God's Children

Scholars remain uncertain about the identities of the vocalists who performed as God's Children on a 1954 JayDee single that paired the urgent exhortation "Get Right with God" with the fervent testimony of "I Prayed, I Prayed." Contemporary accounts credit the record's sanctified intensity with prompting conversions among listeners, yet its release also represented a shift for producer Joe Davis, who had previously declined to issue gospel material despite approaches from promoters including Cleveland's Bill Hawkins. Davis rejected Hawkins's recommendation of the Five Angels of Harmony but quickly issued the God's Children disc anyway. Some observers regarded the single as a decisive final statement on the subject, its bilingual resonance implying that further gospel ventures were superfluous. The simple guitar-bass-drums trio that backed the vocals proved especially potent, though its members stayed unidentified. Even Bruce Bastin, Davis's biographer, could locate no details beyond the credited composer Ulysses Smith. Subsequent researchers have searched for this figure with Odyssean persistence, while skeptics suspect the name served as a convenient fiction allowing Davis to claim royalties on public-domain spirituals, consistent with his other pseudonyms such as E.V. Body.