Wynona Merceris Carr was born in 1923 in Cleveland, Ohio. At the age of eight, she started to take piano lessons, and five years later enrolled at Cleveland Music College. She studied arranging alongside voice and harmony and was soon in demand as a pianist in the local Cleveland Baptist churches.
Carr joined a radio choir and then the Turner Singers, before forming her own Gospel group, the Carr Singers, with members of her family in 1945. Her next move took her to the Wilson Jubilee Singers, an off-shoot of the Wings Over Jordan Choir, which was nationally known. Like most Gospel groups in the forties, the Wilson Jubilee Singers toured the church circuits that took them around America’s cities.
By 1949, Carr was an experienced musician and singer. She had a wonderful, deep contralto voice and her musical talents meant that she could lead a choir. When the Pilgrim Travelers came to Cleveland on one of their tours that year, the group’s leader J. W. Alexander heard Carr singing. He decided to fund a recording session with her and then sent the resulting demo to Art Rupe at Specialty Records in Los Angeles, where the Pilgrim Travelers had been under contract since 1948.
Art Rupe liked what heard and invited Carr to come to Los Angeles to record. He set about making Wynona Carr a new Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The aim was to make Gospel songs that were in tune with the development of popular R&B, and Carr had all the required talents, including songwriting. She went into the studio with a Jump Blues Combo led by pianist Austin McCoy and sang two of her compositions, “Each Day” and “Lord Jesus”. The A-side has a Tharpe-like swing, the B-side is a slow ballad, sung with feeling. Her first single was allocated the serial number SP 324 and may have been issued in March 1949. It is not listed in the two main discography listings. Neither is the follow-up single “I Want To Go To Heaven and Rest” backed by “I Know That He Knows” on SP 333.
Both are credited to Sister Wynona Carr. Art Rupe had added the Sister in imitation of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Carr wasn’t impressed; she felt it made her sound old, but Rupe was the boss, and, as he said, it didn’t do Rosetta Tharpe any harm. Carr recorded around twenty Gospel songs for Specialty but probably only eight singles were released, all with the Sister credit.
If they were issued, the first two singles didn’t make much of a mark. Carr returned to Cleveland, to write songs and then to join the Gospel circuit. Around six months later, her second studio session took place in Philadelphia, where she presumably performing. She had written two songs for the session, both based on well-known secular songs. Sam Cooke had taken a Gospel song and turned it into a Pop song (“Lovable”) at Specialty. Now Carr took “St. James Infirmary” and “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and turned them into modern Gospel songs. The first became “I’m A Pilgrim Traveler” (a thank-you to J.W Alexander?) and the second “I Heard The News (Jesus Is Coming Again)”. Rupe was looking for something new. What Carr delivered was a stunning Jazz-based ballad and a up-tempo dance track worthy of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, both made even more special by Harry W. Polk on guitar. She then added an even more dramatic song, a version of the Lord’s Prayer which she called “Our Father”, that she had written with J. W. Alexander, in a style more akin to Mahalia Jackson’s. All three tracks confirm Carr’s talents as a singer and songwriter.
Art Rupe listened to the recordings and put them on the shelf! He came up with a new idea early in 1950, deciding to record a few songs with Carr in Los Angeles alongside the label’s new Gospel singer Brother Joe May. Together they recorded the Carr/Alexander composition “Our Father”, plus four more Wynona Carr songs. “Our Father” was put on the shelf again, while the other tracks were released as two singles in 1950. “I See Jesus” and “It’s All Right” demonstrate the power of both singers, but the songs are in a more traditional style. Even so, sales were not good. Two more solo singles followed, “I Know Someday God’s Gonna Call Me” in 1950 and “The Good Old Way” in 1951. They demonstrate the power of Carr’s voice, but the backing doesn’t add much to either.
Carr went back to Cleveland and then to Detroit, where she was later appointed director of the choir at the New Bethel Baptist Church by the Rev. C. L. Franklin, the father of Aretha Franklin. She recorded just one song with the New Bethel choir, a new version of “Our Father”, which was finally released in 1992 by Ace Records UK on the compilation entitled “Dragnet For Jesus”, despite a fault on the recording (there is a ten second break). It is a spine-tingling performance that shows just how far ahead of her time Wynona Carr was.
Despite her failure to create a big hit, she continued to push the boundaries of Gospel music. Back in Hollywood in 1952, she recorded a song that she had written, using sport as a metaphor for the struggles of leading a Christian life. “The Ball Game” is imaginative and catchy, but Art Rupe chose four other songs from the session for the next two singles, both released in 1952. Carr’s voice is as good as ever, and the backing is much stronger! The use of the organ on three of the tracks adds to sense of being in a church congregation! Nevertheless, “Conversation With Jesus” and “A Letter To Heaven” failed to make an impression.
Finally, in 1953, Rupe decided to release “The Ball Game”. It gave Carr the first success of her career, as it soon became one of Specialty’s Gospel top-sellers, with its use of baseball to illustrate the fight between good and evil. Carr was taking Gospel away from the old approach and aiming at something modern that people could relate to:
Yes, you know, Jesus is standing at the home plate
He’s waiting for you there
Well, you know, life is a ball game
But you’ve got to play it fair.
Inexplicably, for the next year, Carr went back to performing and songwriting. Then, in 1954, the chance came to record again. The session took place in Detroit, where Carr was working at the New Bethel Baptist Church, with Johnny Vincent in charge. Two more imaginative songs were ready: “15 Rounds With Jesus” and “Dragnet for Jesus”. The first was a boxing metaphor, and the second was a re-working of Dragnet, a popular TV show at that time. Sadly, they both went on the shelf with the others.
Carr must have been disheartened, but she was soon out on the road again. The opportunity had arisen to join Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Sister Marie Knight, two of the best-known Gospel singers of that era. They went not just to the churches in the Black communities but also to clubs with racially mixed audiences. Tharpe had broken down some of the barriers and was welcomed into many more venues than Carr had been able to visit. In addition, Tharpe and Knight had added some secular material to their playlists.
This tour gave Carr the push she needed to go to Art Rupe and ask him to record her singing secular songs. She wasn’t happy to sing pure Blues – that was the Devil’s music – but she was happy to sing most other genres. She told Rupe that she wanted to sing “pops, jumps, ballads, and semi-blues”. She also made it clear that she wanted to work across all communities, not just entertaining her own.
Rupe agreed! For the next four years she recorded a series of R&B songs at Specialty.
The Gospel tracks that Rupe had not chosen to release sat on the shelf until Ace Records in the UK licensed them along with those that had been released and put together a wonderful Gospel compilation in 1992 entitled “Dragnet For Jesus”. It was issued as CD in 2004.
Hidden amongst the Gospel songs is a piano instrumental, untitled, that shows just how good a musician she was. The final track is “Our Father”, which still has all its power after seventy years.
Part 2 will tell the story of Wynona Carr as an R&B artist.
