Search - Inez Andrews :: Two Sides of

The Statuesque gospel singer

Tholly Rosmundsdottir | Reykjavik, Iceland | 02/22/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

""We have a lot of rock-and-roll singers out in the audience," the singer Inez Andrews once said in an interwiev. "They come purposely to see what they can learn - or what they can steal. They'll come backstage and say, 'Hey, girl, I've got to kow what you did on those last eight bars". She needn't have feared. No one in commercial music has ever matched the ability of Inez Andrews to rock a song and extravagantly scale it's peaks. Inez is a singer with the most uniquely melodic shriek in the whole of gospel! Making her debut with The Caravans in 1957, her addition sparked new energy because Andrews, like Shirley Caesar, was a singer and "preacher." There the similarity ends. While Caesar was a light mezzo-soprano-alto, Andrews was a metallic contralto; while Caeser had the rapid-fire delivery of an impassioned sanctified preacher, Andrews chose a slower, majestic delivery characteristic of a presiding bishop. Yet they were equally fiery. This album reflects her wide interpretive range. It includes compelling new tunes while reviving some of the standards that mean the most to her. Hearing some of these songs, you realize that Inez could outsing most anyone in blues. "But when the blues folks came around, I told 'em I don't want blues. When you got some fatherless children and no money, you better look to the fills whence cometh your help.""