|
 |
|||||||
By WAYNE TRUJILLO
The night doesn't intimidate Philadelphia. Nor did darkness dispirit its greatest gospel singer, Marion Williams. In retrospect, the old gospel (and secular) adage, preaching and promising a light at the end of the tunnel after a lifetime bouncing between bursts of triumph and stretches of struggle is appropriate. I had no idea, but surmised there literally was light at the end of the city's famed Broad Street, wherever that might be. There were certainly plenty of lights and luminaries running up and down the Avenue of the Arts shining on plaques embedded in the sidewalk. I glanced down at the bronzed honorariums lined up against and along the lip of the street. The names engraved on the street are legendary -- Phil Spector, Daryl Hall, John Oates, and Solomon Burke are just several. But the plaque I sought belonged to Marion Williams -- or at least her memory. Awarded by the Philadelphia Music Alliance in 1994, the homage resonated with the gospel singer for several reasons, not the least of which was that colleague Clara Ward had received the nod years earlier. Besides, Philadelphia was Williams' adopted residence and a wellspring of artistic talent that reached beyond city borders to influence global culture. I paused and stared at the plaque. Actually, I was looking beyond the metal inscribed with Williams' name. I was gazing into the past. Hallelujah, the storm is passing over.. The Reverend Charles Tindley's lyrics struck like a match across metal, igniting memories of Williams and the last (and only second) time I talked with her. Speaking long distance from a hospital room at Albert Einstein Medical Center, she enthused about the honor. The ceremonial unveiling of the plaque blew a second wind into the ill singer as she rallied energy for what was her last public appearance. Over twelve years later, that telephone conversation gained substance, its volume raised from a faint echo to an immediate reality. Her voice had multiple personalities on record. But her speaking voice seldom raised above a whisper. Lord remember me. Remember poor little me. Memories of Williams and the lyrics of Remember Me haunted my thoughts. Her humility cut across time, reminding me of her understated and largely unknown brilliance. But her influence guarantees she'll never be forgotten. Williams' presence in popular music might be transparent to many people, seeing through her even as they can't help but hear her in the performances of celebrated singers. Mental imagery filled Philadelphia as I reflected on her final days. Broad Street, B.M. Oakley Memorial Temple and Tindley Temple all gave silent but powerful testimony to her time and place. And then I considered the title of a forthcoming compilation of her work, Too Close to Heaven , a CD that gospel authority and producer Anthony Heilbut proclaims will be her summa. Too Close to Heaven is rife with allegorical inferences. It certainly sums up the experience of anybody within earshot of Williams' recordings. Too close to heaven could also describe Williams' last year on earth. After a lifetime of labor, she had scaled the metaphorical mountain. Her ascendancy was brief but dizzying. Shortly after reaching a temporal summit, a lengthy hospital stay preceded her death. Literally and figuratively, too close to heaven perfectly describes her final days. Gospel singer Marion Williams died on July 2, 1994, mere weeks after the Philadelphia Music Alliance stamped the city's gratitude on Broad Street. By the time diabetes instigated various ailments that ended her life, Williams had garnered the world's most estimable awards, including the Kennedy Center Honors and the MacArthur Genius Grant. The hoopala surrounding the honors precipitated the national media to trumpet her mercurial talents. Williams told me in September 1993, "If you wait on God, He will come when you want him, and when He comes, He will be on time!" However, time was running out for Williams. But while her body failed her, her spirit lives on in gospel, pop, soul and rock and roll. Besides, Williams never really left the world, at least the musical realm. Countless