Elizabeth King has been singing since she was three. In fact, she fronted a 10-man group, the Gospel Souls, for almost 40 years, starting at the dawn of the ’70s when she first recorded for Pastor Juan Shipp and his D-Vine Spirituals label. But, while she’s always sung at home and church, she hadn’t performed with the Gospel Souls for quite some time when Shipp called her out of the blue a couple of years ago.
“Pastor Shipp called and asked how I felt about going back in the studio,” she recalls. “I said, ‘I would like to, but it’s been so long.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve got somebody who wants to record you.’ And I said, ‘You need to quit playing!’ ’Cause you know, Rev. Shipp likes to play a lot. ‘Nobody wants me to sing after all these years!’ He said, ‘I’m serious. His name is Bruce Watson. Can you come in tomorrow morning?’”
Shipp had been cultivating a partnership with Watson, as Watson delved into the catalogs of Shipp’s old labels and began releasing archival material on his new imprint, Bible & Tire Recording Company. Indeed, while a few recordings of King and her group were released as singles way back when, there were many others that didn’t see the light of day until Watson’s new label issued them as The D-Vine Sprirituals Recordings in 2019. But Watson wouldn’t stop at that. He wanted to capture her voice now, after many years of a life well-lived, working day jobs and raising 15 children.
When she arrived at Watson’s Delta-Sonic Sound studio, he already had backing tracks recorded, using what has become a house band of sorts for many of his projects: guitarists Will Sexton and Matt Ross-Spang, bassist Mark Edgar Stuart, and drummer George Sluppick. Also in the mix were keyboardists Al Gamble and Rick Steff, saxophonists Art Admaiston and Jim Spake, and a host of background singers, including the Barnes Brothers (who have an album of their own on Bible & Tire) and some of King’s background singers from the ’70s, the Vaughn Sisters and the D-Vine Spiritualettes.
King was impressed with the band immediately. “They’re good!” she says. “They’re professionals. The guy on drums, on one song, he showed me a couple of turns to put in, to change it a little, to fit their music, and it worked out great.”
Meanwhile, King hadn’t been in a studio for nearly 50 years. When she walked in, “Bruce said, ‘Let me hear you sing.’ He was playing the music and it sounded good, and I started singing. I sang from 10 to 2. He said, ‘Okay, come listen, I think I’ve got something.’ We recorded three songs that day and I didn’t even know it! I knew he was recording, but I didn’t know it was going to sound that good. It was amazing because I hadn’t rehearsed a lick with those guys. And he brought all this out. I said, ‘Next time, I’m going to rehearse and it’ll be even better.’”
She never did rehearse, but it didn’t matter. The band had learned songs she’d known all her life, and she poured all of her life thus far into them. This month, Bible & Tire released the fruits of their labor, Living in the Last Days, and it sounds like a miracle. The band, relative youngsters compared to King, play with a deep knowledge of classic gospel, and it gives her work a unique stamp in an age of synthesizers, click tracks, and a genre now deeply shaped by jazz fusion and funk.
“There have been a lot of changes in gospel music and singing, to me. But I’m still old-school. My kids laugh at me all the time. They say, ‘Mama, that’s old-school. We don’t like for you to sing because you be making us cry!’ I think Bruce is doing a good job. I like all the sounds of the groups that have recorded since I’ve been there. They’re kind of old-school. I like that.”
Meanwhile, King is glad she continued her involvement in music long after the breakup of her original group. “I kept going, because, if you’ve got a voice and you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. I kept going.”