#52 SOULFULLY by Andrae Crouch & the Disciples (1972)

SOULFULLY by Andrae Crouch & the Disciples (1972)
Light Records (LS-5581-LP)

“This album was a particularly tasty slice of soul food back in 1972, and still sounds great today.” –Thom Granger

It was the third national release from Andrae Crouch & the Disciples. 

Soulfully, they called it. 

The first two albums from the group sounded a bit like black artists making safe music that would be palatable to a white audience. On this, their third release, AC&D raised the bar and began to confound expectations. This was a potent mix of Black Gospel and Jesus Music…a group of authentic black artists doing what came naturally…touching people, regardless of their race or religious affiliation…going wherever the Holy Spirit said go. They were a group that God raised up “for such a time as this.”

In his Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, author Mark Allan Powell says that Soulfully revealed “a tight, well produced band that could’ve held their own against any R&B act in the land.” It was Christian music’s first real taste of the Motown sound and Philadelphia Soul. When you mix Andrae Crouch’s songwriting, the group’s soulful singing, electric sitars, fuzzy guitars, lush strings, wah-wah pedals, and the anointing of the Holy Spirit…you get an album like Soulfully.

But…in the words of college football analyst Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friends.”

Bill Maxwell

I learned during a recent conversation with Andrae’s longtime drummer and producer Bill Maxwell that there is an alternate view of Soulfully that might surprise you. It may even shock you.

“I think it’s one of the worst records Andrae ever did,” Maxwell said in a phone interview from his home in California. “I thought it was so off-point to who he was. And so did he.”

What?!

Hold on…just calm down. Let him explain.

“He made some mistakes along the way,” Maxwell continues. “His sister was working for Motown a lot during the Jackson 5 records, and she got all of these Motown arrangers, and they tried to turn Andrae’s songs into Motown songs. It was Andrae’s attempt to break free of the bubble gum production that he’d had before with Take the Message Everywhere and Keep On Singin’. And so they kind of turned it into Motown. They took songs like Through It All and It Won’t Be Long and didn’t really do them the way Andrae did them. For me, they kind of missed the meat of what the songs were. Everybody has their opinions. I thought Soulfully just totally missed it. But he let it happen.”

To be fair, the “Motown sound” seems to be what a lot of people loved about this record. But I think the most glaring example of what Bill Maxwell is talking about would be the song You Don’t Know What You’re Missing. It’s one of the standout songs on Soulfully and it would go on to have a special place in the hearts of millions thanks to its inclusion on a subsequent album – Live at Carnegie Hall. The live version is the way You Don’t Know What You’re Missing was meant to be heard. The version on Soulfully…well, let’s just be kind and say that the producer and arranger didn’t do the song justice.

Bill Maxwell drumming for Andrae

According to Bill Maxwell, Crouch was not in a big hurry to finish Soulfully.

“When I agreed to join Andrae, I moved to California and I was staying at his house and I can remember he got a phone call from the record company,” Maxwell recalls. “They said they were tired of Andrae procrastinating and they were mixing Soulfully without him. They said, ‘We’re just putting it out.’”

Maxwell continues: “The recording of Soulfully started in ’71 and the record didn’t come out until the fall of ’72. Andrae spent about a year and a half on it and he just wouldn’t finish it. So they just said, ‘We’ll take whatever vocals we have.’ That became a tendency of Andrae later in life—he never wanted to finish any record he had started. You’d have to drag him into the studio. Or, you’d be getting ready to master it and he’d beg you to let him re-do his vocals, and then he’d spend another month on it!”

In a book called The 100 Greatest Albums in Christian Music, CCM journalist Thom Granger wrote these words:

The cover said a lot about this record: the four key members of Andrae Crouch’s Disciples photographed on a set of railroad tracks, looking the way black people looked in 1972 – Afro hairstyles, bright funky clothes and a healthy amount of pride on their faces.  

Andrae Crouch’s message was always “Jesus.” But race was also an important factor in Andrae’s personal story and rise to prominence in Christendom. 

