Local Treasures: Elizabeth King

Carrying the torch of sacred soul music.

by

Working as an award-winning gospel singer for decades is only one of Elizabeth King’s notable achievements. Overcoming a car accident that left doctors predicting she’d never walk again, long before she was a recording artist, is another. And raising 15 children — she recently held an Easter celebration with 42 of her grandchildren and great-grand-children in attendance — may top them all.

When the phone rang a couple of years ago, the initial public acclaim for her gospel work was many years behind her. Assuming that the heyday of her singing career was long gone, and knowing that the man on the phone, Juan D. Shipp, who had recorded her in the 1970s for his now-defunct D-Vine Spirituals gospel label, had a lively sense of humor, she barely batted an eye when he made a ridiculous proposition.

“He said, ‘Well, I’ve got somebody who wants to record you,’” King recalls. “I said, ‘Who?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll call you back tomorrow.’ I laughed and said, ‘You need to quit playing!’ Because you know, Reverend Shipp likes to play a lot. ‘Nobody wants me to sing after all these years. Quit playing!’ I told him.”

“Uh, yeah,” recalls Shipp, admitting his natural good humor. “I do try to stay on an upbeat all the time.” But this was no joke. Shipp had recently begun partnering with local producer and label owner Bruce Watson, best known for the Fat Possum and Big Legal Mess record labels. They were working to preserve and re-release tracks from Shipp’s D-Vine Spirituals catalog via Watson’s latest venture, Bible & Tire Recording Co., devoted entirely to old-school gospel, both contemporary and archival. Unbeknownst to King, now 77, the two had been going through Shipp’s master tapes, now nearly half a century old.

“After I had met Bruce and we had worked together for about six months, transposing tapes to the computer,” Shipp recalls, “we got to talking and he said, ‘Are any of these people still living?’ I said, ‘Sure. Quite a few of them are still alive.’ He said, ‘Are any of them singing?’ And I said, ‘I know two of them are. Elizabeth is still singing and Pastor Jack Ward is still singing.’

“He said, ‘Do you think they want to record again?’ I said, ‘No doubt about it.’ You see, we always tried to leave our artists on a good note, but Liz didn’t go anywhere after I stopped recording. She just turned down all offers that came her way. And when I called her and said, ‘Hey, girl, you want to go back in the studio and record again?’ she thought I was playing. I said, ‘No, I am actually serious! Do you want to go back in the studio and record again?’ She said, ‘Yes.’”

Slowly and steadily, she willed her own recovery. By the dawn of the 1970s, she was becoming active again, and her faith was unfaltering. This was when she began singing more than ever. “God is an awesome God,” she testifies. “And I refuse to let anybody change my mind about the power of God.”

As it turned out, Watson already had a band ready, primed to record gospel the old way, with guitar, organ, bass, drums and background singers. Synthesizers and funk/jazz/fusion stylings were to be eschewed with extreme prejudice. Better yet, the ad hoc group of studio musicians had already proved itself in cutting original tracks for the Sensational Barnes Brothers, siblings whose parents had played many gospel shows with Elizabeth King, way back when.

“I went to the studio and I just sang songs I’d been singing,” King recalls. “And they put the music to it, because I don’t play music, I just like to listen to it. It worked out good that way. They’re good! They are professionals. It was amazing, because I hadn’t rehearsed a lick with those guys.

“Then Bruce asked me, ‘Do you know the Barnes family? Duke and Deborah Barnes?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I used to babysit their kids!’ And he said, ‘Those kids are singing the background vocals on your record.’ Oh, it’s amazing! Life is just a circle, and be careful how you treat people in the circle, because they’re coming back again.”

Taking the long view of life’s surprises comes naturally to King, in large part because of her faith, but also because of the adversities that such faith has helped her endure. For starters, growing up in the Mississippi Delta, first in Grenada and then in nearby Charleston, was itself an adversity for young Elizabeth Brocks. “I lived in the country and chopped cotton from six o'clock in the morning til six o’clock in the evening, at 9 years old,” she remembers. The landowner, she says, liked how hard the Brocks kids worked and told her father, “You can take ’em along with you, chopping cotton. I’ll pay them the same I pay you, three dollars a day.”

