Source: Lester Cohen / Getty
Clarence Fountain, founding member and longtime leader of the gospel group the Blind Boys of Alabama, passed away on Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana at the age of 88.
The Blind Boys of Alabama confirmed Fountain’s death in a statement on the group’s website. No cause of death was provided, but the group’s manager said Fountain entered a Baton Rouge hospital on Friday.
Born in 1929 in Tyler, Alabama, Fountain was enrolled at the age of eight into the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind. While singing in the school’s choir, Fountain and five friends formed the Happy Land Jubilee Singers. That group toured throughout the Forties and recorded the 1948 hit “I Can See Everybody’s Mother But Mine” before changing their name to the Blind Boys of Alabama – coined by a Newark, New Jersey concert promoter – at the turn of the decade.
“These men were both raised as blind, African American males in the Deep South during the Jim Crow years, and they were sent to a school where the expectation for them was to one day make brooms or mops for a living,” Blind Boys of Alabama manager Charles Driebe said in the statement of Fountain and Jimmy Carter, the group’s lone surviving founding member. “But they transcended all that. The arc of their lives and of the band reflects the arc of a lot of changes in American society.”
source: Rolling Stone.com
