Clarence Fountain

Clarence Fountain helped establish the Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama while still a 12-year-old pupil at Alabama’s Talladega Institute for the Deaf and Blind. Every participant in the ensemble came from that same institution, and the act first performed under the name Happy Land Jubilee Singers before settling on its lasting identity. Their initial recordings appeared in 1948, launching a career that ultimately stretched across more than six decades. Fountain departed the ensemble in 1969 to launch a solo career, cutting two albums for Jewel before returning in 1980. Three years later the group supplied the chorus for the Obie-winning stage version of Sophocles’ play The Gospel at Colonus, reprising those parts on multiple occasions throughout the ensuing seasons. During the 1990s Fountain maintained his association with Jewel while also overseeing reissues of earlier material on assorted imprints. In 2009 he teamed once more with former Blind Boys colleague Sam Butler—whom he had once guided within the group—to deliver the album Stepping Up & Stepping Out for Solomon Burke’s Tyscot Records, a collection that balanced gospel and secular selections with measured emotional range. Fountain passed away in June 2018 at the age of 88.