But life had its moments of joy for the Brocks family. “We’re singers and preachers,” King notes. “I first started singing when I was 3 years old. My mama and my daddy and my brother, they would sing in my other brother’s quartet group. I would go with them.” Over the course of her youngest years, the musicality of the family only grew. “My cousin gave me a piano when I was 10 or 11 years old. But a lot of the strings were broken. So my brother went and took the strings off the piano and put them on the side of the house and made a guitar. Right on the side of the house, with five strings off the piano. And then he told me, ‘You don't need to learn how to play the piano. You need to sing and let me play!’ He played those strings so good my daddy bought him a guitar. Then he started coming to Memphis, playing for a group up here every week. And he’s still playing. His name is Charlie Brocks.”

They weren't the only musical family in the area. As a teenager Brocks met Gabriel King, a singer from nearby Webb who would become her husband and the father to her first four children. “He was a singer, but I never did sing with him,” she says. “Then we went to Chicago, and he was singing with a group there. I didn’t like Chicago, so we moved back to Memphis and he started singing with a group here called the Southern Jubilees. Then he started preaching. And then we separated. He went back to Mississippi first, and then he went back to Chicago and lived. That’s where he passed away. His name was Gabriel King.” She would take his continue to use his surname as her own for the rest of her life.

She was a single mother, raising those four children and driving a local florist’s delivery truck for a local florist, when the unthinkable happened. “I was doing good. I thought I was doing good, anyway. I was working,” she says. “So I was at one of my drop-offs at this funeral home, and this drunk man just came out from one of the side streets. He didn’t even stop. I saw him coming. I tried to stop. But there wasn’t any way I could stop because I was on a main street. It ripped my forehead open and it broke my legs.”

That was a defining moment of her life, as much for the way she dealt with the aftermath as for the accident itself. “I stayed in the hospital 17 days,” King says. “And I remember asking the nurses about this priest, a man dressed in priestly clothes, who’d come in every morning and he would just sit in my chair. ‘Can I pray with you today?' He was dressed in black and I could see his long white hair, but not his face. And they said, ‘We don't have any priest on our staff like that.’ Now I know it had to be the spirit of God, letting me know that I was going to be okay.”

With that thought bolstering her confidence and hope, King made her recovery with extraordinary willpower. “I got up every day,” she says. “I would walk from my living room to my kitchen door. And my whole body was shaking, but I refused to hold on to anything. And then I went back to the doctor. I was supposed to have three shots in my head. I took the first one, but when I went back the next week and he told me, ‘I got two more shots I’ve got to give you,’ I said, ‘I’m not taking no more shots. I’m not going to take them. And I’m not going to take no more pills. I refuse. I’m not going to take that medicine, because it just makes me want to do nothing.’ But I would walk. And what gave me a lot of courage was, I had small children.”

Slowly and steadily, she willed her own recovery. By the dawn of the 1970s, she was becoming active again, and her faith was unfaltering. This was when she began singing more than ever. “God is an awesome God,” she testifies. “And I refuse to let anybody change my mind about the power of God.”

Around this time, she encountered a ten-man group who called themselves The Gospel Souls. “They were already singing,” King says. “I don’t know how long they had been singing. I think four of the guys went to the same church. But I went to another church. One of the members, I think he was the manager, was at a church where I was singing by myself, and he asked me, ‘Would I be interested in singing with an all-male group?’ Now, I don’t know of another group in Memphis that had a one-female lead singer. I was the only female at the time in Memphis with an all-male background. And I was used to singing with males because I was singing with all my brothers at home. I grew up with men.”

Things accelerated quickly. “I think I went to two of their rehearsals, and the next one I was going on tour with them,” she says. “We were going to different churches. We went to Nashville. They had things booked already! It was fun to get a chance to travel with them.”  

And she also began recording, first for the Designer label, owned by a music producer with an unforgettable name. “The first recording I did was in 1970, for Style Wooten,” she says. “And the first song I recorded with the Gospel Souls was with Style Wooten. We did ‘It’s Amazing What God Can Do.’ I did that song in ’71, I believe.”

