‘Let’s Have Church’

For almost 70 years, the Jewel Gospel Singers have answered the call

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The following is an extended version of the article that appears in our February 2021 issue.

Henrietta Doswell Gattison has retired from singing three times, but the longtime leader and manager of the Jewel Gospel Singers — aka the New Jewels — is always pulled back in. 

“People just keep calling us,” says the 86-year-old gospel matriarch, who was managing a full schedule of church appearances before the pandemic. “They won’t let us stop.” 

Telling people no is not an option, she explains with a sigh: “It’s not something you say when you sing gospel music. We do what God wants us to do.”

Along with co-founder Ellen Jefferson, her 83-year-old younger sister, Gattison and the Jewels have been a solid rock in the Richmond-area gospel scene for nearly 70 years. With three longtime (60-plus years) members, the quartet specializes in a passionate style of church singing that is both traditional and harmonically complex, a unique sound honed through years of performing in Hanover County churches.

“We started off singing with our daddy,” Jefferson says, remembering their father, Mitchell Fox. “He did the leading, and Henrietta and I would back him up. He sang ‘pattyfoot,’ without music, and would appear at all of the church revivals in Hanover.” 

Somewhere around 1940, Fox formed the Foxes Trio with 3-year-old Ellen and 6-year-old Henrietta. The family lived in Newport News then, where Fox drove a taxicab and worked on the docks and Mom sold pies and pigs’ feet to coal workers. After a time, even little brother Hosea joined in the act.

“They had to get me out of there because I was so devilish,” the longtime Richmond concert promoter known as The Great Hosea says with a laugh. 

After moving back to Hanover in 1950, the well-seasoned Foxes Trio performed regularly at nearby churches. Mother Estelle handled the bookings and the collection plate money, and she had no problem with her girls breaking off from their father to form their own group after one still-talked-about 1953 incident. 

“We were celebrating our anniversary at the church,” Jefferson explains, “and my dad sometimes liked to go out and drink a little liquor. He came home that Sunday morning, and he didn’t have time to get his blue suit out of the cleaners, and my uncle had given him a haircut. So he was sitting there in a brown suit and a skinny head, and my sister and I said, ‘Uh-uh, we’re not going to sing with you no mo’.’ ” 

The sisters insist that their father didn’t mind. “He was a happy-go-lucky guy,” Gattison says. “He didn’t care as long as we were happy. And it didn’t stop him from singing one bit. Everyone wanted Mitchell Fox to sing for them.”

Polishing a Jewel

Cousin Lenora Anderson, who would later marry Pervis Staples of the Staple Singers, was a Jewel during the group’s first years as a trio. Singers Joan Jones and Lotte Henry, a former member of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Rosettes, also had short term stints in the group. When Anderson moved to Chicago to sing with the Staples Singers, it was Henry who recommended a replacement for lead vocals, Doris Anne Allen, a gospel disc jockey at WANT-AM whose talents went beyond singing.  “Doris was prolific,” Gattison says, “and she really could write.”

That’s an understatement. The 6-foot-2 Allen, who died in 1989, was a force of nature. Her dramatic ballads — such as the popular “I’ve Got a Lot To Be Thankful For” — were complicated, passionate affairs. And when she went up-tempo, as on “Guide Me” (Gattison’s signature solo), she could conjure a rave-up as loud and forceful as any rock or R&B band of the era.  

“She was amazing — you could open the Bible and point to a verse, and she could write a song about it,” says Ann Gardner Cunningham, 78, who joined the group at the ripe age of 17 and still sings with them today. “She was well loved, a fun person to be around, but when it came to the music, she didn’t play. She drilled our parts into our heads the way she heard it.”  

Cunningham comes from a family steeped in music. Her father, William Gardner, sang in Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Dependable Four quartet, her uncle Burt played organ for jazz legend Lionel Hampton, and her brother Stu Gardner was comedian Bill Cosby’s longtime musical arranger and collaborator. “The Jewels sound was before their time,” she says. “If you listen to some of our songs, we are sky high. Normal singers aren’t singing that high. But it’s still down-home church music.” 

