight and said he was a 21-year-old college student.

The Hummingbirds' Wikipedia entry says that Tucker was known for energetic acts of showmanship, which now brings a faint smile to my lips. At eighty-one years old, can't really pull the James Brown moves anymore, but he did seem to be setting up the crowd with excruciatingly slow song introductions followed by bursts of energy, either in speech or in song.

The emphasis was on singing, where it should be. The four men sang over relatively spare accompaniment, a guitar-bass-drums trio in which all three players contributed backing vocals. The guitarist, with the unlikely name of Lyndon Baines Jones, seemed to play without effects, although his C&W-influenced solos were razor-sharp. The others essentially stayed in the pocket all night so as not to distract from the close harmonies up front.

And those harmonies are so close that at times they barely seem to come from human beings. (McKnight's voice from the bottom of the ocean sure helped in that regard.) It's easy to drift away on a cloud when people sound this good together. Rarely did anyone fly up into falsetto; the Hummingbirds' harmonies are more of the cool blue flame variety, although they are not without their intensities. Tucker did drop to his knees to testify once, surrounded by (and helped up by) his fellow singers.

This was one of the most satisfying nights of music I can recall. For this rare show, attendance was likely under 100 people, although I think the GAMH's capacity is more like 600. I believe I was the only SonicLiving user to even sign up for it. (Most popular SonicLiving artists: Radiohead, Beck, Shins, Death Cab.) I suppose gospel music doesn't really bring in the thrift-store crowd, of which I admit I am a proud member, but I was still surprised at the weak turnout.

Which got me to thinking. I was there primarily for aesthetic reasons and historical context. I'm interested in the gospel style as one of many styles you might find on my turntable, interested in this harmony singing style as a forerunner of soul music, and in the Hummingbirds as historical figures who are still a thriving, working band. But content? Honestly, I'm likely to roll my eyes at feverish Christian talk when I hear it on the radio. Bible-thumping is something I'd prefer to keep out of my life. And yet, my cynical atheist/agnostic self was so profoundly touched by this performance that I felt like an asshole for drinking a Miller High Life in their presence. I was treating this spectacular exhibition as historically interesting entertainment, and the performers themselves were treating it as spreading the Word.

I was reminded of a guy I saw at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival a couple of years ago. Drunk to hell, waving around a bottle of Jack Daniel's, he was out on the lawn when Gillian Welch said, "Now we're going to do a gospel tune," and he let out the loudest, longest whoop I heard at the fest. Had he got the Holy Ghost in him, or was he just momentarily convinced that gospel music is frickin' cool?

OK. I'm not going to beat myself up over this or anything, and it's not like I felt like I didn't belong. The Dixie Hummingbirds are just very convincing performers, that's all, and I'm allowed to show up to see an example of a musical form even if it's not in step with my overall world view, right? If I held every artist to deep philosophical standards, I'd have to kick 90% of my music collection to the curb. Or all of it, maybe.

Anyway they finished up with "Loves Me Like A Rock," the Paul Simon song on which the band sang in the early 1970s, and quickly came out to shake some hands when the house lights came up. All revealed themselves as personable, even-keeled people. And thanks, GAMH, for wrapping things up by 10:30 on a school night.

Emmit Powell's Gospel Elites were a perfect warmup act. Nine microphones and nine Calistoga waters across the front of the stage, with a four-piece backing band behind them. Each of the singers took a solo turn, with Powell serving as ringmaster. I especially liked the one woman who testified that Jesus cured her of renal disease. Oh, and Boss says Powell makes great soul food too.