LIVE: Five Blind Boys

For five decades, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama have been thrilling religious and secular audiences alike with their impassioned, electrifying Gospel music. Their 50th anniversary was a milestone year for them with their first major lable release, Deep River, on Elektra Nonesuch. At the beginning of 1994, the album received a Grammy nomination for 'Gospel Album of the Year,' and last September, Hillary Clinton presented them the NEA's Heritage Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement.

Group leader Clarence Fountain has maintained this musical mission since the late 1930's, when he formed his first group--the Happy Land Singers - as a student at the Taladega Institute for the Blind. At first Fountain and his friends Johnny Fields, Jimmy Carter, and George Scott performed only at school. Encouraged by good response on these local engagements, the Happy Land Singers set out on a full-time career in music. The Group has toured constantly since the 1940's, and hasrecorded for such classic "roots music" companies as Specialty, Savoy, and VJ.

Since then, the band has come out of the churches and toured internationally several times over. They've quickly become the favorites at festivals, bringing audiences to their feet with their live performances around the world, including such notable events as the Womad Festival, theMontreaux Jazz, New Orleans Jazz and Heritage, and the North Sea Jazz Festival among several others.

"We try to make people feel something they have never felt before," Clarence Fountain says with classic understatement, while George Scott concludes, "It says in the Bible that David danced with his robe stuck out behind him, so you know he wasn't dancing to nothing slow."