Lovett. Heinz Junior is a longtime artistic director of the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts. He's a staple of the city's jazz scene, and through his work as a music educator, he's mentored everyone from bassist Christian McBride r and B singer Belave, and various members of the roots, including drummer Questlov and tuba player Damon Bryson. In short, he's truly a Philadelphia legend, and he got his start at the United House of Prayer for All People.
By the time he was in high school, he was playing saxophone in the church shout band alongside some of the city's top musicians, and he credits the education he got there to making him the musician he is today. Shout music is particular to the United House of Prayer and to Daddy Grace. It's joyful music meant to bring
listeners into worship. It's also very, very danceable. Mister Hines was kind enough to talk to me about what it was like playing in the House of Prayer bands and how he sees the legacy of shout music carry on today. Thank you so much for being with me today. I'm so so honored to be able to talk to you
and get into this conversation about the music. As I've been doing my research on Daddy Grayson and the United House of Prayer and their impact and what has been accomplished over the years, the thing that stands out to me over and over and over again is the music.
And you know, Daddy Grace not only a spiritual leader, but I consider a marketing genius and an entrepreneurial wizard who just understood the power of music and the power in which music can not only draw people in with sound and joy, but how it reaches people on a spiritual level and how it touches them on a spiritual level. So in starting off, I'd love for you to tell me a little bit about your own experience and your connection with the United House of Prayer.
Okay, well, I think I talked about my beginnings. You know, I started to play piano. I was made to start to play piano by my mother. You know, we grew up in the Philadelphia right a black neighborhood, and you know, she started going to church. So when I got six seven years old, she was already in church. In essence, you know, the House of Prayer was our church, and the music actually pulled her in. So when I was made to take piano lessons, invariably my first.
Teacher was from the House of Prayer.
Well neither Bradley, who would turn out to be my music teacher, was the most I guess, prolific, you know, intelligent, most talented.
Musician at the church.
Okay, she was one of those females that was with pianists. But then finally or later she could play trumpet, they could play, you know.
She choose not to play.
In the band because the band was considered you know, the guys, you know, a band, but she played piano. She was the choir director, and she gave me such a strong foundation in music that carried me the rest of my life. Everything I did was based on that foundation of the fundamentals of music that I learned from her. Okay, by going to the church, I had a chance to see the band, and growing up in the House of Prayer, that's all we all young people, right we can six
years old, seven eight years old. We couldn't join the band, but we were influenced by it, you know, so we would roll up magazines and play you know and pretend that we had a horn or something. And so when I told my mother said I want well born, she said, well what you want and I said, I want to play some sacks.
Kid. I really meant trumpet, but I was saying it wrong.
So they bought me a saxophone and that became my instrument and my teacher on The first teacher on saxophone was jan Nita Bradley's husband, Eugene Radley. And so I would go study piano for a hour and then get up from the piano and study saxophone four hours.
And that's where it started.
And I would take that, you know, and play in the church band.
Mister Hines joined the House of Prayer band when he was in high school in the late nineteen fifties. Daddy Grace passed away in nineteen sixty, so their time didn't overlap too much, but he does remember how special it was when the bishop would come into town.
When Daddy Grace came to town, all the bands gathered, so you would have bands on each side, so it was a like a music festival. Be at three churches in Philadelphia at South Philadelphia, they had a church out of West Philadelphia and then the North Philadelphia church was closest to our neighborhood, so that's the church I went to. And each one of them had a band, so and they would compete against each other, you know, so we
call them the shout bands. And the different churches was made up of trombones, maybe a trumpet, you know, but maybe trombones, baritone horns, tubers best, definitely tubers of course, drum set well to South Philadelphia, that particular band at clarinets, several saxophones, you know. So it was really a comparable band that you was finding any school, any college band.
Can you just break down for us shout music? What exactly is shout music? What's the structure of it?
Well, the shout music is when the band plays a song. They start off with a song, the recognizable song, the song that someone sings. It's a song, so you'll recognize the song right away.
Okay.
Then the band goes into the shout part. The shout part is simply standing on one chord. The chord doesn't change it. It's not melodic where the song goes up and down.
Now, what they.
May do inside the shout they'll do maybe a change right may go to another key right to get a different feeling.
They may have one change.
Like when I talk about chord changes in the melody, you're gonna have several chord changes in the shout.
You're not gonna have that many.
So you're hearing the same thing over and over and over and over again. Now, this is the power of black music. Okay, And it's so so subtle, but it's so amazing.
