On a Sunday morning this September, the pews of Spruce Street Baptist Church in Nashville will hold something the congregation does not often get to hear: a voice that has been silent for nearly two decades. It will come not from a living throat but from a screen — old video of the baritone that Mahalia Jackson once called the greatest she had ever heard. The occasion is "Songspiration," a worship service the church's music department will present on Sept. 13 at 11 a.m., during Gospel Music Heritage Month, to posthumously honor Sir J. Robert Bradley, the man known across the Baptist world simply as "Mr. Baptist." Beyond the music and the memories, the congregation will do something lasting: it will officially name a choir room in his honor, ensuring that every rehearsal and every harmony rising from that sacred space carries his name forward.
The setting could not be more fitting, for Bradley was a dedicated member of Spruce Street Baptist Church, where the church's director of music, Dr. Christopher A. Duke, said, "Sir J. Robert Bradley is tops among them" when speaking of the church's musical legacy. Bradley died on May 3, 2007.
To understand why a choir room should bear his name, you have to begin where he did: a boy outside an auditorium who sang his way in. John Robert Lee Bradley was born in Memphis and raised by his mother in poverty. When he was 12, he found himself outside the city auditorium at a National Baptist Convention Christmas Eve program. As he recounted, he sang outside the door, and a policeman brought out the convention's music director, Lucie Campbell, a pioneering gospel songwriter who would become his mentor. When asked what she heard, Campbell replied, "I hear an angel singing."
Campbell organized the Good Will Singers, an important gospel quartet of the 1930s that toured nationally, with Bradley as the main lead singer. He later studied classical music in New York and London, where he lived for six years, and his concert career carried him across Europe and the Americas, singing concerts that included arias, lieder, and spirituals.
What made Bradley extraordinary was the marriage of worlds that polite society insisted remain apart. His bass-baritone could be richly operatic or earthy, raspy and improvisational. According to gospel scholar Anthony Heilbut, his performances could create an uproar: "Women would throw their pocketbooks, hats and wigs," he said. "Men would run in circles or even hurl themselves out of balconies." Yet Bradley never left church music behind. He recorded his first gospel single for Apollo Records in 1950, and later recorded for Decca, Battle, Nashboro, and Spirit Feel. When Campbell died in 1963, Bradley succeeded her as director of music for the National Baptist Convention. His concerts took him to Carnegie Hall, and in 1975 he was knighted by Liberian President William Tolbert, becoming "Sir" J. Robert Bradley.
Bradley's voice was also a weapon against the color line. "Whites would not listen to African American preachers," he said, "[but] they would listen to me sing." He used that opening to break down racial barriers as he performed across the South, and he became a favorite singer of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mahalia Jackson once declared, "Nobody need mess with 'Amazing Grace' after Bradley gets through with it." He published his memoir, "In the Hands of God," in 1993 and continued to perform into his eighties, appearing at the National Baptist Convention's annual convocation as late as 2005. He died on May 3, 2007, at age 87, of complications of diabetes in Nashville, Tennessee. A historical marker in Nashville's Watkins Park honors him.