LITTLE ROCK — For the past 63 years, bass singer Gerald Williams of Little Rock has been entertaining gospel fans across Arkansas and the country, most of those years with The Melody Boys Quartet.
But on New Year’s Eve, Williams and the group sang their final concert.
The performance, for an audience of 1,100 at Geyer Springs Baptist Church in Little Rock, also concluded the group’s year-long farewell tour, aptly named Exit 63.
For the farewell concert, 16 former members of The Melody Boys Quartet (including Williams’ son, Steve) took turns singing with the current group.
Now 79 and a member of the Southern Gospel Music Hall of Fame, Gerald Williams began performing professionally at age 16 when he joined the group, previously known as the Stamps-Baxter Quartet, in 1949.
At the time, Williams was in a junior quartet that had been organized by that group’s owner, manager and bass singer, Herschel Foshee.
When Foshee died of a heart attack, the group’s pianist and songwriter, Smilin’ Joe Roper, reorganized the group as Smilin’ Joe Roper and The Melody Boys Quartet and hired Williams as Foshee’s replacement.
And Williams has been belting out those deep rich bass notes anchoring the quartet’s unique sound for six decades.
Following the group’s final performance, which lasted more than four hours and included 45 songs, The Melody Boys Quartet disbanded and the other three members - tenor Mike Franklin, lead singer Chris Walton and baritone Jason Tapley - are joining other groups.
Why have the swan song at an odd-numbered year like 63 instead of a more landmark one like 60 or 65?
“I just couldn’t quit until I knew it was time,” Williams says. “And all things considered, I knew this was the year to do it.”
For all his years of embracing the belief that the show must go on, Williams is pragmatic enough to realize when the time had come to take a final bow.
“Our style of quartet is enjoyed by an older generation and we’re reaching the end of an era,” he says. “I see a great difference in the size of our crowds in the last year - as our fans are growing older and have more trouble getting out and driving at night - and I know in the next three years it’s going to get even smaller.”
Williams says his group’s members were on salary and paid per diem and he wanted to call it quits before he reached a point where he could no longer afford to pay them.
“We lost two or three generations because parents and grandparents stopped bringing kids to hear us,” Williams says. “The younger ones hear the term Southern gospel and assume they’re not going to like it; they have preconceived notions about it,” he adds. The genre of Christian music, sometimes referred to as quartet music, was traditionally all male and comprised tenor, lead, baritone and bass singers. Southern gospel dates to about 1910 when the first professional quartet was formed for the purpose of selling songbooks for the James D. Vaughan Music Publishing Co.
Some of the best-known names in Southern gospel are the Gaither Vocal Band, The Oak Ridge Boys, Happy Goodman Family, Stamps Quartet and the Blackwood Brothers.
Duane Allen, lead singer of The Oak Ridge Boys, who have had a distinguished gospel and country career, praised the musical contributions Williams has made with his quartet.
“Gerald is one of those great bass singers that is just an extraordinarily low lead singer,” Allen says. “Some bass singers can only sing the foundation of the chord structure; Gerald can take a lead and bring it home. I have always loved his vocal work, and him as a friend.”
In his autobiography A Mighty Lot of Singing, written on the group’s 50th anniversary 13 years ago, Williams recounted his musical career.
THE EARLY DAYS
Growing up in Honey Hill, a community three miles west of Searcy on Arkansas 36 with a church and a school but no post office, Williams says he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t singing.
“I was singing long before my voice changed,” he says. “I love to sing; it’s in my blood. While other kids were out playing baseball in somebody’s pasture, my folks took me to singing conventions.”
By the time he was 15, Williams says, he was capable of singing a “respectable low C.”
While he did his share of fishing, hunting and playing ball as a youth, he enjoyed singing more than any other pastime. He spent hours listening to Foshee’s Stamps-Baxter Quartet (originally founded in 1933 as a pop group but later sponsored on the road by the Stamps-Baxter music publishing company)and mimicking Foshee’s bass singing and his flair as master of ceremonies.
After Foshee’s death, the group briefly became known as Smilin’ Joe Roper and the Stamps-Baxter Melody Boys for a few months before changing the name to Smilin’ Joe Roper and the Melody Boys Quartet, which was among the groups that performed at the first National Quartet Convention in Memphis in 1957.
Today, Williams can easily rattle off the old singsong advertising jingle sung during the radio programs as though it was just yesterday.
For better pies, better cakes, better biscuits when you bake, use Magic Miller’s Best Flour.
Like his mentor, Williams began his gospel career with live radio broadcasts on KARK-AM (KARN today) at 5:45 a.m., 6:30 a.m., and 12:30 p.m. where the group’s opening theme and signature song was “Give the World a Smile.”
