The story of
the Golden Gate Quartet begins in the early 1930s at a barbershop in the Norfolk,
Virginia suburb of Berkeley. It was there that owner A.C. "Eddie" Griffin,
a tenor singer, and Robert "Peg" Ford, a one-legged bass vocalist, recruited
two Booker T. Washington High School glee club members, tenor Henry Owens
and baritone Willie Johnson, to form a quartet singing gospel music in the
new "jubilee" style that was beginning to sweep through Virginia churches.
Unlike, say, the older Alabama gospel tradition, with its trademark reliance
on formal song structure and straight-ahead harmonies, Virginia's gospel music
was looser, and more rhythmic. Influenced by such varying sources as the pop
group Mills Brothers, the swinging jazz of the Three Keys, and the emotional
wailing of area pulpit preachers, jubilee singing was something daring and
exciting - gospel music geared for the body as well as the soul.
It was the youthful energy of jubilee that Griffin sought to harness with
Owens and Johnson in his group, and that indeed proved to be the case; the
quartet eventually gained enough recognition that by 1935 they were regularly
venturing to neighboring Virginia towns such as Richmond and Tidewater and
even into parts of the Carolinas for personal appearances. By this time, Griffin's
modest ambitions had been more than fulfilled, and as he felt more certain
about his haircutting business than a singing career, he retired from the
quartet, replaced by Portsmouth tenor William Langford, a veteran of several
area singing groups. In the summer of 1936, as the elderly and sickly Ford
began to miss more and more of the Gates' growing number of engagements, Johnson,
Owens, and Langford succeeded in talking the parents of 16-year old bass singer
Orlandus Wilson (their favorite fill-in for Ford) into permitting their son
to join the group as a permanent member.
With Wilson aboard, the look and sound of the group struck a new balance.
Each of the four brought specific talents to the quartet: Langford was a showy,
melodramatic lead singer in the standard barbershop/pop mold, with a tremendous
range that allowed him to easily slide from baritone all the way up to a falsetto
soprano; Johnson, the most jazz-influenced of the group, had developed a grin-and-wink
hipster narrative style the likes of which gospel music had never before seen;
Owens, probably the best pure singer in the quartet, was a master at harmonic
invention, allowing him to shuttle between Langford and Johnson's leads as
the arrangements warranted; and Wilson, the bass singer, anchored the foursome's
songs with an intrinsic sense of timing and syncopation that allowed them
to jump, glide, bounce and swing. Together, they were poised to set gospel
music on its ear.
The Golden Gate Quartet made their final RCA-Victor recordings at a milestone
June, 1940 session with legendary folk singer Leadbelly (the fruits of that
collaboration can be heard on the RCA Heritage Series album, Leadbelly:
Alabama Bound). Not long thereafter, lead singer William Langford left
the Gates to form a new group, the Southern Sons (some of whose best work
can be found on another RCA Heritage Series release, I Hear Music
In The Air), and Langford's place was taken by old friend Clyde Riddick,
who had been an early replacement for Griffin even before Langford joined
the group in the thirties. The 1940s found the group making cameo appearances
in a number of films, including Star-Spangled Rhythm, Hollywood
Canteen, and A Song Is Born, and continuing to record (for Columbia
and Mercury). In 1948, Willie Johnson exited the group, but the Gates were
able to absorb the loss, as they would later also manage to do when Owens
departed in 1950 to become an evangelist preacher.
The group went through several more personnel changes during the early fifties,
as r 'n' b, and then rock 'n' roll, dampened the demand for their music in
the U.S., but when they made their initial European tour in 1955, they were
delighted to discover a new worldwide audience waiting for them with open
arms. It is in Europe that they've primarily lived and worked for the last
forty-plus years. Still to day under the guidance of tenor Clyde
Wright (a member since 1954) and baritone Paul Brembly (a member since '71)
they create the trademark Golden Gate Quartet sound, and are still
extremely active in touring and recording. In 2004 the Quartet will tour the
world to celebrate their 70th anniversary.
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