You know, James Brown can do it.
Yay, James Brown can play the same thing over and over and over and you had danced as long as the music is being played. Hey, you can hear another band playing maybe like Amendment James Brown.
And then after a while it gets boring. You stop moving. You sit there, right. That's the power of the shout.
The shout is that that element that's the most spiritual part of the song. That's the part that moves continuously, continually.
And you do.
Subtle things, you build you subdue sound, you know, deprescendo, presciendo, you know, the drums, the leader if he feels it, or two leaders, whatever it is in the house of prayer, you know you'll feel that.
But that's that shout.
One of the things that I found out in just studying that.
You know. I said, well, the shout of the vamp itself is like a.
Continuous poor the continuous musical movement.
It started in Africa. But this rhythms with the drums, so.
You haven't even a lot of but that kind of thing. The drum plays a major part in that. So if you're playing a shout and you have a drummer that's inconsistent, the people feel it okay. In spiritual terms, you know, the music has the you know, that continuous feeling. We talk about that passion, that feeling in the music that has to stay there whatever it takes, whatever James Brown does to keep his music flunky.
Mister Hines also told me about how special the annual Convocation time was for band members.
One of the great opportunities in the House of Prayer for a young musician of the convocation, the comvoication is when the churches would travel from church to church throughout
all the states that the House of Prayer existed. So you consequently you can start from New Hampshire to New York, Philadelphia, the Baltimore to Washington, right, and that opportunity if you had a band, the band would travel and play all of those places, and each one of these churches, in each one of these states, in these House of prayers, all of them had a unique sound, you know, although they were basically playing the same style of music, but
their approach was totally different. And I don't think any other church during that period had that kind of structure and that type of we say ritual in the way, but it was much more than that, and that was the brainchild of Daddy Grace, you know, the power of the convocation, and that Sunday would have a bade and a baptism. If it was in Newport, News, the baptism would happen at the ocean or the League, or or
the natural water body. If it happened in the North like New York City, Philadelphia, it would happen under the Bronman's holes.
And then you had the band playing bottle water. But that was the impact.
So it was structure, it was formatting, you know, it was the instrumentation or all of those elements made for a really really strong experience and it didn't happen in any other church except the House of Prayer.
Beautiful.
Do you have any stories specifically about Daddy Grace and his connection with the music and the House of Prayer. I do know that he did play piano. I know that he was a major music lover, and I do know that there are some songs that are attributed to him. Whether or not he actually wrote them or not, we don't know. But I'm curious to see what you might know about specifically how he influenced the music directly.
From my point of view, is when he started the church someplace along the way he was that came up because he started that.
What did he hear.
When he established a band to bring that element into the ritual? You know, and it's I can go back in surmise, Okay, Well he was listening to New Orleans jazz, okay, because that's basically where that New Orleans found with the brass bands came from, you know, but it had a more How did he integrate that into the service. One of the things that he brought them anything. If you look at a producer, you know, the job as a producers take music and put it together so it becomes
this really impactful element. You know, all the pieces, what the horn is going to do, what the singer is going to do, with the backup singers going to do so if you look at it from a church ritual standpoint, to bring the band in okay, because he could actually say, I just want a piano player, I just want Oregon player, I just wanted trump But he could have picked any sort of instruments. What I'm saying is that he was
a great producer. He was in massario of sound. You know, he knew the elements that he wanted to make his service something special, and he wanted that music to be more than just a singular instrument. You know, he wanted to be something that would be special but resonate with people wherever that came from. So it's a little bit of jazz if it came from New Orleans, and a little bit of gospel, and he integrated that and that became actually the signature.
Of the House of Prayer.
I do want to tell you this one thing that in the research that I've done, I can tell you that a lot of what I see Daddy Grace, what he implemented, did come from his Cape Verdian roots. So for example, the marching bands, the processionals, that's very much a part of the church structure. There you know, the drum, the drumming going down both traditional you know, what we would consider African drumming, and also drums in the way
that we see them today with a drum kit. Those are part of the church celebrations and rituals in Kabalvid And when people first came over, they started doing these bands. It's a band called the Cape Verdian Ultramarine Band, which very similar to what you see in New Orleans. But I feel like it's an interesting convergence of just all these different African elements, same origin, different branches, and it
all kind of came together. And so in looking at that, you know, it all makes sense to me, this idea, all of these elements, you know, the colin response, the repetition, all of these things going into trance with the music. This is the root of this is Africa. So when I look at Daddy Grace and I look at how things unfolded for him, I do think that his Cape Verdian origins had a lot to do with it. And then when I thought about what else was happening in
New Bedford and on the scene at the time. So my grandfather's first cousin is Paul Gonzalves, and there was also this interesting convergence of Cape verdie and musicians that were in the jazz era and started to play. They were going to Harlem, they were playing, you know. Obviously Paul Gonzobs was playing with Duke Ellington. So it's really interesting to see how all these things came together and the different elements just blended into one, and you know, and here we are today.