musicians revive her soul; even if their attempts to reincarnate her genius are often ghastly and ghostly approximations, every once in a while, some aspiring, audacious singer rekindles the gospel great's memory in performances that simmer, sometimes roar, with a nuanced note, inspired ad lib or volcanic shout and moan. The New York Times stated that Williams was "widely regarded as the greatest gospel singer" and "the equal of any blues singer alive." The New Yorker magazine hailed her as "among the greatest of jazz singers." Rolling Stone Record Guide went the distance, gushing that she was nothing less than "the greatest singer ever." But the accolades didn't translate into omnipresent paparazzi or a nine-figure income. No matter. Williams' acolytes include everyone from Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and the Isley Brothers. Indirectly, she influenced the likes of rock titans Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, and Bob Dylan, among others. As Heilbut wrote, "If Little Richard is the Father of Rock and Roll, then that father had a mother." Heilbut continues to be her staunchest supporter. He played the master recordings of the 2005 CD compilation, Remember Me , for me three summers ago at his pad facing Central Park on New York's Upper West. The voice coming out of the Heilbut's speakers lashed out, simultaneously sounding sexy, schizoid, and surreal. In an age when singers trot through melodies that demand nothing more than a set of functioning vocal chords and a listless attention span, a decade-plus past her death, Marion Williams' voice can't be silenced. God is still alive, and you had better believe He is still on His throne. Williams can grab listeners by the throat, knock them to their knees and have them swallow her sermon whole, and beg for more. The listener knows that not only God, but also Marion Williams still sits on a throne. Williams' birth in 1927 to a West Indian political activist father and a prayer warrior mother who trumpeted the gospel did not portend a destiny that would "shake the very foundations of popular music," as Walter Cronkite said at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony. However, her background instilled in Williams a fiery temperament common among sanctified church women. Growing up in the church, Williams toured the city's sanctified stomping grounds, earning a reputation as Miami's best singer. But it wasn't until she journeyed north to visit a relocated sister in Philadelphia that Williams met her future in the person of Gertrude Ward. Williams hit the city's holy land and threw down at a Ward program on their home turf in Philadelphia. "I was called on to sing 'What Could I Do If It Wasn't For The Lord' and the house just went crazy ... they just went crazy," Williams recalled when I spoke with her at a North Philly church in 1993. "They didn't stop for fifteen to twenty minutes, they were in an uproar!" The business-savvy Gertrude Ward immediately offered Williams a prominent position with her family group, The World Famous Ward Singers (starring her daughter, Clara Ward, who was Aretha Franklin's main influence). Williams played coy, citing her sanctified mother, whom she believed would disdain any touring, even on the gospel circuit. Gertrude Ward's persistence won over Williams' reluctant mother, and the Ward Singers might have carried Gertrude and Clara's appellation, but the group gravitated around Williams. While Mahalia Jackson enjoyed the fame, Williams endured the faith that sustained most gospel singers of the genre's golden age. But for sheer ability and aesthetics, some critics claim that Williams surpassed Jackson. Only Clara Ward even remotely closed in on Jackson's celebrity. Still, even the starstruck years with the Ward Singers left Williams working the crowds while Gertrude and Clara worked the box office. Fed up, Williams and several other members abandoned the group and set sail on a voyage under the banner, The Stars of Faith. Williams and the group thrived with their new venture, appearing on Broadway in Langston Hughes' Black Nativity, a play he wrote with Williams in mind.