“The Lord prepares His people to meet any situation,” Andrae wrote in an autobiography titled Through It All (with Nina Ball, 1974, Word Books). “Whites aren’t any different from blacks, blacks from Orientals, or Orientals from Mexicans. Mankind is born in sin and shaped in iniquity and one race is just as funky as another,” he explained. 

Then Andrae ventured into territory that some audiences would consider politically incorrect today: “Though there’s no difference at all,” he wrote, “I disagree with making mankind a melting pot. We can have unity in purpose and spirit and still keep our separate ethnic and cultural identities. It’s like rice and beans—they get together and you can still see the rice and still see the beans. They’re not all smashed up together so you can’t tell what they are. We need to enjoy the rice and the beans. The Apostle Paul was different from Job and Job was different from David. They were different writers with different lessons but they all had a unity of purpose.”

Andrae was welcome among the rice and the beans.

Crouch’s music paved the way for greater understanding and acceptance, and served as a bridge between “white church” and “black church”…between Black Gospel and Southern Gospel…between Black Gospel and Jesus Music. Andrae Crouch shared Jesus within his denomination, the predominantly black Church of God in Christ, but he was equally effective sharing Jesus with busloads of ethnically diverse youth group kids at an outdoor Jesus festival or, later, with the grey-haired white grandparents who buy those Gaither Homecoming videos. 

The man and his music had reach.

If you don’t believe it, just do a little poking around on YouTube sometime. You can quickly and easily find a 20-minute clip of conservative Caucasian Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart singing a medley of two of Andrae’s greatest songs.

Author Nina Ball, who was tasked with helping Andrae write his aforementioned autobiography in 1974 (Through It All, Word Books), related a story that will no doubt offend the PC sensibilities of some here in 2016, but it was a playful glimpse into Andrae’s view of race relations in the early 70s. She writes:

One day while working on the chapter dealing with prejudice, he’d been serious for as long as he can be at one time. A mischievous gleam came into his eyes and with an Andrae grin he said, “You may call me a nigger, And you may think it’s true, But if I am like Jesus, Then you’re gonna be one too!”

Soulfully was produced by Bill Cole (who also produced Keep On Singin’ and Just Andrae). Woody Woodward Grafix designed the album cover and took the photographs. The album’s back cover was a photo of the group playing live on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on NBC. It happened to be the very first time drummer Bill Maxwell had ever played on stage with Andrae Crouch.

“I didn’t work on Soulfully,” Maxwell said. “They had been working on it for about a year and a half before I joined. After I joined Andrae, the first time I ever played with him on stage was on The Tonight Show. He went down and auditioned and they liked him and put him on The Tonight Show. No one ever got in off of auditions, but he did. Andrae was great; he didn’t know how great he was. He didn’t have any big credits at that time. This was before he exploded. He just went down and auditioned, and the talent booker liked him.” 

“He tracked me down and asked me to fly out,” Maxwell remembers. “We were on tour with Reba Rambo and Randy Matthews and he asked if we could fly out and play on The Tonight Show because he didn’t think his band was—he just felt like they could be better. So he flew me out, we went in and rehearsed, and did The Tonight Show the next night. That was the first time; I played on there with him many times after that.” 

"Thanks Andrae, Johnny Carson"

Soulfully kicks off with a performance every bit as smooth and current as anything on the R&B Top 40 in 1972. But the message of Everything Changed was based on II Corinthians 5:17: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new...  

One cold and dreary night
He stepped into my life
And He brought to me the breath of Spring
And then He gave me a brand new song to sing

Everything changed
Everything changed
When Christ stepped into my life

Andrae sang lead on most of the album’s songs, but the other Disciples got a chance to shine vocally on He Proved His Love to Me, Oh I Need Him, I Come That You Might Have Life, and Try Me One More Time.

In the 60s Mick Jagger famously complained, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” In 1972, Andrae Crouch answered, “I’ve got a satisfied feeling down in my soul.”

 

Satisfied, with its memorable intro riff, is said to be AC&D’s first full-bore rock song, with its gritty guitar work and earthy rhythm. It definitely caught the ear of the Jesus people who gathered by the tens of thousands in Dallas, TX for Explo 72. The group’s performance of this song at that festival became somewhat iconic and is available for viewing today on YouTube.

