How Great Thou Art Review

Everything else from this period is a soundtrack he did not care about. This is the exception, and you can hear the difference in the first thirty seconds. Gospel was the music he grew up inside, and given a room, a piano, a vocal group and no film to service, he sings with an involvement that had gone missing. The title track is the centrepiece, building from a near whisper to a full voiced climax that he attacks head on rather than sliding into.

Where No One Stands Alone works the same way. Run On and So High are the up tempo quartet numbers and they swing properly. The material is traditional and the arrangements are conservative, which limits how far it can go, and there is no writing here to assess since none of it is his. But as a performance record it is the most honest thing he put out between the army and Memphis, and the award it won was not sentiment.