“We had our own live radio program three times a day - the shows were all live because the sponsors didn’t think a person would buy from a company whose program was recorded - and did concerts every night during the week and then singing conventions on the weekends.”
Williams says the show was created for rural people who would come home for their noon meal and listen to the radio.
“It’s so interesting to meet the people who actually heard those radio programs back then and remember the guys who were with us. There were very few radio stations in Little Rock back then, maybe five or six across the state, so your signal was not harmed by the others so we were statewide as far as radio coverage was concerned.”
MULTIMEDIA
In 1954, the Melody Boys Quartet began doing live TV shows in addition to their radio shows on KARK.
“The studios were in the same building and the doors between the radio and TV stations were so huge, you could drive a truck through them,” Williams recalls. “They would open them up and come into the radio studio with the cameras and do a simulcast. Those were our early days of radio and television mixed together; it was very interesting.”
When he first joined the group, they had not yet started making records, but once they began in 1950, The Melody Boys Quartet went on to be very prolific through the decades, averaging one recording project each year. Through the years, the quartet has recorded 78 and 45 rpm records, an EP, audio cassettes, eight-track tapes and CDs, but never a full album on vinyl. Several of the group’s CDs and a DVD of alive performance from their farewell tour are available at themelodyboysquartet.com.
“In the early days, we produced our records at the radio station and we recorded it all at one time on a reel-to-reel tape,” Williams says of the days before separate tracks were recorded. “And if one person made a mistake, we had to redo the whole song.”
The group’s trademark was its close, four-part harmony led by pianist Roper’s musical arrangements, Williams says.
“His arrangements were complicated, difficult and demonstrated the fine musical ability of the quartet. His emphasis on tight and modern harmonies gave us a distinction from other quartets, which gave us admiration from our peers. Whenever we would be on the same concert schedule as other groups like the Blackwood Brothers, almost without fail, when we were performing, we would look down into the audience and see James Blackwood enjoying our set.”
Beginning in 1959, for legal and financial reasons, members of The Melody Boys disbanded the group but continued singing under another name. Williams acquired the Melody Boys Quartet name in 1966 and has kept the group’s legacy alive as members came and went.
Why has Williams dedicated more than six decades to the rigorous schedule of a musician’s life on the road?
“The primary objective of the Melody Boys Quartet was to spread the gospel of Christ through our music wherever we went,” he says. “There have been many times when I’ve looked out into the audience and seen many a person with tears in their eyes. And when you see that, you know you’ve gone to their depths; you know it when you see it on their faces.”
A LABOR OF LOVE
For a while, Williams grappled with how singing could be his mission and life’s work when he was personally gaining so much satisfaction from it.
Was it a passion? Or a calling?
He finally realized it could be - and was - both.
“It took a lot of years to come to grips with that and I finally did through the story in the Bible about how the Lord gave gifts to three different people,” Williams says, referring to Jesus’ parable about three people who were given gifts of large sums of money.Two increased the amount while the third dug a hole in the ground and hid it away.
“God gave me this talent and, in return, my commitment was to take it and use it. I hope we have been a blessing and that we won people to the Lord.”
The Melody Boys performed more than 200 dates on their farewell tour.
When Williams joined the quartet in 1949, he and the other members traveled in Joe Roper’s 1948 DeSoto.
“We ran it right into the ground and were so excited when he got a new 1950 Buick Special,” Williams says, laughing. “We’d ride three in the front and two in the back and since I was the smallest at 5 feet 7 inches and 125 pounds, I usually got stuck in the middle of the front seat.”
Through the years, their mode of transportation improved, with the group’s most recent ride being a 2001 MCI 45-foot, fully customized tour bus previously owned by country music star Kenny Chesney.
What will Williams miss most?
“The singing,” he says. “Because I do love it and the connection with the people and the association with the guys in the group.”
As the clock neared midnight on New Year’s Eve, Williams and former and current members of his group gathered onstage to sing “Give the World a Smile.” It was a touching, bittersweet moment for Williams as he reflected on the many decades of singing the group’s signature song.
He may miss singing, but Williams says he won’t miss the long stretches of traveling and being away from his family.
Williams plans to spend more time at home with his wife, Martha, whom he married after each of their previous spouses had passed away, and with their combined family of four children, eight grandchildren, and 10 great grandchildren, most of whom live nearby.
“We’re looking forward to being together,” says Martha Williams. “I am used to sending him off every week midweek and through the weekend. This will be the first time in the 15 years we’ve been married that we’ll be together 24/7.”
Williams says he plans to record and play music, which will be available on the Melody Boys website, which is being converted into his own.He also may do some voice over work in commercials.
Though he attends Geyer Springs First Baptist Church, don’t expect to hear him singing bass in the church’s choir.
“I can’t do their music,” he says. “It’s too high for me.”
Style, Pages 47 on 01/13/2013