“We are rooted in our Christianity, in the church. You can’t mix it. You are either going all the way with him, or you’re not.” —Henrietta Doswell Gattison

Thanks to Allen’s distinctive songwriting and the group’s unique singing style, the Jewels became one of the most popular gospel acts in the country in the 1960s. They recorded three albums and released five singles — all songs penned by Allen — for the New Jersey-based Savoy label, arguably the most important of all gospel imprints. The LPs were produced by Laurence Roberts, the organist for the king of gospel music, the Rev. James Cleveland. Roberts, who also performed on the sessions recommended the Jewels to the label after hearing them perform at Petersburg’s Mt. Olivet Baptist Church. 

Ernestine Jackson, who was enlisted before the Jewels’ first album, was a jazz performer who sang with her siblings in a group called the Green Sisters, and she brought a bluesy, soulful element to the Jewels’ sound. (Jackson died in 2005.) This classic lineup — Gattison, Jefferson, Allen, Cunningham, Jackson and pianist Vivian Owens — toured the East Coast with popular gospel artists such as Rev. Cleveland, the Caravans, the Dixie Hummingbirds and Shirley Caesar, and they were in constant demand at home. For more than 20 years, they opened the Harmonizing Four’s annual all-star show at the Mosque (now the Altria Theater).  

Although the three Jewel Gospel Singers albums are long out of print on vinyl and never made it to compact disc, two are available on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube, including the ambitious concept album “Let’s Have Church” from 1965. “We never made a dime from the records,” Gattison says. “The only way we made money was when we sold the records at our shows, and we even had to pay for the records.” 

As important as Savoy was in documenting American gospel, the company’s founder, the late Herman Lubinsky, had a terrible reputation. “The SOB was the worst thief in the world,” singer Al Henderson told jazz critic Jordan Levy in 2018. “He made millions on us [Black musicians], and he wouldn’t pay you nothin’.” Today, the Savoy back catalog is owned by the Mississippi-based Malaco label. 

Going the Distance

When Doris Allen, who also recorded albums of original songs with the Robert Jones Singers and the Virginia Choral Ensemble, moved to Washington, D.C., in the late ‘60s, the original group continued with new member Mae Ida Mitchell — her daughter Vanessa Fitzgerald sings with the group today — and their only male singer, David Reynolds, who would perform on and off with them for years. Rita Lewis and Ruby Pearson were two more key additions. Cunningham says that Allen never really left. Even when she got a job as a DJ in Boston, she would still perform with the Jewels when she could. 

Curiously, the Jewels recorded songs for Detroit’s HOB Label that resulted in a 45 that, until this past year, the sisters didn’t realize had been released. “Dionne Warwick was at the session because her father [Marcel] was producing us,” Gattison recalls. “But I had no idea that they ever put anything out.” Sometime in the mid-’70s, they released a record on their own label, JGS. The B-side was a daring cover of country artist Kris Kristofferson’s “Why  Me Lord,” reworked by arranger Clifton Smith, and it became one of their most popular numbers, according to the sisters. 

When the Jewels splintered in the late ’70s, Gattison penned a Christian musical titled “The Church in the Valley” that she, Jefferson and a cast of singers from their church, New Chestnut Baptist in Mechanicsville, would end up performing for more than a decade as the Henrietta Doswell Ensemble. After the group got back together in 1984, as Henrietta Doswell Gattison and the New Jewels, they participated in an unlikely concert with country artist Charlie Daniels at the Roanoke Civic Center. “He did a gospel portion of his shows,” Cunningham remembers. 

Cunningham and the sisters each say that they enjoyed that show with Daniels, but it begs a question: Have the Jewels ever been tempted by secular music, to go pop, as Sam Cooke did when he left the Soul Stirrers?

“Not ever,” Gattison answers quickly. “We are rooted in our Christianity, in the church. You can’t mix it. You are either going all the way with him, or you’re not. It hurt me when Sam Cooke changed. But [even] if they had paid me a fortune, I would not have sung rock ’n’ roll.”  

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TV Gospel Time

As rooted as they've been in the Richmond area, the Jewel Gospel Singers have been largely forgotten nationally by everyone but ardent record collectors. That was before episodes of the '60's syndicated program, TV Gospel Time, began to circulate a decade ago. The group's 1964 appearance, filmed in Richmond and also featuring locals the Cedar Street Memorial Baptist Youth Chorus and Gospel Baptist Youth Chorus, has become a much shared internet item that showcases the range of the Jewels sound, with three different lead singers delivering memorable performances. The episode is available on the DVD box set, "Soul of the Church" but can also be found (for now) on YouTube. This is the only extant footage that survives of the Jewel Gospel Singers' classic lineup in their prime.