The "5" Royales
A Winston-Salem, North Carolina gospel quintet — fronted by singer Johnny Tanner and driven by guitarist/songwriter Lowman Pauling — that was pushed by Apollo Records into the R&B market in the early 1950s. They never fully shed their church roots: Pauling's guitar answered the singers the way a shouting deacon answers a preacher, and songs like "Baby Don't Do It" and "Think" (later a hit for James Brown) made them one of the direct architects of soul music.
Group member Fred Tanner recalled the Royal Sons (the "5" Royales' gospel-quartet forerunner) learning their vocal parts directly off Soul Stirrers records — "we got our repertoire from the recordings... we'd go get the records and learned the parts right off." R.H. Harris's lead-and-response hard-gospel style is the template under all of Pauling's later call-and-answer arrangements.
listen forListen for how the Soul Stirrers' backing voices punch in behind Harris's lead on "By and By" — that same interjecting, answering vocal shape resurfaces as Pauling's guitar stabs behind Tanner's lead on "Baby Don't Do It."
The Pilgrim Travelers were one of the touring gospel quartets whose records the Royal Sons studied to build their own sound, alongside the Soul Stirrers and Five Blind Boys — part of the same jubilee-to-hard-gospel repertoire the group absorbed before ever recording secular music.
listen forThe Travelers' "walking rhythm" showmanship and driving, rhythmic lead vocal on "Mother Bowed" anticipate the propulsive, dance-floor urgency of the "5" Royales' "Help Me Somebody."
The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, led by Archie Brownlee's raw, shouting tenor, were the third group the Royal Sons named as a direct repertoire source — the harder, more abrasive edge of gospel lead singing that the group carried into its own hardest-driving R&B sides.
listen forBrownlee's rasped, urgent lead on "Our Father" is the same vocal grain you can hear pushed to the front on the "5" Royales' "Think," recorded the same year James Brown would later cover it.