Satisfied is also notable for tackling the subject of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in a straight-forward way in the song’s second verse:

You know the joy of the Lord was so wonderful
That I wanted a little bit more
So I got down on my knees
I lifted my hands
I began to praise the Lord
Something started moving, bubbling, churning
Down in my soul
Right then and there
You know the Lord filled me with the Holy Ghost

The idea of the Holy Spirit baptism is deemed controversial by some. Many teachers say that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit occurs only at the moment of salvation, and they can point to Scriptures to bolster that claim. Those folks are sometimes known as Cessationists, and they teach that the gifts of the Holy Spirit “died out” with the original apostles. Others maintain that the Holy Spirit baptism is a separate and distinct experience occurring subsequent to salvation and they, too, claim biblical backing. One thing’s for sure—the most difficult task a naysayer would have is to somehow convince a person who has experienced the Holy Spirit baptism that “it isn’t for today”…that it was a one-time event intended for the original Day of Pentecost. Because convincing someone who has had an experience that he didn’t actually have it is not easy. Especially considering the fact that the Apostle Paul discusses at length the proper use of tongues, prophecy and other spiritual gifts in his letters to the Corinthian church, well after the Day of Pentecost. For whatever reason, this is a topic that has been painfully neglected over the years by Christian musicians, most likely due to the fear and confusion it presents for many believers.

In the book Through It All, Andrae Crouch reveals that he saw visions and actually heard God speak to him while he was yet a child. He also goes into great detail on his own experience with the Baptism of the Holy Spirit:

It was a few months after I was saved when I was sitting with the congregation at Val Verde while Dad was preaching that I started to say “Praise the Lord” but some strange words came out. I just gasped. I covered my mouth and thought, Oh no. I’m not supposed to do that. They’ll think I’m imitating somebody. A few minutes later I started to say “Praise God” and again the strange words came. I tried to reason with myself. I thought, Nobody’s gonna believe you. You weren’t even tarrying with them. In some of our churches where Dad went to preach, they had what they call tarry meetings. A tarry meeting was like a prayer service. After a person was saved, he could wait around, tarry, and receive the Holy Spirit. It was a big thing to receive the Holy Ghost, as they called Him, and a lot of work to tarry. They’d clap their hands, pray, and say things like “Get your mind on the Lord, Thank You Jesus, and Fill me, Jesus” with raised hands.

Meetings of this type were held mostly among the smaller churches or if a revival was coming through. My folks didn’t believe that was the only way to receive the Holy Spirit. I never could understand why if I got saved by simply saying “Jesus, come into my heart and save me from my sins,” I would have to beg Him for His Holy Spirit to empower me for service. I knew they tarried in the Upper Room for the Holy Spirit but they were told to wait for His arrival. But since that time, He has already arrived. We don’t have to wait for Him anymore. Because I thought some of the people wouldn’t be able to understand my reasoning, I suppressed the gift for about two years. But one day during a worship service, I was just so happy rejoicing, I said, “It’s gotta come out! I don’t care who knows today!” I just praised the Lord and let it all come out.

After that, when I started exercising the gift, I was opened up to boldness for the Lord. I was filled with His love and joy and power. Words are inadequate to express the joy. I think that’s why He gives us the gift, to replace inadequate words. Some people call it the charismatic experience, some call it sanctification, and others call it a deeper Christian experience. But no matter what label you put on it, it is good. I just thank the Lord for this precious, gracious gift.

In the book Andrae also addressed the divergence of views within the body of Christ regarding spiritual gifts:

I am a Holy Spirit pusher and I’m highly opposed to people putting down the charismatic renewal, but while singing in many churches I’ve especially noticed two groups: One plays the holier-than-thou, super-spiritual role because they have received the charismatic gifts. Unfortunately they don’t let His supernatural power flow through them in a natural way—they force it. And there is another group that says the gifts are not for today.

I would like to say to both groups, “Hey, it ain’t no new thing! Jesus started the movement! Look, you haven’t got something nobody else has. Look, Jesus gives the gifts!” 

