I had been singing in the church since age five, but after that night at St. Luke’s, music and faith became the absolute center of my life. I was committed to singing and spreading the Word, and at the same time, the Drinkard Quartet—which we renamed the Drinkard Singers—kept on performing, getting bigger and more popular.
Ronnie Williams, one of the area’s biggest gospel promoters, was booking us in shows all over New York and New Jersey, and all down the eastern seaboard. We mostly sang at small churches, but we were also booked into concerts with some of the biggest quartets of the day—acts like the Davis Sisters, with their featured singer Jackie Verdell; the Swan Silvertones; and the Dixie Hummingbirds, with their fabulous lead singer Claude Jeter.
And during the early 1950s, while traveling on the circuit with the Soul Stirrers, I met their lead singer, Sam Cooke. Sam was not only a great singer but also a very good-looking man. We dated for a quick minute back then, and I almost wound up married to him. But Sam lived in too fast a world for me. I knew that neither my Daddy nor my sisters would approve of our relationship, or of Sam’s forays away from gospel and into the world of pop music. Many people—like my sisters—didn’t like seeing their gospel stars move into the world of secular music, as they considered it a form of backsliding from the church. And I was young enough then that I still worried what other people thought about stuff like that.
My sister Lee was managing us now, and like my father, she was determined to keep the Drinkards on the straight and narrow, far from the temptations of popular entertainment. So when New York City DJ Joe Bostic, known as the “Dean of Gospel Disc Jockeys,” approached her about recording deals, management contracts, expanded road tours, radio, and TV shoots, she shot him down quick.
At the time, gospel music was becoming more commercial, and at certain gospel extravaganzas, or during engagements at places like the Apollo Theater in Harlem, we’d seen how some groups succumbed to the temptations that came with fame and money. Backstage, some so-called church folk and gospel artists were every bit as sinful as the world they were supposed to be saving. Lee didn’t want us anywhere near that.
But a little later on, Bostic made an offer Lee couldn’t refuse. He had plans to feature Mahalia Jackson in a show at Carnegie Hall—and he wanted us on the program, too. Lee quickly agreed, so in October 1951, the Drinkards appeared on that famed Fifty-Seventh Street stage with Mahalia and other gospels greats such as Rosetta Tharpe and Clara Ward. This was the biggest venue we’d ever performed in, and that show nearly tore the house down—literally. At one point, Mahalia had to warn the crowd that if they didn’t cool it, the police were going to empty the hall and put us all out in the street.
This was a magical evening, but even a Carnegie Hall appearance wasn’t allowed to affect our regular routine. There was a big party afterward, but do you think Daddy let us go? No, all of us Drinkards dutifully piled into a cab, went to the Port Authority, and took a bus back to New Jersey—right back to focusing on church, our day jobs, and rehearsals.
My father didn’t come to see us perform that night, and some people wondered why. But you know, I didn’t really expect him to get all excited about Carnegie Hall. To Daddy, gospel was never about fortune or fame or the greatest venue in New York City. It was about ministry and teaching the Word—these were the only things that mattered to him.
And that’s why Daddy soon began urging me to take over directing the St. Luke’s choir. He believed that teaching, and helping others to express their gift, was a crucial part of gospel music. That’s what he’d done for his children, and I guess he wanted to pass along that vision to me. I was reluctant—directing a choir was a lot of work, and I just wanted to sing. But once I started, I soon found teaching others almost as rewarding as singing.
I taught the choir just as Reebie and my father had taught us—with a firm hand and a focus on what really mattered. And like them, I didn’t take no mess. This was the same way I would teach Nippy years later, when she told me she wanted to be a singer—no messing around, no shirking. It might have seemed hard-edged or strict, as I wasn’t one to sugarcoat anything. But that was the way I had learned, so it was the only way I knew how to do it.
Our family had already been through so much together—the fire, losing my brother William to the streets, my mother’s strokes and her death, and my father’s remarriage. But through it all, we had stayed close and looked out for each other. We were all adults now, living our own lives and working day jobs while singing with the Drinkards. Once again, life was good—but if I knew anything by now, it was that you never know what’s around the corner.
In the spring of 1952, when I was eighteen, my father went into the hospital because of stomach pains. Exploratory surgery revealed that he had stomach cancer, and it was already so advanced that even though he’d only just been diagnosed, it was too late to do anything. Within a week, Daddy was dead.
Perhaps because I was older and closer to him, and was able to understand more clearly what had happened, I was even more devastated by my father’s death than my mother’s. I walked around in a daze. I just couldn’t believe that my father, the man who had always been there for us, who had served as a model and a protector through good times and bad, was gone. Just like that, I had no parents—and I was barely out of high school.
Life after Daddy’s death was a blur. I was lonely and restless, and I didn’t have any kind of ambition left in me. What was the point, when everything could just be taken away from you in the blink of an eye? Without my father’s steadying hand, and mired in sadness at his death, I started to slide from the safe and disciplined path he’d always kept us on.
I started drinking, and for a few years, I partied pretty heavily with my brothers and my sister Annie. I did still make it to church every Sunday morning, and I never missed a choir rehearsal, but things were changing at St. Luke’s, too, which only added to my feelings of being unmoored.
We had always loved St. Luke’s, especially its regular pastor, the Reverend Warrick, who had started coming to our house for dinner back when my mother was still alive. My parents loved Reverend Warrick and his wife, and we were all thrilled when the reverend’s son, Mancel, got together with my sister Lee. (They married and had three children—my nieces Dee Dee and Dionne Warwick, who both later became recording artists, and my nephew Mancel Jr.) Our families were very close, and Reverend Warrick was a big part of the reason we loved St. Luke’s. So, when he left the church not long after my father died, we all began drawing away from it, too. We just didn’t feel as comfortable there anymore.
Losing St. Luke’s on top of everything could have been the final straw, plunging me even further into drinking and despair. But just when we needed it, our family found another church. The Drinkards had sung a few times at New Hope Baptist Church, and we all liked it. So we decided to switch to New Hope, and soon I took over directing their choir there. New Hope would become my spiritual home, the place where I would worship for the rest of my life—and the church where Nippy would first learn to sing. Years later, it would also be the place where we brought her home, to lay her to rest.
But all that was far in the future. For the moment, New Hope was the place that drew me back from partying and straying, the place where I once again found strength in my faith and managed to put myself right. My parents were gone, and it was time for me to grow up, time to move on to the next part of my life—even though, as I’d find soon enough, I was still so naive I didn’t know my rear end from my elbow.
I started the next phase of my life with a big misstep, by marrying a man named Freddy Garland. A good-looking construction worker, Freddy had proposed after a couple of months of dating, and I said yes. I suppose I agreed because I was lonely—my sisters and brothers were all starting families by then, and I was the only one who wasn’t married. Freddy and I married at New Hope in 1955, but within a few months I knew I’d made a mistake. He was a good man, but I didn’t love him, so I left him after two years of marriage—even though