Marie Knight: Hallelujah What a Song! (1946-1951)

Marie Knight belongs to the select group of great soloists in the history of Afro-American gospel. With a voice that one recent reviewer described as "a natural wonder, an unadorned, powerful instrument," Knight began her career touring the national gospel circuit with evangelist Frances Robinson as a young woman in the mid-'40s, recording a few sides with the quartet The Sunset Four. The guitar-playing Tharpe, a major recording artist on the Decca Records label who brought gospel music to a broad audience, first heard Knight sing at a Mahalia Jackson concert in New York in 1946. Two weeks later, Tharpe showed up at Knight's house in Newark, N.J., to invite her to go on the road with her. "She was a beautiful woman with a beautiful contralto voice, who had a spellbinding effect on audiences," said Gayle Wald, who interviewed Knight for her 2007 biography "Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe." Tharpe and Knight toured through the late '40s, appearing in clubs, arenas, churches and auditoriums. "Sometimes the one-nighters and the traveling was a little rough," Knight told the Times Union of Albany, N.Y., in 2005, "but on the stage was beautiful." Tharpe and Knight were best known for their classic gospel duets 'Up Above My Head', 'Beams of Heaven' and 'Didn't It Rain.' "They had a dynamic, exciting sound where they traded off vocal lines," Wald said. "That was a kind of hallmark with their duet singing, and it was so vocally agile that it approximated the sounds of jazz." After several years of recording together, Tharpe and Knight parted ways except for occasional on-stage reunions during the '50s, including performances at leading jazz clubs in New York City in 1955. In the '60s, Knight pursued a R&B career and toured with Brook Benton, the Drifters and Clyde McPhatter. After a hiatus, she returned to recording gospel music in the mid-'70s. This 22 track compilation features her work from 1946 to 1951, and features her collaborations with the Sam Price Trio/Quartet, the Nightingales, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Sunset Four, the Dependable Boys and others. Highlights include 'In the Shaded Green Pastures', 'Hallelujah What a Song' and 'I Thank You Jesus'. Although she was a top gospel soloist, Marie was more or less invisible to the gospel world at large during the last two decades, and in the fall of 2001, it was revealed through gospel expert Anthony Heilbut that Marie was still active as a singing pastor in New York. Unfortunatelly, she died in New York City on August 30 due to complications from Pneumonia. http://www.worldsrecords.com/. http://www.marieknight.com/

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Marie Knight singing 'You Better Run':