The Blind Boys of Alabama

The Blind Boys of Alabama go back to 1939 and Talladega, Alabama, and they have outlasted just about every trend American music has thrown at them. The roster has turned over again and again, most of its singers blind or visually impaired, and the group has gone by other names too, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and Clarence Fountain and the Blind Boys of Alabama among them. Jimmy Carter has sung lead since 1982, with Ricky McKinnie aboard from 1990 and Joey Williams from 1995.

Mainstream audiences found them in 1983, when they appeared in The Gospel at Colonus, a musical that won an Obie, and they have toured the world ever since. By 1995's I Brought Him With Me, with its "Amazing Grace", those voices were weathered and reverent, the harmonies stacked like old timber and every bit as sturdy.

The roll call of people they have sung and recorded with tells its own story: Prince, Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel, Bonnie Raitt, Ben Harper, Bon Iver, Amadou & Mariam. Their take on Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole" opened the first season of The Wire. Five Grammys, a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2009, a National Heritage Fellowship in 1994, the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2003, the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 2010 and White House invitations under three presidents have all come their way. McKinnie has said it plainly: blindness does not have to hold them back, and what they do is sing gospel.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.