"I Can't Feel at Home Anymore" by Laura E. Clemons
“Sir J. Robert Bradley was among the most popular American musicians the majority of us have never heard of. Born in Memphis in 1920, Robert went on to tour six continents during nearly 70 years as soloist and music director of the predominantly African American National Baptist Convention USA. He sang for English royalty, for tens of thousands at Baptist conventions and Billy Graham Crusades, and for President William Tolbert of Liberia, who knighted him. People around the world called him “Mr. Baptist,” and Mahalia Jackson once said that when J. Robert Bradley sang “Amazing Grace,” no one else need try.
“How do you get from a poor Memphis neighborhood to knighthood? That’s the path this narrative essay takes. It is, frankly, an act of love and admiration for not just Robert Bradley and his prodigious talent, but for this man's sturdy, unflappable ambition … and a heartfelt insistence that more people know of him.”
The narrative profile published here is a side-shoot of an essay titled “Sorrow Songs” that Laura contributed to People of the Upper Cumberland (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2015), which won Tennessee’s History Book of the Year She has since expanded that essay into a book-length narrative biography.
I Can’t Feel at Home Anymore
The Making of Sir J. Robert Bradley
In Memphis, Tennessee, around the time of the Great Depression, they called John Robert Bradley “the little boy with the big voice.” He would compete in radio contests on Beale Street, and when other children sang popular blues songs, he would sing “I Will Always Call You Sweetheart.” A blonde-haired girl in his neighborhood stole his heart with her refined ways, but the other kids were just a torture, making fun of his high-falutin’ manner, chasing him through the city streets, and he always blamed one for half-blinding him in a fight. The Baptist church was his sanctuary, and when he sang there, parishioners raced down the aisle to be saved. He said the first hymn he ever sang in public was “I Can’t Feel at Home Anymore,” testifying to his loneliness and desire for a better day.
This world is not my home
I'm just a-passing through
My treasures are laid up
Somewhere beyond the blue
The angels beckon me
From heaven's open door
And I can't feel at home
In this world anymore.
He was always striving to find his place. He wanted to be somebody, encouraged by a frequent message preached in African American churches. And he did not want to wait to get to heaven to feel welcome. Nor would he have to. Born with little he could call his own, but determined to make his way in music, J. Robert Bradley would grow up to be the most famous African American gospel singer most people have never heard of. People today who were lucky enough to sit in pews and stand in aisles as he lifted his voice to heaven revere this singer who outgrew his reputation as the little boy with the big voice. They came to call this mighty bass-baritone “Mr. Baptist.”
When I go back and watch an interview of Robert in his Nashville apartment, I’m even more humbled than I was then. I knew I sat at the feet of a great man; I just didn’t grasp how great until I started talking with people who knew him back in the day. At the time, Robert was 83 years old, three years post-retirement from the massive National Baptist Convention USA, for whom he had served as a singing ambassador since he was 13 years old. He wasn’t well; the effects of diabetes kept him mostly chair-bound. “Go get the photos of my mother and me from off my dresser,” he said, and I leapt to my feet, chirping “yes, sir!” happy to be of service. “Tell me about your mama,” I asked, unafraid to sound Southern in the presence of this distinguished and decidedly Southern gentleman. “My mother was a great woman,” he said, “proper, upright, a Godly woman.” You used to live with Mahalia Jackson, didn’t you? And he said, “Oh, Ma-hal-i-a, I loved her, and I know she loved me.” You sang for English royalty? “Oh, yes,” he said, “in London’s Royal Festival Hall. I was the first singer to bring gospel to the concert halls of Europe.” Were you baptized in the Mississippi River? “The Mississippi River, baptized in the Mississippi River!” he exclaimed, his hands rising in his excitement. “Twenty-one of us lined up, girls in white robes, boys in black robes! When I went to Jerusalem, I was baptized in the River Jordan,” and he showed me another photo, his hands crossed over his chest as he leaned back in the arms of a preacher to accept the healing water flowing over his face.
