PineCone presents the Golden Echoes, "Singing Stream" Excerpt

Jan. 27, 2009 - PRLog -- Raleigh, N.C. - Tom Davenport's 57-minute documentary "A Singing Stream: A Black Family Chronicle" traces the history of the Landis family from rural Granville County, North Carolina. The story is told with interviews and stories, scenes from daily life, reunions, gospel concerts, and church services, ranging over the lifetime of its oldest surviving member, 86-year-old Mrs. Bertha M. Landis. Members of the Landis family were members of the original Golden Echoes.

The current Golden Echoes group features two of the group's original members: Claude Landis (lead and background vocals) and Johnny Malone (guitar); the other original group members are deceased.

The full group is: Johnny Malone (guitar); Claude Landis (lead and background vocals); J.P. Jenkins (background vocals); Andrew Green (background vocals); Kenneth Daniel (lead and background vocals); Bryant Malone (bass guitar); Phillip Daniel (drummer); Tevin Vass (keyboards); Lenny Tharrington (keyboards).

J.P. Jenkins and Andrew Green were added to the group about 20 years ago and are still background vocalists. The remaining members of the current configuration are part of the younger generation of the group: Kenneth Daniel started with the group at age 14 as bassist and remained with the group for about 15 years before moving to another group in the mid 80s, and he is now back as part of the group. Bryant Malone is the son of Johnny Malone, and Phillip Daniel is the son of Kenneth Daniel. Tevin Vass is the grandson of the late John Landis, and Lenny Tharrington is the Nephew of John and Claude Landis.

The emergence of gospel quartets in rural North Carolina during the first half of the 20th century can be traced to a number of earlier influences such as congregational and church choir singing of spirituals and hymns, the singing of traditional African-American songs while at work in the fields or with family members in the home, and the appearance of new kinds of performing groups that ranged from the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Hampton Institute Quartette to local groups of male singers who sang in their churches and at prayer meetings. "Quartets," observes folklorist Glenn Hinson, "incorporated the close harmonies of workers singing in the fields, the falsetto of the hollers, the bass phrasings of the rhythmic work songs, and the syncopated beat of congregational handclapping into a unique musical sound that is still the basis of modern gospel music."

The liveliest of unaccompanied vocal styles developed and popularized among black singers and audiences in the era between the two world wars was known as "jubilee" singing. The young Landis brothers-John, Fleming, and Robert-along with a friend, Roy Braswell, began to sing regularly as the Rising Stars of Creedmoor (the town nearest the family's farm). "World War II and the Army," John says, "broke up the group."

The war and emigration from the South by kin and friends leaving farm work for jobs in the urban North depleted and rearranged the quartets of Granville County. Two gospel quartets, the Rising Stars of Creedmoor and the Nightingales of Kittrell, merged in the late 1950s in the wake of having lost members to war service and northern migration. The Nightingales, originally named for a community 20 miles northeast of Creedmoor, had been renamed the Golden Echoes by the Dixie Hummingbirds, a widely respected gospel group of the time. When the Rising Stars and the Nightingales merged, they decided to keep the name Golden Echoes.

Two Landis brothers from the Rising Stars joined the Golden Echoes: the lead singer and manager, John, and baritone singer Claude. Later, their nephew Kenneth Daniel was added as a lead guitar player. In joining the Echoes, John Landis made a clear choice against a career of performing on the road. While still singing with the Rising Stars, he was offered a job with Chicago's Soul Stirrers, a nationally popular quartet who had just lost their best-known singer, Sam Cooke, to a career in rhythm and blues. "We had appeared several times with the Soul Stirrers," John Landis recalls, "and our styles were very similar. In September or October of 1957, the Soul Stirrers came to look for me in Raleigh and offered me $150 plus royalties to go on the road with them. I talked it over with my wife-we had been married two weeks-and was almost ready to go when she asked them how often I'd be home. They said two to three times a year. She told me to drop it. I gave up on going on the road right then."

Wilburt "Johnny" Malone of the Nightingales joined the band as bass guitarist. The Nightingales also contributed lead singer Ronald Perry and another singer, Luther Foster, who specializes in falsetto. Andrew Green, a "new man" who was also from the Kittrell community, joined the group only five years before the film production began. In A Singing Stream, Mr. Green is seen singing "back-up" but has since begun taking his turn at singing lead.

The performance will take place at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 8 at the NC Museum of History's Daniels Auditorium. This program is free and open to the public. Program notes will be provided. For directions and more information, please call (919) 807-7900, or visit www.pinecone.org.

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PineCone—the Piedmont Council of Traditional Music, is a private, nonprofit, charitable membership organization dedicated to preserving, presenting and promoting traditional music, dance and other folk performing arts.