Five Blind Boys of Mississippi
In 1929, Martha Louise Morrow Foxx arrived at Mississippi's Piney Woods School for the Blind to teach; within a few years she had assembled four blind students — Archie Brownlee, Joseph Ford, Lawrence Abrams, and Lloyd Woodard — into a fundraising quartet, the Cotton Blossom Singers, recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax in 1937. By the mid-1940s, renamed the Jackson Harmoneers and relocated to Chicago, they heard Soul Stirrers lead R.H. Harris and abandoned polite jubilee harmony for his harder, screamed-and-shouted style. Brownlee took it further than anyone: the historian Anthony Heilbut called him gospel's "king of the road with his bloodcurdling shrieks." Renamed the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, they scored a Top Ten hit with 1950's "Our Father" on Peacock Records before Brownlee's death in 1960 at 35. His scream became a blueprint Ray Charles and soul singers after him never stopped borrowing.
When the Jackson Harmoneers relocated to Chicago in the mid-1940s, they were, by one chronicler's account, "just another gospel harmony group, singing in the 'jubilee' style" — until they encountered R.H. Harris, lead singer of the Soul Stirrers. That same account puts the gospel-circuit legend bluntly: Harris "could out-sing anybody," with even Sam Cooke reportedly "afraid to have a sing-off with him." Brownlee listened and pivoted, trading the Harmoneers' restrained ensemble blend for Harris's harder, ad-libbed hard-gospel lead — so completely that the group's early repertoire, historians note, drew almost entirely from the Soul Stirrers' own songbook.
listen forHarris's 1950 lead on "By and By" stretches phrases behind the beat and lets his voice break upward for emphasis — the ad-libbed, hard-gospel style he pioneered. Brownlee's lead the same year on "Our Father" takes that same freedom past melody entirely, into a shouted, rasping cry that abandons the tune's outline. The two 1950 sides sit at opposite ends of one lineage: control giving way to release.
Before Brownlee had a public voice, Martha Louise Morrow Foxx had a classroom. She arrived at the Piney Woods School for the Blind in 1929 to teach and house its blind students, and when founder Laurence C. Jones asked her to organize quartets, she trained Brownlee, Joseph Ford, Lawrence Abrams, and Lloyd Woodard into the four-part harmony group that became the Cotton Blossom Singers. Jones later credited her ethic as much as her music: "She developed self-reliance in all of her students," he said, "so that they could eagerly look forward to the time when they could support themselves out in the world."
listen forThere's no Foxx recording to hold against this one — she trained singers, she didn't make them. Listen instead for what she installed before Harris's harder style (see Soul Stirrers) arrived: on "Precious Memories," the group's blended four-part harmony holds a steady, churchy foundation under the lead, the ensemble discipline of a teacher who drilled four blind boys into a working quartet years before any of them sang for pay.