Dorothy Love Coates R.I.P

A gospel queen who refused to sell out

April 22 2002

Dorothy Love Coates, gospel music singer, 1928 - 2002

Dorothy Love Coates, a gospel singer whose gruff delivery and blazing
theatrics made her one of the giants of the genre, died on Tuesday at a
hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, where she lived most of her life. She was
74.

The cause was heart disease, said Anthony Heilbut, a friend and gospel music
scholar.

Coates's voice was rough and gravelly and did not have the range or
sweetness of Mahalia Jackson, Marion Williams and other leading gospel
singers of her day.

But what Coates lacked in
vocal purity she more than made up for in her impassioned
delivery.

She was one of gospel's great performers, regularly stirring crowds into a
frenzy with her intense vocalisations and animated physical style.

She also had a subtle but substantial role in the civil rights movement.

She sang at many benefit concerts and in her music alluded to current
events.

In her 1964 song The Hymn she preached: "When the President was
assassinated, the nation said, 'Where is God?' When the little children lost
their lives in the church bombing, the nation cried, 'Where is God?' I got
the answer for you today: God is still on the throne."

Born Dorothy McGriff in Birmingham, she was one of seven children of a
minister who divorced when Coates was young.

She sang in local churches and started a family group, the Royal Gospel
Singers, as a teenager.

"On weekdays I worked for the white man. On weekends I sang for the people,"
she told Heilbut in his 1971 book The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times.

Coates joined the Gospel Harmonettes, a well-known Birmingham group, and in
1951 the group cut its first hit, I'm Sealed, and quickly rose to fame on
the gospel circuit.

She continued with the Harmonettes throughout the '50s and '60s on a variety
of record labels, writing much of the group's material. Among its hits were
You Must be Born Again and That's Enough on the Specialty label, I Won't Let
Go of My Faith on the Nashboro label and You've Been Good to Me on VeeJay.
She also sang No Hiding Place and (You Can't Hurry God) He's Right On Time.

The Harmonettes broke up in 1970, though Coates continued to perform with
the Dorothy Love Coates Singers, featuring her sister Lillian and other
singers from Birmingham. She sang at the Newport Jazz Festival several times
and in a 1975 tribute to Mahalia Jackson at Carnegie Hall.

She stopped recording in 1980 but appeared in two films, The Long Walk Home
(1990) and Beloved (1998), in which she can be seen leading a chorus of
former slaves in an inspirational song.

She married twice. Her first marriage, to Willie Love of the Fairfield Four,
ended in divorce. Her second husband, Carl Coates of the Sensational
Nightingales, died in 1999.

She is survived by her daughters, Cassandra Madison of Birmingham and
Carletta Criss of Arlington, Texas, a brother, Fred McGriff of Newark, a
sister, Naomi Chambers of Plainfield, New Jersey, and two granddaughters.

Coates's music influenced many pop and rhythm'n'blues singers, such as Mavis
Staples of the Staple Singers, and Cissy Houston, and she was well aware of
that. But she steadfastly refused to betray her calling by singing blues,
jazz or any other secular idiom.

"I can't sell out," she told Heilbut.

The New York Times