I interviewed people who knew Robert because I’d decided to write a dual biography of him and Charles Bryan, a White professor who helped him in his early years and became a lifelong friend. Their relationship is a sweet spot in the story of the South. They are an example of our complexity and how music democratizes our relationships. By example, they helped point out how the American sound is forever indebted to the music that drifted off plantations, the Negro spirituals.
Gospel historian and record producer Anthony Heilbut told me, “I think he might have been the greatest male gospel singer at the very least. Everyone,” he said, naming two of the greats, “Alex Bradford, Robert Anderson, each of them independently, would say the same thing, the same phrase: ‘J. Robert Bradley, that man moves my soul.’” Heilbut met Robert in 1972 in a Nashboro recording studio. “He was a great character, a mixture of down-home and high-art,” and what Heilbut was referring to was Robert’s training in classical music -- his rise from the people’s music to music sublime.
In a poor North Memphis community called Pinch, John Robert was born in 1920 to John and Lela Ellis Bradley. “My great grandparents were slaves in Arkansas,” Robert said. “A White lady, a Jewish woman, raised my mother, kept her as a companion for her daughter. My daddy was a lady’s man. Tall, Black, high cheekbones, slender but strong. He had a deep bass voice, and he played the blues. They used to come get my daddy and take him down on the boats and have him to dance for them.”
A stevedore, John worked hard, carrying cotton bales on his shoulders from the dock to a mule-drawn wagon for the Patterson Transfer Company. He split his earnings among his family, cigarettes, spirits and likely other women until his health gave out and he stopped going home.
So Robert began to pitch in. Lela was a housekeeper for a White family. Her salary was enough to pay the rent, but not always groceries, and Robert took to following produce trucks through town, picking up fallen vegetables and fruit, taking some home to the family and selling the rest at a deep discount to neighbors. He fished for the family, snatching crawdads from holes along the riverbank with his bare hands. The winter after he turned 12, Robert sang carols at a Christmas program for other families in need, so moving a corporate sponsor that he sent the Bradleys the gift of warmth – a load of coal to heat their apartment.
But it was another kind of singing that would be the making of J. Robert Bradley. At the auditorium that Christmas Eve, he met Miss Lucie Eddy Campbell, music director for the National Baptist Convention USA, at four million members in the 1930s, the largest African American organization in the country. Miss Lucie, as everyone called her, was a hugely influential church musician. She wrote gospel songs, pageants and plays; auditioned musicians and directed choirs of a thousand voices at Baptist meetings; chose the spirituals, hymns and, increasingly, new gospel songs that Baptists everywhere would sing. Miss Lucie was leading the choir the night of the Christmas program. She snatched little Robert up and put him front and center – the first time she’d do so. The next time was soon to come.
I asked Robert about Lucie Campbell’s influence on him. “Miss Lucie Campbell,” Robert said, shaking his head. “A twelfth-grade teacher at Booker T. Washington in South Memphis. She first found me singing for the poor children. The next time I was catching crawfish down at the river, and the National Baptist Convention met in Memphis at Ellis Auditorium, and with my bucket of crawfish, I found my way walking up the hill,” following the glorious sounds of church music spilling from the auditorium doors. “I stood there with my bucket, my mouth open; that music just fascinated me! One of the fine ladies in the choir said, ‘Take that little ol’ nasty boy off the stage; he’s embarrassing us,’ but Miss Lucie said, ‘Oh, no, leave him alone, he can sing!’ They had to put me on a chair so I could be seen. I sang ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’” and here Robert choked up, caught up in the moment. “The Lord blessed me, he set me on fire, people shouted everywhere, and from then on at the convention I’d sing three, four times a day, and after that, the Baptists began to send for me.”
As they would do for the next 67 years. Word spread quickly of the startling voice coming from this child. Preachers began inviting him to sing at revivals, and before too long, the NBC invited him to join its new touring ensemble, the Goodwill Singers, whose charge was boosting membership and, not incidentally, helping sell the official hymnal of its publishing house which would, in turn, help pay off the convention’s headquarters in downtown Nashville.
