Between the late 1930s and 1969 the Roberta Martin Singers helped shape the sound of contemporary gospel. Among the earliest ensembles to combine male and female voices in a single choir, they moved away from conventional harmonic blends toward sharply defined solo lines that stood out within the group texture. Their catalog of enduring recordings features “He Knows Just How Much We Can Bear,” “Try Jesus, He Satisfies,” “I’m Just Waiting on the Lord,” and “God Is Still on the Throne.”
The ensemble embodied the artistic direction of pianist and contralto Roberta Martin, born in 1907 in Helena, Arkansas. Living in Cairo, Illinois, from 1918 onward, she first studied piano under her brother’s wife. Although a high-school instructor encouraged her to pursue a career as a concert pianist, her path shifted after she began accompanying the Young People’s Choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church; the experience prompted her to dedicate her life to sacred music.
Following a short period with a gospel quartet directed by Theodore Frye, Martin assembled six young male singers drawn from neighborhood congregations—Eugene Smith, Norsalus McKissick, Robert Anderson, James Lawrence, Willie Webb, and Romance Watson—creating the Roberta Martin Singers. In the early 1940s the lineup expanded with the addition of Bessie Folk and Deloris Barrett. Outside the group Martin ran her own recording facility and issued compositions by other gospel writers, among them James Cleveland.
The Singers delivered one of their last public performances in 1963 at Gian-Carlo Menotti’s Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. After Martin’s death in 1969 the ensemble dissolved. More than fifty thousand mourners attended her memorial service. On 15 July 1998 the United States Postal Service released a thirty-two-cent commemorative stamp celebrating her contributions; it formed part of a set of four honoring gospel pioneers that also included Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
