walking upstream…
Before they were the "5" Royales, they were the Royal Sons Quintet, two Winston-Salem, North Carolina families — the Tanners and the Paulings — singing church programs their fathers had built out of the city's 1930s gospel-radio scene. Apollo Records signed them for gospel in 1951, then pushed them toward R&B a year later; "Baby Don't Do It" hit No. 1 within weeks of the name change. Guitarist Lowman "Pete" Pauling, raised on jazz drifting into a West Virginia coal camp, answered singer Johnny Tanner's shout the way a deacon answers a preacher, and never fully left the church behind. "It is a miscarriage of justice that they are not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame," critic Peter Guralnick said in 2011 — they were finally inducted in 2015. They wrote the blueprint James Brown, the Shirelles, and the Temptations all borrowed from.
Long before the group had a name Apollo Records would use, the Tanner brothers spent Sunday afternoons in Winston-Salem chasing the sound off a turntable. "We got our repertoire from the recordings of 'The Five Blind Boys,' 'The Soul Stirrers,' 'The Pilgrim Travelers,' all those groups," family member Fred Tanner recalled. "We'd go get the records and... learned the parts right off the recordings." A separate family account places the same records on the piano in the house on Spencer Avenue, next to Ma Rainey and Muddy Waters.
listen forOn "By and By," R.H. Harris's lead voice cuts loose from the group's close harmony and the other voices punch back in short, answering bursts, never smoothing the transition into something polite. Listen for that same interjecting shape on "Baby Don't Do It" three years later — it's Lowman Pauling's guitar stabbing in behind Johnny Tanner's raw lead exactly where a second vocal line would have gone, turning a gospel quartet's call-and-response into a guitar-and-voice conversation.
Named in the same breath as the Soul Stirrers when Fred Tanner traced the family's gospel education — records bought and studied until the parts could be sung back exactly. It's the same account both a 2003 oral-history essay and a 2015 Winston-Salem Journal profile independently confirm: the Pilgrim Travelers on the family turntable, alongside the Soul Stirrers, years before Apollo ever came calling.
listen forKylo Turner's lead on "Mother Bowed" rides a driving, walking rhythm that refuses to let the beat settle, pushing the whole group forward verse after verse rather than easing into a refrain. That same forward-leaning urgency, kept rough instead of smoothed into doo-wop's croon, is what makes "Help Me Somebody" land less like a ballad and more like a shout carried straight over from a Sunday-night service into a Billboard chart record.
The third group Fred Tanner named as a source of the family's repertoire, learned the same way as the others — off the record, part by part. The surviving quote doesn't specify which "Five Blind Boys" beyond the name itself; this is the touring, Piney Woods School-founded Mississippi group whose recordings fit the Tanner brothers' listening years, and the identification carries some open uncertainty (see this record's citations).
listen forArchie Brownlee's lead on "Our Father" is raw and near-screamed, a harder, more abrasive grain than the polished trade-off singing of the Soul Stirrers. That same shouted intensity, pushed right to the front of the mix instead of buried under harmony, is what drives "Think" seven years later — the vocal grain James Brown would borrow wholesale for his own hit cover of the song, a dispute that eventually pushed the group off King Records altogether.