And then, Andrae’s natural bent as a bridge-builder and consensus seeker kicked in as he penned these words:

I wish there was some way we could get on the right road and just see Jesus, so the groups could be bridged together in love. The Bible says we are to work out our own soul’s salvation as we are fed by Jesus. If we’re feeding on Jesus, then we’ll be to each other what He wants us to be and we’ll be to the world what God wants us to be.

L-R: Perry Morgan, Fletch Wiley, Bill Maxwell, Andrae Crouch, Bili Thedford, Sandra Crouch, Danniebelle Hall

 

The book Through It All also reveals that Crouch had some interesting—and terrifying—encounters with “the dark side” as a young man…leading him, perhaps, to write songs like Lullaby of the Deceived (from Just Andrae) and Leave the Devil Alone (from Soulfully). He writes in the book of being literally tormented by demonic spirits for a time—at home and on the road. I have no trouble whatsoever believing these accounts, and I applaud Andrae for being brave and transparent enough to share them with the world. I think if I were the devil I’d do everything within my power to take Andrae Crouch out…before he had the opportunity to fully shine like the brilliant force that he became against the kingdom of darkness. Well, Satan gave it his best shot. But he came up empty.

The devil takes people on a merry-go-round. Even in some of my songwriting, I’ve tried to steer people away from any kind of satanic involvement because it opens up a channel in which the devil can work. I’ve found that people who come up with a lot of fear in their life often don’t know why. Sometimes they’ve opened a door through a Ouija board, ESP, astrology, mediums, movies, or satanic-inspired literature, and they don’t even realize it. Satan has a slow way of pulling you into these things, especially when they’re seemingly popular. I want to learn more about putting on the whole armor of God. His armor, His righteousness will take you through any fire and repel any instrument Satan has. Satan is powerful, but our God is all-powerful.

I understand people’s fear when they relate demonic experiences to me, for it is the most terrifying, dreadful experience I have ever had in my life. I tell them how God delivered me—how they must take authority over the demons, throw the Word of God at them, and bind the power of Satan. I also tell them something beautiful: one of the things I like most about Jesus is His love. His perfect love casts out fear. All fear.

-Andrae Crouch (in the book Through It All with Nina Ball, 1974, Word Books)

Soulfully also contains two signature songs that would bless millions. 

The return of Christ was a central focus of the Jesus Movement, and It Won’t Be Long was one of the most popular and best-loved songs on the Second Coming of Jesus. 

It won't be long
Till we'll be leavin' here
It won't be long
We'll be goin' home

Count the years as months
Count the months as weeks
Count the weeks as days
Any day now
We'll be goin' home

It Won’t Be Long has been called a “hauntingly beautiful” song that expresses an “undying hope.”

And then there is Through It All.

I've had many tears and sorrows
I've had questions for tomorrow
There's been times I didn't know right from wrong
But in every situation
God gave me blessed consolation
That my trials only come to make me strong

I've been to lots of places
I've seen a lot of faces
There's been times I felt so all alone
But in my lonely hours
Yes, those precious lonely hours
Jesus let me know that I was His own

I thank God for the mountains
And I thank Him for the valleys
I thank Him for the storms He brought me through
For if I'd never had a problem
I wouldn't know God could solve them
I'd never know what faith in God could do

Through it all
Through it all
I've learned to trust in Jesus
I've learned to trust in God
Through it all
Through it all
I've learned to depend upon His Word

I think it’s fair to say that Through it All is a definitive statement of faith that accurately describes Andrae’s commitment to the Lord and sums up his life like no other song he wrote before or has written since.

In 1972 Andrae Crouch & the Disciples were on the verge of something big. They were about to “blow up” (as we used to say). But not for the sake of simply making money and being famous. They were literally on a mission for God. This is our third Andrae post so far on this blog and three more AC&D albums from the 70s will be examined later in this countdown. Their influence and contributions in the seventies were nothing short of phenomenal…with results that will be eternal. 

Weird fact:
I Come to Give You Life from Soulfully was sampled for a Snoop Dogg song called I Love to Give You Light.