Rev. Amos Jones Jr. worked with Robert for many years at the Sunday School Publishing Board, the NBC’s financial engine. Jones pastors at Zion Hill-First African Baptist Church and owns Bethlehem Book Publishers. He was commissioned to write a biography of Robert that came out in 1993 under the Townsend Press label. He and Robert traveled the country frequently, a late-century equivalent of the Goodwill Singers.
“They were similar to the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, paying for the Sunday School Publishing Board, building the Morris Memorial Building, bringing in money,” said Rev. Jones. The Jubilee Singers toured not only America but Europe, and their concerts raised enough money to cover the cost of the magnificent Jubilee Hall on the Fisk campus, built on the site of Union Army barracks after the Civil War. Two Jubilee singers were formerly enslaved workers.
Music historian and journalist Robert Oermann wrote that the original Nashville sound was Black, crediting the Jubilees, who were a long cry from the hillbilly sounds Nashville would become famous for producing. The Jubilees were classically trained; their concert programs included old minstrel standards and European music, as well as Negro spirituals, in spite of some initial reluctance to sing songs that brought back foul memories. They’d sing “Steal Away” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and they’d sing them with all the polish, precision and refinement of classical recitalists: crisp enunciation, standing up straight and narrow, perhaps chafing against a tight white collar or whalebone corset. They also sang Purcell, Strauss and Verdi. Some audience members would always consider them a novelty act; these young college students didn’t look, act or sing like entertainers America loved: the minstrels and players in burlesque and medicine shows. Other audience members (including Mark Twain, one of their most passionate fans) were slayed by the poignancy of their delivery, purity of tone and the songs themselves, representative of an American history many people were trying to thrust behind them.
That’s what Robert wanted to do. From as far back as he could remember, he dreamed of becoming a concert recitalist. He wanted to sing the music of Schubert and Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms – art music that made celebrities of African American classicists Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson.
An unsurprisingly limited number of African American singers enjoyed successful careers in classical music, but of those who did, none were more acclaimed than Hayes, a tenor, Anderson, contralto, and Robeson, bass baritone. In the first half of the 20th century, they sang for royalty, at least one American president, and on stages around the world. Robert’s desired trajectory was high and wide.
“J. Robert was a child prodigy,” said Rev. Jones, “and he grew up singing; I guess he was born singing. He sought out classical training. He was precocious. He didn’t seem to be interested in literary training, but he was a smart man.”
With Miss Lucie’s backing and a partnership with the Goodwill Singers’ pianist, Thomas Shelby Jr., Robert took to the road as a solo act.
“He was 16 and invited to Chattanooga for a revival, and somehow my father, a car dealer, became the driver for Bradley and Shelby,” said Rev. Chris Jackson, senior pastor at Pleasant Green Baptist Church in Nashville. “None of them could do what the other could do. Bradley could sing but he couldn’t play or drive, Shelby could play but he couldn’t sing or drive, and my father could drive but couldn’t play or sing! They all needed each other. That one-week revival turned into a year; first one church would want them, then another and another. The whole time being driven around by my father. They forged a hard and fast relationship, and it grew into a lifelong relationship.”
Pastor Jackson moved from Chattanooga to Nashville and inherited Robert from his father about the time Robert retired. For years, Jackson bought Robert’s groceries, picked up his mail and paid his bills, drove him to doctor’s appointments. Late in Robert’s life, Pastor Jackson also drove him to Memphis, where a street in the Pinch neighborhood had been named in Robert’s honor, and to a Nashville stage where, in 2005, Robert would sing publicly for the last time.
Robert learned gospel songs directly from their composers (that’s how new the genre was) – Miss Lucie, Rev. William Herbert Brewster, also of Memphis, Theodore Frye, Cleavant Derricks – but he took his cues from his teachers who gave him form, breath, classical repertoire. He met his first formal teacher, Charles Faulkner Bryan, in 1938 during a summer revival at St. Mary’s Baptist Church in Charles’s hometown of McMinnville, Tennessee. Charles and his wife, Edith, had heard about a recital featuring Robert and Shelby, and their curiosity about this apparent prodigy overcame any hesitation they may have had about attending a song service at an African American church. Robert did not disappoint. The Bryans, sitting in a back pew, were flabbergasted by the rich velvet of the young man’s bass-baritone and approached Robert after the service.