This was when Juan Shipp discovered the group. As he recalls, “I was pastoring a church in South Memphis, and one of the members of the Gospel Souls was the deacon there. I told him about the studio that I’d just gotten in touch with, hoping to make better sounding records, and it was on from there on in. I took them up to see the studio, and Elizabeth King and the Gospel Souls were the first group that I recorded.”

That was to be the first release on Shipp’s D-Vine Spirituals label, and it jump-started the company. “When that record came out and the other groups heard it,” he says, “Boom! D-Vine just grew from there. And guess what the song was: ‘I Heard the Voice of Jesus.’”

King is understandably proud of her group. “We were like stars!” she says. “We were going to schools and churches, going to Nashville, Knoxville, St. Louis. Mostly every weekend, we were booked somewhere to sing. Including here in Memphis. It was a busy time for us. And all of us had jobs. We had to get back home so we could be back at work, you know. I had to be at work at 8 o'clock.”

This momentum carried the group through the next 13 years of D-Vine's existence, and on through the years that followed, into the next century. And all the while, the other facets of King’s life had to be tended to. “I was driving for the same florist,” she says. “I had stayed off work for over a year. Then the doctor said, ‘You did a marvelous healing. You’re ready to go back to your old job.’ And that's what I did. I worked until I got married again, then my husband didn’t want me to work anymore.”

It was 1979 when King married for the second time, to William Stewart, pastor at the Greater Gospel Truth Church in Memphis. “He was an amazing man,” she recalls fondly. “He was a little older than I was. But he was a great husband and a joy to be around.” Often appearing as Liz King Stewart, she continued working with the Gospel Souls for a total of 36 years. But by 2010, old age and infirmity had claimed the lives of many in her group, and her husband too as well .

Still, King has stayed at the center of her family's life, even babysitting her grandchildren full-time for over two decades. And somehow, in spite of doctors’ predictions, she has remained healthy and fit.

“It's just amazing to me,” she marvels. “Anybody who said I’ll never walk again, should see me now. Up until this pandemic, I could still outrun all of my children except one of my sons. Because I went to the gym every day before 2019. My husband passed in ’09, and he told me, ‘With the diabetes you have and the arthritis and the pain in your body, go exercise every day!’ And that’s what I’ve done. I was telling my son, I can’t wait until this stuff is over because I need to get back in the gym!”

And she has continued to sing. The first sign that the world was appreciating her talent again came in late 2019, after Bible & Tire Recording Co. re-released all of her 1970s tracks as Elizabeth King & the Gospel Souls: The D-Vine Spirituals Recordings. “I did a concert at the Crosstown Concourse, with the Barnes Brothers, as a promotional show for this album,” King says. “There were a lot of people there!”

And this was when she first began recording new material. “I think Bruce had recorded eight or nine songs, and then COVID came, and I had to stop. The album was supposed to come out in March of 2020. But it’s like it’s coming out at the right time now. Because everybody’s been shut in.”

When the new material finally emerged as the album Living In The Last Days, released this April, the world did indeed seem primed to hear it. King has lately been celebrated in magazines as wide-ranging as Mojo, Southern Living, Mother Jones, and No Depression, not to mention an appearance on NPR and a riveting performance in the recent Folk Alliance International virtual showcase. And she has no plans to stop now, having teamed up with another singing group recently.

“In 2019, I started singing with this female group here that had been singing for a long time, The Stars of Faith,” she says. “We were going places, and singing locally. Because everybody in there was older than me. And I’m real old. But I think 2020 was the 62nd year the group had been singing. And two of the original ladies are still living. One passed last year, the lady that was leading them. I sang lead for them too, but I was mostly singing backup.”

Taking the long view, even the trials of the quarantine era, coming just as her talent was being recognized again, were not enough to stop Elizabeth King. Through car accidents, motherhood, the vagaries of age, and a global pandemic, King’s faith has carried her through the storm, always singing.

“I kept going,” she reflects. “Because, if you got a voice and you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. I kept going.”