AMY TURNER
His voice sold millions of records, his name still sells out tribute concerts, and his gospel recordings remain some of the most emotionally raw performances in American music history. But to Billy Blackwood, Elvis Presley was something simpler, and more human, than any of that.
“He was just the kind of guy, honestly, it was hard not to love him,” Blackwood recalled. “He was just a sweet man, just a gentle, real, loving man.”
It is that personal dimension, the Elvis who existed in small rooms with a handful of people rather than on stadium stages, that gives a new collaborative recording project its particular weight. Ronnie Booth, one of gospel music’s most respected voices, has joined forces with the Blackwood Brothers Quartet for “Together: Gospel Tribute to the King,” a collection built around the sacred songs that shaped Elvis Presley’s faith and defined his spiritual identity.
Billy Blackwood, who sings baritone and has worked as a songwriter throughout his career, is one of the few people still active in gospel music who knew Presley personally. He was the younger son of James Blackwood, the quartet’s longtime leader and public face, and those family connections placed him in rooms where Elvis was simply himself.
“When you’re in a room this size and there’s eight or 10 people around, you get to know what somebody’s like when you have enough exposure,” Blackwood said. “I think his life and his thinking, maybe his heart got really corrupted by what the world had to offer. But my gosh, I just loved him. He was a sweetheart of a man.”
The Blackwood Brothers Quartet was not merely a successful singing group. For nearly a century, it has functioned as something closer to an institution. Founded in 1934 by brothers Roy, Doyle, and James, along with Roy’s son R.W., the quartet began building a following during an era when gospel music was still finding its place in the broader American cultural landscape.
The early decades were not without tragedy. In the late 1950s, Roy and Doyle retired from the road, and in 1954 R.W. was killed in a plane crash, a loss that shook the gospel world. James Blackwood, however, rebuilt. Under his leadership, the quartet assembled a new lineup of singers and took their music far beyond the American South. They performed in all fifty United States and every Canadian province. They carried their sound to Great Britain, across Europe, into the Middle East and Northern Africa, south to South Africa, and across Asia to Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. By almost any measure, they became the best-known name in gospel music history.
James Blackwood died in 2002, but the tradition he built did not end with him. His sons, Jimmy (James Jr.) and Billy, carried the work forward. More recently, Jimmy retired after 49 years on the road, leaving Billy as the keeper of a legacy that now spans more than eight decades.
Elvis Presley’s relationship with gospel music was not a publicity exercise. He grew up in Assembly of God churches in Mississippi and Tennessee, singing hymns long before he ever walked into a recording studio. The Blackwood Brothers were part of that world, and young Elvis was part of their audience. That connection eventually grew into something more personal, and Billy Blackwood’s recollections of Presley carry the kind of detail that only comes from genuine proximity; not the carefully managed image of a superstar, but a man who could sit comfortably in a small group and show his actual nature.
Blackwood’s tenderness in describing Presley is matched by an honesty about the pressures that made his later life so complicated. The faith, he suggests, was always real, even when everything around it was not.
One track from the project, “Put your hand in the hand,” is currently in rotation on Texas Gospel now. For Ronnie Booth and the Blackwood Brothers, the album represents something beyond a conventional tribute; it is a recording made by people who carry a direct connection to gospel music’s most storied era, honouring a performer whose faith, whatever its complications, was entirely genuine. For Billy Blackwood, that faith was the truest thing he ever saw in Elvis Presley, and it is clearly the part of him he remembers best.
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