“Charles Bryan said that voice needs training,” said Robert. “He said have you ever studied? and I said no, and he said you’re going to. He said be here at 9. I was there at 8. I wanted to see what he was talking about” and here, Robert started singing scales to demonstrate those first lessons, which mystified him. “I don’t have to do that, I just go to sing a song,” Robert said, shrugging. “But from that day, every morning during the revival, we vocalized. And after that, he started teaching me songs.”
As Robert prepared to leave town after the revival, Charles made him an astounding offer: to continue vocal studies at Tennessee Polytechnic Institute, a White public school specializing in agriculture and engineering with an enrollment of barely 1,000 where Charles directed the music program.
Robert did it. He got off the road in November and moved to Cookeville. He worked odd jobs to pay for his room and board at an African American minister’s home. Robert said, "Mr. Bryan took an awful chance. For what he did for me, he could have lost his job.” It wasn’t long before the whole school knew about it. Students would line up in the hallway outside their music professor’s studio to hear Robert sing.
But the National Baptist Convention was calling him back to Nashville, and coincidentally, the Bryans moved as well, accepting a fellowship at Nashville’s exclusively White Peabody College.
“When he found out that I was here, he brought me to Peabody,” Robert said. “They thought there was going to be trouble. When he introduced me to the class in chapel, we got a few boos, but he put his arm around me, and we walked down the aisle [to the stage] and he said, ‘Now sing for them, Robert,’ and well, as I began to sing, the house quietened. And when I was through, I had walked halfway back down the aisle to my seat when the students broke out applauding.”
Robert didn’t stay in Nashville long. The Goodwill Singers tours kept him on the road, and a new opportunity arose. The NBC’s president, Rev. L.K. Williams of Chicago, had been watching Robert since his unofficial debut in 1933, and offered the young man a soloist position with the choir at Olivet Baptist Church, Rev. Williams’s home church and the largest Black Baptist church in the country. Robert was 20 years old.
Chicago was good to him. Memphis and Nashville brimmed with good music, but Chicago was home to some of the best gospel singers, writers and performers in the world. The man known as the father of gospel music, Thomas A. Dorsey, worked there, as did so many other massively talented musicians … all, however, to be eclipsed by Mahalia Jackson.
No single person contributed more to a broad appreciation of the African American gospel sound than Mahalia Jackson. She didn’t do it singlehandedly; she rose to heights previously unknown while standing on the shoulders of composers including Miss Lucie, Rev. Brewster and Thomas Dorsey. If you want to point to a moment in time when gospel captured the minds and hearts of both Black and White Americans, you would have to consider January 20, 1952, when Mahalia Jackson appeared on Ed Sullivan’s show “The Toast of the Town” and sang a breathtaking rendition of “These Are They” by Rev. Brewster. She stood before a national audience in the popular new medium of television, and sang with the same heartfelt conviction she shared with congregations – and Americans loved her for it.
But before that, Mahalia occupied the same spaces Robert did: NBC churches and halls. She made her living from hairdressing and singing at funerals. That income helped her help others, and she became a magnet for preachers and singers who would gather at her home for fellowship and food. Robert joined that group soon after arriving in Chicago in 1940. Mahalia let him sleep over sometimes, share meals; sometimes, she even did his laundry.
What she would not do was let him tell her how to sing. Good intentions aside, Robert’s growing air of refinement just rubbed her the wrong way. “The artist,” as she called him, tried to school her – the great Mahalia Jackson! -- on articulation and pronunciation, salting the wound of the one formal voice lesson she paid for, when the teacher called her a disgrace to the race with all her “hollering” as she felt the divine spirit – something he thought White people would never embrace. In her autobiography, Mahalia wrote, “I felt all mixed up. How could I sing the songs for White people to understand when I was colored myself? It was a battle within me to sing a song in a formal way. It felt too polished and I didn’t feel good about it.”
