The Blind Boys of Alabama: Gospel truths

The Blind Boys of Alabama's new album, Go Tell It On the Mountain, recalls a tradition of festive records quite distinct from that found in Britain. Whereas British pop has concentrated on knockabout novelty singles - from Slade's "Merry Xmas Everybody" to The Darkness's "Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)" - and the miraculous seasonal rebirth of Cliff Richard (whose new Cliff at Christmas album replicates several Blind Boys selections, with sickly results), in America, midwinter pop has deeper resonance. Its Christmas albums have at their best played out the tension between the sacred and secular, the soulful and showbiz, which remain at the heart of rock'n'roll, and are reflected in the Blind Boys' career.

The Blind Boys - whose gospel career began a startling 66 years ago - have assembled a familiar batch of songs and sometimes surreal collaborators for their Christmas album: from George Clinton on a funked-up "Away in a Manger" to Chrissie Hynde and Richard Thompson on a reverent "In the Bleak Midwinter". Tom Waits, Solomon Burke, Mavis Staples and Michael Franti are among the other guests, tackling Nat "King" Cole's "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire ... "), pre-war black spirituals and Victorian-era British carols.

Bing Crosby felt the conflict between the sacred and the secular as he prepared to define the Christmas album, agonising over singing "Silent Night" for commercial gain in 1935. His Irish-Catholic conscience sopped when it was decided that the profits would go to charity, the 1945 collection Merry Christmas became the all-time bestselling Christmas album. In 1998, it was renamed White Christmas, in recognition of Irving Berlin's 1942 sentimental distillation of a US December, written at the height of the exile abroad of the nation's soldiers. Bing sang with church purity and home-fire comfort, creating the Christmas album's safe essence, song staples and - along with the seasonal perennial White Christmas (1952) and his own laid-back TV specials - even helped institutionalise post-war America's pipe-and-slippers Christmas ideal in his album's image. (The record's enduring cultural hold was proven when the moment for US forces to get the hell out of Vietnam in 1975 was secretly signalled with the radio play, not of an acid rock classic like "White Rabbit", but "White Christmas".) Nat "King" Cole's The Christmas Song (1961) provided an album of more intimate, playful balm, but a similar selection to other crooner collections, like A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra.

Elvis Presley was the first and last rock'n'roller to really take on the tradition, falling more deeply and happily than Crosby between religion and ribaldry - Elvis' Christmas Album (1957) combined the pure gospel of his Peace in the Valley EP and the inevitable "White Christmas" with "Santa Claus is Back in Town", a dirty, double-entendre blues knocked up for him by Leiber and Stoller. The 1971 sequel Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas included a still randier version of Charles Brown's "Merry Christmas Baby", close-cousin to Clarence Carter's smirking "Back Door Santa" (1968) and Joe Tex's "I'll Make Every Day Christmas (for My Woman)".

It was a window into a more realistic, subversive strain of Christmas albums, in an America far from Crosby's - like Charles Brown's own blues classic Please Come Home for Christmas (1961), Merle Haggard's country docudrama A Christmas Present (1971) - including a hit single about factory layoffs, "If We Make It Through December", alongside "Winter Wonderland" - and Black Power-era, James Brown rallying cries like "Santa Claus Goes Straight to the Ghetto" (1968), assembled on the recent James Brown collection Funky Christmas (1998).

A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (1963) is, though, the only rock-era Christmas album to retain its reputation. Throwing the Wall of Sound at Crosby's saccharine template, batteries of jingle bells helped The Ronettes put the soul into "Frosty the Snowman". Though Spector and his sound were clearly more important than Christ on this record, it kept enough traditional elements to cross over into mainstream America. The Supremes, The Temptations, The Jackson 5 and Stevie Wonder all provided Motown Christmas albums, liberally borrowing songs from Merry Christmas. And even today the tradition continues, from Mariah Carey's own Merry Christmas (1994) to Whitney Houston's current One Wish: The Holiday Album.

Destiny's Child's follow-up to their massive 2001 hit album Survivor, 8 Days of Christmas, may have looked bizarre here, but back home it tapped into the black church tradition, as well as Spector's secular soul Christmas, and the spirit of Bing. Changing times were most evident in the prominence of Destiny's Child merchandise in the title song's video and lyrics (the latter boasting: "On the eighth day of Christmas, my baby gave to me/ A pair of Chloé shades and a diamond belly-ring..."). Crosby's 1945 "Silver Bells" was upgraded to "Platinum Bells" - bling-Bing. Only "White Christmas", now sacrosanct, was left untouched.

This struggle over Christmas's pop meaning is not something the devout Blind Boys concern themselves with unduly. Go Tell It On the Mountain is at its strongest when it plugs straight into black-gospel roots which predate Crosby's Merry Christmas, as do the Blind Boys themselves. The group's three founder members and vocal core - Clarence Fountain, Jimmy Carter and George Scott - met, aged seven, at the Talladega Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind, near Birmingham, Alabama, in 1937. It was a hard beginning, as Carter, born blind, recalls.

"I used to pray to God that he would give me my sight back," he says. "But then, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. When my Mom took me up to the Institute and left me there, it felt like the end of the world. The school wasn't exactly peaches and cream. It was kinda rough. I was seven, I didn't know nobody. Second day up there, I got into a fight. When you've been through hardship, you know what it means. But when I think back now, it was the greatest thing she ever did for me. I met Clarence and George, and we have a bond, we've been together all our lives. We're one body in the Blind Boys. And that's what this new record is all about - a coming together and a new beginning, at Christmas."

Carter remembers the old schism between secular and sacred music which Christmas albums have helped to blur. Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin were among those who crossed the divide while the Blind Boys continued on the dwindling gospel circuit. Carter still resents Cooke's leap. "I hated to see him do it at the time. But Sam never changed; he was the same good fellow. The way I knew Sam, he was just singing about girls to make money. We were offered the chance, but we were never tempted to go. We felt if we left gospel, we would be leaving God." Younger Blind Boys recruit Ricky McKinnie, a child of the Sixties, is more accepting: "When Sam was singing gospel, it was the love of God. With R'n'B, it was the love between two people. But God is love. And what's from the heart touches the heart."

Only in recent years, by covering disguised gospel, such as Prince's "The Cross", supporting Peter Gabriel and collaborating with secular artists, have the Blind Boys bridged both worlds themselves. And, while Beyonce may want a "diamond belly-ring", Carter has a more old-fashioned festive message. "My faith has never faltered," he declares, in ringing, Southern hellfire tones. "Nothing can break me. No, no. Because whatever happens to me, I know God has a purpose for it. There's always hope. As long as you're alive, there's hope. And the Blind Boys are not going to stop. Not until he tells us to."

'Go Tell It on the Mountain' is out now on Real World