Keeping the faith

       On the Sunday morning when Naomi Davis first sang gospel for an audience, in the woodframe sanctuary of Mount Coney Baptist Church, Harry S. Truman was president and Martin Luther King Jr. a precocious teenager graduating from college. Naomi was 6, a farm girl from the outskirts of Midway, Alabama, population something like 500, nearly entirely black.
       With her older siblings Hattie Mae and Annie Ruth, Naomi performed throughout her childhood in the Davis Sisters, harmonising on I Got Over and Nearer, My God, to Thee . They went from church to church, played at Baptist conferences, did shows from a radio station in Tuskegee, Alabama.
       For decades to come, Naomi Davis could envision no life except singing.That vision lasted through day jobs and different states, through marriage and motherhood; for a time in the 1960s,she cleaned houses in two shifts before doing a soul show at a Brooklyn club called the Night Cap.
       Through it all, one thing eluded her - a record album. As 78s gave way to 33s, as LPs surrendered to CDs, as iPods and downloads emerged, only a few singles attested to the musical existence of Naomi Shelton, her married and professional name.
       Then, a few weeks ago, the obscurity ended, and in an unlikely way. An independent label, Daptone, with its diehard audience among the young and hip,released the first album by Shelton in a gospel career that began 60 years ago.Along with a series of live shows, the album,What Have You Done, My Brother?has won acclaim from writers in American Legacy magazine to The Wall Street Journal to the music blog Brooklyn Vegan."I never gave up," Shelton, a discovery at 66, said in a recent interview."I claimed from the age of 6 I'm going to be a singer. So I stayed out there. I kept my faith. And I felt in my spirit that something has got to give."
       For the 20ish audiences that hear Shelton and her group, the Gospel Queens,at Manhattan clubs like Joe's Pub and the Fat Cat, her music arrives with a deceptive sense of newness. Deceptive because it is more like a time capsule from gospel's heyday, recently unearthed and pried open.
       "Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens are definitely traditional, and they are singing out of a tradition that's been around for a very long time," said Anthony Heilbut, author of the 1971 book The Gospel Sound and a producer of award-winning gospel albums."You would've heard people singing like them back in '61,'62."
       Shelton and her sisters grew up modelling themselves on the gospel quartets that were almost always male, like the Swan Silvertones and the Dixie Hummingbirds. Nearly half the songs on What Have You Done, My Brother?are gospel classics like Trouble in My Way and Jordan River .Still, in the manner of musicians from Wilson Pickett to Aretha Franklin, Shelton also crossed over into black pop music built on gospel roots.
       Leaving home after graduating from high school in 1958, Shelton took her dual musical personality to Long Island,then Miami, then Long Island again,and finally Brooklyn, working as a maid by day and singing soul music at night and gospel on weekends.
       Not until 1999 did Shelton meet the pianist, Cliff Driver, who would become the bandleader and arranger for her three surrogate sisters who make up Gospel Queens. The same year, she and Driver cut several funky singles for the Desco label, with 41st Street Breakdown and Wind Your Clock building cult followings.Through Desco, both met a young white man infatuated by classic soul, Gabriel Roth.
       Roth went on to found and develop Daptone with his partner, Neal Sugarman. The label burst onto the musical radar with the revivalist soul of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.
       When Roth turned his album-making attention to Shelton four years ago, it was with the inclination of recording "message songs" in the style of the Staples Singers or the Impressions. They cut an entire CD's worth in a session in June 2005, but came away disappointed with the results. They tried again in January 2006, and once more were left to conclude that, as Roth recalled,"it just didn't feel right."
       Shelton, meanwhile, was starting to wonder about leaving gospel altogether.She told Driver,"If this doesn't get moving, I'm going back to R&B." To which he replied,"Just sit tight, things gonna change."
       So they did on June 20,2007, when Roth started recording Shelton and the Gospel Queens doing what their name promised."I'd been worried that if we did a gospel album, we wouldn't reach much of an audience," he recalled."But I realised I had to let her sing gospel."