Robert’s time in Chicago ended too soon when Rev. Williams died unexpectedly, and Robert went back home to Tennessee. He resumed lessons with Charles Bryan, but the day came when Charles believed he’d given Robert all he had and that the young man’s extraordinary talent deserved an extraordinary teacher, and he helped arrange for an audition with just such a tutor, opera diva Edyth Walker of New York. A soprano who made her mark in the 1890s, Walker sang with the Vienna and Hamburg state operas, appeared with New York’s Metropolitan Opera. By the time Robert met her in the 1940s, she had been teaching for decades. Her pupils included Marian Anderson; Robert would be among her last students. When Walker died in 1950, Robert got one step closer to heroes Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson, convincing their accompanist, Lawrence Brown, to sponsor him. Brown helped Robert find a path across the Atlantic to London, where Robert would follow in Brown’s (and Roland Hayes’s and Marian Anderson’s) footsteps by studying at Trinity College of Music and with private tutors.
Robert stayed in London three years. He sang in churches, at venues in other parts of Europe, for the BBC. Near the end of his time in London, he sang “Ol’ Man River” on a new television show, “Music for You,” his voice favorably compared to Paul Robeson’s. But two performances in 1955 would eclipse all that: his professional debut at Royal Festival Hall, where his program ranged from Beethoven to concert spirituals and gospel, and opening the Baptist World Alliance convention at Royal Albert Hall.
For the rest of his life, Robert leaned on those two performances, claiming he was the first African American to introduce gospel to the European stage, which in a manner of speaking, was probably true. Mahalia had been touring Europe since 1952 … but she wasn’t singing gospel in classical form. That would remain Robert’s greatest claim to fame.
Over the next 20 years, he became known as a favorite of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; recorded on the Apollo, Decca, Battle and Nashboro labels; was summoned halfway around the world for convention meetings (earning the title “Mr. Baptist”) and command performances including, in 1974, for Liberian President William Tolbert, who knighted him.
I wish I knew the full measure of hardship he overcame to get there. How much harder was it for Robert to make his way than it would have been for a White singer? He had the refuge of the church and comradery of his White friends, including Charles and Edith Bryan and Edyth Walker, and even a handful of evangelists. Maybe that wasn’t much, but maybe it helped.
“Billy Graham, I sang with him many times,” Robert said. “It was very rare for a Black man to sing with the Southern Baptists. I never thought of it as breaking racial barriers. Race never bothered me.”
Rev. Jones has told stories about Robert’s being an important bridge between races. Following a service in New Mexico, Robert wrote that for “the last two years I have been doing quite a bit of work among the white churches in the U.S. I am trying to make friends with our white brothers and sisters. I know the Negro and the White can get along if we all give it a try.” That’s from one of many letters between Robert and Charles, who wrote to each other devotedly for the 17 years their lives overlapped. Robert talked about being the only Black person present in a variety of places: college campuses, meetings of the Southern Baptists, churches in Southern cities infamous for racial violence. But those comments were rare.
“The people I’ve met in my lifetime, singing, have opened doors for me,” he said. “I decided to make friends instead of marching, instead of fighting, which was all right, but I’ve never been able to hate anybody. The White people would listen to me sing when they wouldn’t listen to no Black preacher preach.”
When the NBC beckoned yet again in 1955, Robert went back to Nashville for good this time, a triumphant return. The next spring, Miss Lucie helped bring to life a long-held dream: for Robert to take the stage as a recitalist at Ellis Auditorium in Memphis, where she’d discovered him. He sang Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart … and gospel. Throughout his career, he sang classical music in churches, too, but from this time on his standards were always going to be the old hymns, spirituals, and gospel. He was most known for his masterful rendition of “God’s Amazing Grace,” a modern take on the hymn “Amazing Grace.”
“In London,” he said, “I sang ‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.’ I told them I’m singing one of your son’s songs, reared in England. ‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I’m found, blind but now I see.’ And that became my theme song in America for a while. They’d say Amazing Grace is coming to sing – not Robert Bradley, but Amazing Grace.”