So whoa Okay, well, see taught me a lot. I would write that down.
What are some of the cousins or the offshoots or the influences that are now in popular secular music that specifically are related to shout music.
Musicians are still coming out of that, you're ause of bread. So that's his lasting legacy from the cultural standpoint, because each one of those bands, you know what you know, I knew about the Philadelphia Band, but we were talking about each one of those bands had a legendary player, you know, that did certain things to keep that band developing. They had their own identity, you know. And one of the things I think is so important about this story.
If you have Daddy Grace as the nucleus, you know, the son as it can be, you know, and all these radiations that came out from the choirs and the singers and pianists and all those other people. Each one of these places had their own unique stories of excellence. Today you have in that House of Prayer band in South Philadelphia. The person who I studied under, you know, my leaders then when I was with fourteen fifteen, was Ob Bryson. Now let's look at the Bryson family. Ob
just sticking with him, his son Eugene Bryson Kay. Then Eugene had three sons. One was Damiens k Jervayne and Jermaine. Jermaine is playing with Cooling the.
Gang, okay h Jermain and they have a group called Mosaic Flow.
And Damien he's playing on television every night, playing with the.
Most popular rap group in the world, the Roots, but the fore fathers of.
His instrument, the tuba, the House of Prayer Legends.
And I remember when.
I'm teaching at the Club Club and Damien came down and he.
Said, miss Times. He said, Uncle Love, He said, Uncle, can I practice? You know? I said, of course. So he's at my school and he's pray.
He asked me the question, he said, he said, can a tuba play melodies, you know, I said, of course they can't. You know, they have to be in the back room, right, yeah, can He played melodies, and he would.
Practice songs, you know.
And everybody has this idea that the tuba in the church, in the watching band is going to But in the House of Prayer, if you listen to the tuba players, I mean it's they're the most colorful instrument in the band because they're.
Doing all these moving parts, you know.
And so you see how that generational kind of influence.
It just continued and continued.
And this is my final question. What does the United House of Prayer mean to you and Daddy Grace's legacy. What does it mean to you personally and to your career.
It's a big question.
Well, my career, that's where I started from. It's going to always be part of my beginnings. Like I said, my first teacher, my first piano teacher, my introduction to the fundamentals of music. You know, it's the basis of what have carried me all these years.
You know.
In my particular case, I think I have to owe everything that I do musically right to the House of Prey. I don't think I've been the kind of musician or have the samele sensibilities that I have about my music and want to share that with my young people that if I didn't come from the house Prey I, it wasn't for house of prayer.
Wow, thank you. You're bringing tears to my eyes.
Thank you so much, Thank you, Erry.
This has been wonderful.
Okay, all right, you.
Take so much care of yourself and lots of love.
Oh right, say you, dear.
Sweet Daddy. Grace is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Force, a media group. This show is hosted by Me Marcy Depina. It's written and produced by Marissa Brown and Me. Our story editors are Darryl Stewart, Duncan Riedel, and Zarren Burnett. Editing, sound design and theme music by Jonathan Washington. Additional editing by Matt Russell. Show cover art by Viviana Salgado of Studio Creative Group. Fact checking by Austin Thompson. Our executive
producers are Marcy Depina and Jason English. Special thanks to Will Pearson, Nikki Ettore, Ali Perry, Tamika Campbell, and Lulu Phillip of iHeartMedia and all of my family members. Who talk to me for this show, my ancestors, the United House of Prayer for All People, and the countless number of people who shared their memories of Sweet Daddy Grace with me. Thanks also to doctor Marie Dollam and doctor Danielle brun Sigler, whose academic work on Sweet Daddy Grace
has been incredibly helpful. And finally, I want to thank Bishop Grace himself for choosing me to tell his story. For more information on Bishop Charles M. Grace, check out the website Sweet Daddy Grace and follow me at Marcy Depina on all social platforms