The Pilgrim Jubilees

9. The Drive

9. The Drive he drive," "the beat"—these arethe phrases the senior Pilgrim Jubilees use to define the elements that make their music different. None of the group members has any formal musical training, so their arranging of their songs is largely an intuitive process of trial and error, guided by past experience and balancing the traditional Jubes' style with the need to keep the sound modern and of interest to today's audiences. But all of the Pilgrim Jubilees agree that the core of their musical identity lies in the rhythm, the blueprint for which was drawn up at the first Peacock recording session. And all believe the blueprint has been studied carefully by the quartets that followed them. Clay: "We didn't realize what we were doing. Struck gold and didn't know it. 'Stretch Out' set the trend for that beat. If a quartet goes into a drive, it's going to end up Pilgrim Jubilees.1 That's what's kept us alive so long—they're still hanging around our style. Youcan't get away from our beat." Major: "I started arranging for the Jubes years ago. And my thing was to be sure that if I took a song somebody else wrote, that the Jubesdidn't sing that song like the writer or anybody else who had an arrangement of the same song. I'd bring the song in, and all the guys would sit down and listen. And everybody would be picking on it. When we finished with it, it didn't sound like anybody 87 T :: 88 Tke Drive else. Whether it sells or not, it's not going to sound like anybody else's stuff." Cleave: "Just about everybodyout here's got something of the Jubilee beat. Everybody!Well, not the real old groups that had already made their way—the Dixie Hummingbirds, or the Sensational Nightingales. But the rest? Every last one of them that come up after us." Obviously this claim is not going to attract any great support in afield where each group prides itself on its individuality. But one unreserved endorsement comes from the Canton Spirituals, who invited Cleave and Clay to join them in 1999 when they recorded a live album and videotape in Jackson, Mississippi.2 In an interview inserted into the video segment in which the Graham brothers appear, Cantons' singer and guitarist Cornelius Dwayne Watkins talks of the influence the Jubeshave had on his group and on quartet singing: "Their sound and their style is so much a part of me till it'll never leave. You can hear their style in much of our music. . . . Our music has always been influenced by the sound of the Pilgrim Jubilees. I don't think there will ever be another group that will come into the gospel arena . . . they gave all the groups a style to sing." On their previous CD, the Cantons recorded Major Roberson's "Father I'm Coming Home"— recorded by the Pilgrim Jubilees for Nashboro in I959.3 Their concert recording of "Mississippi Poor Boy" ends with a drive that has too many similarities to the Jubes' "Don't LetJesus Down" to be coincidence, whether it is unconscious imitation or deliberate tribute.4 "The fact of the matter is that a group can't hardly do a beat without running into the Jubes," says Major. "The Jubes brought the beat out here." Cleave offers the closest to a musical analysisof the PilgrimJubilees' style with the apparently enigmatic statement, "The best thing that happens to us is on the 'one.' Bam! There! Foot, there. That's Jubilees." He's referring to the stresses in a bar, defined by the foot-operated bass drum. Where most groups usually accentuate the second beat of a bar—One TWO—the Pilgrim Jubilees more often accentuate the first beat—ONE Two. Most of the impetus in the Jubes' music comes from the bass guitar rather than from the drums. The group used drums—played by session musicians—in the recording studio from 1959, but on the road its only accompaniment in the early days was guitar and bass. Today, the Pilgrim Jubilees can't remember when they first took a drummer on the road with them—or who that drummer was—but it wasn't until the late 19605. Major Roberson recalls that, despite Tke Drive 89 the widespread use of drums on recordings...