On a Sunday morning at New Home Missionary Baptist Church in South Austin, Reverend Mack McCollum waits till the service is well under way to make his entrance. He knows that pacing himself for the long haul always beats making a reckless rush. A banner in the stairwell of this west-side church celebrates his lengthy career: “60 Years Preaching / 55 Years Pastoring / 85 Years Young.” The building itself, constructed in 1996, is relatively modern, but the music inside on this day is mostly time-honored gospel. An organist and drummer guide the choir through its peaks and valleys, expertly building tension, and McCollum’s voice provides the release.
No Other Love : Midwest Gospel (1965-1978) by Various Artists
McCollum has always sung gospel, but he also heard B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and Little Walter while he was growing up in Mississippi in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Because he expected more for himself than a rural southern town could offer, he migrated from Tunica, Mississippi, to Chicago in 1953, when he was about 18. McCollum set up his ministry six years later, but at first it couldn’t sustain him financially—he continued to work in a series of other jobs. For a time he painted cars at Earl Scheib, quitting after he started coming home at night spitting up different colors. In 1966, while working at a rubber-processing factory in Cicero, McCollum lost his right arm.
McCollum took it upon himself to create opportunities, which included a slew of self-pressed recordings. His church’s basement offices still document his efforts: they contain flyers for many of his appearances, including dates he coheadlined with gospel and R&B singer Otis Clay. A map of the United States bristles with push pins marking cities where McCollum performed. Adjoining rooms are filled with his 45s, LPs, CDs, and eight-tracks, along with a vintage Ampex reel-to-reel tape machine and other equipment used to record them.
Drummer may make his supposed ineptitude the subject of self-deprecating jokes, but his unvarnished guitar is the sort of thing that helps make the records on No Other Love so valuable—they provide insight into a small but enduring corner of gospel. Though these artists were outsiders in the 1960s and 1970s, that status meant that their musical messages arrived in the world as they envisioned them, not contorted into whatever shape a major label thought might be easiest to market.
In our conversation, Stout also links collecting and producing gospel with her recent work digitizing tapes of 1950s and ’60s Ecuadoran music. She compares Ecuadoran vocal harmonies, which some families have modeled after the sound of pan pipes, to the music of the Georgia Brooks Singers, a mother-son-daughter group from Gary, Indiana, who have a track on No Other Love. For Stout, a shared worldview transcends language.