Amazing Grace was a legend in his own time, what we now call the Golden Age of Gospel. Robert helped shape the movement with his cultivated, prodigious voice, giving voice to the new songs of his elders and peers with refined abandon. But calling an era “golden” presupposes a shift in popularity, as younger generations find their own voice. By the late 1960s, when the Edwin Hawkins Singers recorded and released “Oh Happy Day,” gospel had noticeably shifted gears, picking up rhythm, words and sentiments closer to pop music. That was my generation. I loved Mahalia Jackson’s hand-clapping “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” but I loved more the bouncy, joyful, soulful “Oh Happy Day,” which broke the Top 40 in 1969. That was not the kind of music we sang in the largely White Baptist church, where it was stiff stuff, the stern admonishing old hymns.
Robert fell out of favor. Churches were still issuing invitations, and his work with the NBC continued unabated, but songs by Amazing Grace no longer seemed as compelling in some circles. Once again, he did not feel at home in this world. In a 1972 Fisk University interview, Robert defended his work, saying that “Black music can stand and be as dignified as Marian Anderson.” He bristled at the disregard this kind of singing could elicit from some audiences. “Years ago, when I used to go to Chicago to sing, the young gospel singers would get up and walk out on me, ‘Old Bradley singing those old hymns.’ But the other day, I sang at the Chicago Civic Opera with Maciel Woods, sold-out house, twelve dollars a seat, they gave me a standing ovation, and I hadn't opened my mouth. This paid for all the times they cursed me. I sang hymns until the gospel singers and musicians are all singing some hymns on their programs again. If it meant no more than that, I did what I could to motivate singing hymns among the Blacks because jazz music had taken over all the churches and choirs. I'm grateful to have had a part in better church music in the United States. I've had the privilege of taking the original music of the Black people of America -- which is the one music that America can call its own -- to Europe. I won't say that I came to do [the songs] as Roland Hayes and all the greats, but I sang them as clean as I could and as authentically as I thought they should be.”
And so his time came around again. He inched his way into social justice issues. In 1982, he sang during an anti-nukes demonstration and, in 1990, he sang with students protesting poor conditions and under-funding at Nashville’s historically Black public college, Tennessee State University. He gave his last encore in 2005 at the Opryland Hotel during a historic gathering of the four major African American Baptist organizations.
“He'd been off the singing for years,” said his friend Pastor Jackson. “But he was like a rock star when I took him there. They asked him to come up on the stage -- and you know in Black Baptist politics, there is nothing more important than being up on that stage. Gardner Taylor -- if you see any of the lists of the greatest Black preachers, he's on it -- he was a high proponent of social justice; he wanted to get all four conventions together to try to find a way to make a difference in society and life, and he felt the church has a strong place in that. He was just sitting there enduring this string of preachers coming up to him. Bradley said, ‘I want to go say hello to Dr. Taylor,’ so we walked over there, and when he saw Bradley, his face just lit up, and he struggled to stand and hug him. When they announced that Bradley was present, and he stood, all this doting began. ‘You have to come bless us,’ they said.” Amazing Grace was back in the hall.
Sometimes called America’s spiritual national anthem, “Amazing Grace” was written by John Newton, a repentant English slave ship captain, in 1772. It didn’t catch on in its homeland the way it did here, and there are at least two reasons why that happened: an American Southerner paired the lyrics with a different melody, one more naturally suited to the cadence of the words; and the story itself resonates more naturally with our sad, sordid history of racism – sometimes called America’s original sin. Historian Heilbut says that “Amazing Grace” is the most popular hymn in American churches – all denominations, all cultures, Black and White, Southern and Northern.
There are so many more questions I wish I’d asked Robert – chief among them, Why did you return to the South? I suspect his answer would have been the same and as simple as mine: Because it’s home. Nowadays, as the bad ol’ South has risen again, empowered by malevolent leaders on the federal level being slavishly followed by their peers on the state level, I do not feel at home in this world anymore either. So this biography I’m writing about Robert and his friend Charles Bryan feels even sweeter now, gives me something to cling to, reminds me that grace is available to us all and always has been, all evidence to the contrary. In these days of peril and strife, to believe in the possibility of grace feels amazing and hopeful – and available to all of us, regardless of race or religion, gender, class or political persuasion. Or geography.