Echoes of the South

The original five Blind Boys long ago went to meet their maker, which is unsurprising given that they first raised their voices to the Lord in 1939 – yet with a shifting line-up, they’ve kept up their righteous gospelising for more than 80 unbroken years. Since their last album, 2017's Almost Home, they’ve lost a few more long-serving members with the deaths of Ben Moore and Paul Beasley and the retirement of Jimmy Carter, and the leadership has passed to Ricky McKinnnie, a youthful septuagenarian who has ‘only’ been singing with the group for 33 years.

The album is named after the first radio show on which the Blind Boys performed in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944 and lives up to the group's long-standing mission statement: ‘as long as everybody gives all that they have to give and we sing songs that touch the heart, we’ll live on forever.’

Echoes of the South notably includes the final recordings of Moore and Beasley, who share lead vocal duties on the southern soul classic ‘Friendship’. Elsewhere, there are call-and-response numbers that wouldn’t have sounded much different recorded by the original line-up in the 1940s (‘The Last Time’), sanctified church stompers and glorious versions of 1970s soul classics by Curtis Mayfield (‘Keep On Pushing’) and Stevie Wonder (‘Heaven Help Us All’).