Allan Appel Photo
Before the Salt and Pepper Gospel Choir launched into a set at Tower One/Tower East, chorus founder Mae Gibson Brown humorously warned her elderly audience that her group of 12 singers might get loud. “If you are afraid, I give you a chance to move back.”
No one did.
Salt and Pepper — an allusion to their white and black membership — offered an hour-long program of gospel and traditional Christmas spiritual music that got hands clapping and put smiles on not a few weary faces in an audience of 100 seniors who gathered in the Towers’ main dining room.
Brown said the idea of a diverse chorus singing gospel emerged when she was a teacher in the Branford schools and she and her kids gave a performance. “A white lady came up” afterwards and asked if she could learn to sing like that. Brown, the daughter of a very strict choir master father, asked why the woman would want to subject herself to that. But the woman persisted, saying she had never been so moved by music and wanted to sing it.
That was 30 years ago. Since then the chorus has had a religiously and racially mixed group of altos and sopranos, as well as some male singers, although none were present at Monday night’s vocal celebrations. They’ve sung at schools, nursing homes, prisons, and other places across the country.
Monday night, the second number, “Now Behold the Lamb, the Precious Lamb of God,” demonstrated why they are such a draw. Swaying back and forth, secure in the big sound that a dozen voices can generate, the singers turned their palms up as their voices crescendoed and then turned, on a vocal dime, into a hushed whisper.
By the time they finished the concert with “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” “Oh What a Pretty Little Baby,” and the finale, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” the audience was clapping away with exclamations of appreciation — “Beautiful!” “I love that music!” and “Oh yeah!” — long before the singers finished.
Bob Godfrey, who was a trumpeter for many years in local New Haven bands, was no exception. A one-year resident with his wife at the Towers, Godfrey had a 30-minute straight smile on his face and called the concert “unbelievable.”
After the concert a reporter was interested in knowing if singing gospel presented any special challenge to the white folks.
Betty Brainard, a singer from Stony Creek, shook her head emphatically no. She’s not aware of differences between black and white singers. She’s been with the group for 25 years and was drawn to the group by her lifelong love of rhythm. “It’s a difference in energy, the beat, and type of music,” she said. Brainard acknowledged that when her church group does a gospel number, it does not have the pace and energy of the song as done by Salt and Pepper. Yet what brings her to sing the way she does with the group isn’t emulation of a black style, but what she described as a love of God and religion.
“I’m inspired by being with people in a group, with blacks, whites, Hispanics, in a positive way. This is the way the world should be.” she added.
Before the guest chorus sang, the Towers’ homegrown chorus of five entertained with some gospel of their own. Its founder Joyce Lanier (pictured on the right with fellow Tower chorister Beatrice Jackson) has been at the complex as an employee and now a resident since 1969. She brought down the house with her solo.
“I love singing. It’s a picker-upper. A healer. If you find yourself down in the dumps, find a song,” she added.
Next Sunday’s concert at the Towers, by Nu Haven Kapelye, New England’s largest klezmer band, begins at 1 p.m. and is open to the public.