The Stars of Faith jetted across the Atlantic and performed for royalty. Still, the business acumen of Gertrude Ward eluded the Stars of Faith. Williams also refused to sing herself silly like she did in the old days with the Wards. Wrecking and tearing up churches with her slithering, almost sexual, romps through the aisles had exhausted Williams as a Ward Singer. The earsplitting whoops that Little Richard later appropriated still rang out during her performances, but she refused to sing herself into a headache. Williams said she sung so hard in those days that her head hurt. She still rekindled the flames in concert, but the fire didn't rise as frequently or furiously. That is, not unless Heilbut produced. Beginning in the 1960s, while Heilbut was in grad school at Harvard, Williams entered the studio and chapel with the blazing ferocity of the Ward years. Her voice would trill like a coquette before free-falling into a booming, Big Mamma bluster. At times, Heilbut would record Williams' sensual psyche, a husky whisper that could be mistaken for a carnal rather than celestial celebration. Often, Williams would let the spirit seize her and repeat phrases, even syllables, by bending notes to express emotions ranging from frustration to fealty to ecstasy. The spirit moved her to even higher ground in live performances. Williams could both scold and sooth. The congregation answered her with lusty shouts and hushed awe, pushing her up into the heavens, celebrating the afterlife, or pulling her back down to earth and the terrestrial concerns of poverty and homelessness. Remember Me features several improvisational performances for ecstatic worshippers. “A Charge To Keep” is one of her greatest performances, but it veers from the flighty optimism many Americans associate with gospel music. Sung a cappella, it is difficult to determine which is darker, Williams' voice or her burdens. She soars, teasing the parishioners into believing that hymn will offer a glimpse of hope. The lyrics are not exactly doomsday, and Williams' lusty, booming voice might speak words of deliverance, but the drops and dips spin the congregation into dementia. The performance is terrifying and sacred at the same time, somewhat like Moses humbled before the burning bush. The holy warriors' screams in response to Williams' slides and moans are nearly as ethereal as her performance. Williams' career expanded beyond the church to jazz festivals and elite colleges. Her dazzling versatility and spectacular range enraptured intellectuals. The nuances of her voice often shaded emotional expressions that could rival an actor of Lawrence Olivier's caliber. While the fire and ice dynamism of Williams' performances might overwhelm the uninitiated, the connoisseurs recognized the seemingly schizoid vocal persona as a finely tuned talent displaying an eclectic range of human emotions. Little girl chants alternated with ball-breaking booms (Sometimes I Ring Up Heaven ) Williams' one-woman play ran the gamut of drama - granting her audience a comedy, tragedy, love story, and epic within one song. Denver's Westword newspaper summed up her vocal personality in a review that noted, "Williams can sing as pretty as any choir director, but when she chooses to belt, she can blast the balls off Roger Daltrey." All of Heilbut's' productions of Williams on the Shanachie label earned five-star reviews from the Rolling Stone Record Guide . The reviewer did not dissect the recordings, stating that Williams' artistry was "simply beyond criticism, let alone comprehension." The accolades and awards came fast and furious. After suffering neglect from the public while toiling in the church for decades, Williams' finally received the rounds of applause she deserved. When she stood above her better-known students at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, she had the world at her feet. Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, and Billy Preston tore up the Kennedy Center in tribute to Williams as she sat with Bill and Hillary Clinton and Johnny Carson in the presidential booth. Williams roused the legendary "spirit feel" of yore when she rose from her seat, whipping her head and whacking her hands. But, as the Bible says, the world is a temporal domain, and the Lord giveth and taketh away. When the singer sat in the spare offices of Philadelphia's B.M. Oaklely Memorial Temple, reflecting on gospel's instability and reminding me that God will be on time, she predicted her demise like a seer. The rush of good fortune floored her. Awards, presidents, and national exposure beckoned. Then, nine months after she preached about God's sense of timing, her church hosted her farewell with a wake and funeral outside the room where she had reflected on God's timeliness. The upside is that her God spared Williams the creative world's denial. Many singers sunk into national obscurity even as the latest cultural rage pilfered gospel's emotions, rhythms, and emotions. As Heilbut noted, when Williams died, the media memorialized her as one of America's great artists. She went out on top, claiming her share of the limelight that had been occupied by singers who, according to Heilbut, “couldn't touch the hem of her garment." Williams remained humble but fiery until the end. A couple thousand miles and multiple ailments couldn't deny her spirit. She spoke the last words I would ever hear from her, confined to a hospital room. Again, the softness of her speaking voice struck me -- as breathless as the swoops, belts and bellows powering the classic recordings left listeners. But I was reminded of the whispers that appeared in her songs, the sensual asides that raised goosebumps. “Are you a praying child?” she asked. I can't recall the precise words, but Williams frequently referred to herself in the third person. She did so that time. “Pray for me baby, pray for Marion. God is all she has.” And her memory and recorded legacy is all the world has… thank you Jesus. Can I get a witness? Amen. OTHER VALUABLE RESOURCES TO LOOK INTO:
|
