It's still a point of some confusion that there is more than one veteran gospel group called The Five Blind Boys. Arsenio Orteza talked to THE FIVE BLIND BOYS OF MISSISSIPPI.

Not that Foster's decision was entirely monetary. "I like singing gospel," he assert. "I don't like singing rock and roll. I can sing rock and roll, but I don't like singing rock and roll. I like singing gospel. I love it. I was raised up in the Church."

But neither was his decision entirely one of principle. When asked if Womack could have named a price to which he would've agreed, Foster answers matter-of-factly, "He could have, yes, if he would've went up a little more. But the price he was talking about," he reiterates, "I got that in gospel."

It's an interesting story because of what it reveals about the struggle between secular and sacred glory, God and Mammon, that so many gospel singers experience. While many great gospel singers never left the church to perform for the world, so to speak, many others have, Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin chief among them. And there's long been an assumption on the part of many soul and R&B music lovers that only the really good singers can leave the gospel scene for a career on the pop charts, an assumption that's obviously false but that nags from the backs, if not the fronts, of the minds of most, if not all, gospel performers at some point in their careers.

Sometimes, though, a gospel singer gets a chance to have it both ways, sort of. For instance, in the late 70s and early 80s, the semi-sacred, semi-secular musical, 'The Gospel At Colonus', played for four years, "overseas, everywhere," says Foster. And although Foster wasn't among the cast (headed by Morgan Freeman), three of the current Blind Boys were.

"J T, Joe and Olice, they was in that play," Foster recalls. "They made a lot of money. They're all in the film, too." When it was all over, gospel had gained some much-deserved publicity, but the fortune of the Blind Boys remained just as subject to the vicissitudes of a fickle public as ever, and some lean years and lean crowds followed, bringing to the fore once more the gap in material wealth and worldly gain that can widen between musicians in the church and those outside.

When Curtis Womack approached Foster in that Los Angeles dressing room, he wasn't making Foster's acquaintance for the first time. In fact, Bobby Womack, before he went on to play for the likes of Sam Cooke, Ron Wood, Janis Joplin and Sly And The Family Stone, played guitar for the Blind Boys, "a long time ago in Cleveland," according to Foster. It's a relationship he and the Blind Boys have maintained over the decades.

"Every time we go to California," says Foster, "he always comes and gets the Blind Boys and we go over to his house. And whenever we sing he's there, him and Lou Rawls, too. He (Rawls) used to travel with the Pilgrim Travellers when they was travelling with the Blind Boys, so they really good friends. And Lou Rawls, he really likes the Blind Boys. He don't care how big our audience is or how much money we make." Then he adds, "Whenever he sees them, he puts a few hundred dollars in everyone of the Blind Boys' hands. And Bobby does that, too."

So again, although indirectly, the issue of a gospel musician's having to "go secular" in order to really make it finds its way into the discussion. It is, after all, Womack and Rawls who give money to the Blind Boys and not the Blind Boys who give money to them. But Foster's years with the group haven't been completely free of worldly acclaim. 'My Desire', Foster's first Blind Boys album, earned a Grammy nomination in 1975, as did "I'm Just Another Soldier", the lead single from the group's 1977 album, 'Meet The Blind Boys'.

Although it's well known that the original Blind Boys' breakthrough recording, "Our Father", on the late Don Robey's Peacock record label, actually made Billboard's R&B charts in 1950, the prospect of them, or any other traditional gospel group's, repeating that success these days are practically non-existent.

Nevertheless, with SRO crowds once again the norm, Foster seems more than content. In a business where full-throated shouters often wear themselves out and sometimes, as in the cases of Browniee and the Rev Julius Cheeks, die from the grind, Foster still has his health and his voice.

"We had been with the Rev Julius Cheeks three weeks before he died (in 1980)," Foster remembers. "His voice was gone, you could hardly hear him when he'd be talking to you. I'm fine," he continues, "'cause I take care of myself. I rest myself, OK? If I know I got a concert tonight, I'm going to sleep. And when I get finished with my concert, I'm going back to the motel and get to sleep. I ain't gonna stay up late at night, nothin' like that. I get my rest. That's what they (Browniee and Cheeks) didn't do."

And as a result, Foster has been around long enough to develop into a gospel performer worthy of extending the Blind Boy's tradition of great lead singing that began with Browniee and was carried on by Rev Willie Mincy, Roscoe Robinson, Wilmer Broadnax, Jimmy Carter, Henry Johnson (whom Foster replaced) and Lewis Dicks. In his own estimation, he's come a long way from the days when he made a living as an autoworker and only sang gospel on the side.

"I was working at General Motors in Norwood, Ohio and the local groups that I sang with was on a concert at the Emory Auditorium in downtown Cincinnati with the Blind Boys and Shirley Caesar. We opened the show. I met the Blind Boys then." Then, shortly after that, Henry Johnson left the group.

"Didn't nobody know why he left," Foster admits. "He just left and they didn't have no lead singer. A few weeks later, they were coming to town because J T Clinkscales' mother lived here at the time. And I went over there and rehearsed with them about two weeks. Then they sent for me about a month later. And then I quit General Motors. When I was rehearsing with them," he continues, "they asked me if I could do that Blind Boys scream. I said, 'Yeah, I can perfect that.' But that ain't all I can do. I can sing soft, the musical songs, and I can sing the hard stuff, too. So really, though I was just one lead singer, they didn't need no two lead singers.

"And I'm more experienced now," Foster says by way of summing up his maturation both as a singer and a performer. "I believe that when I hit that stage, the people should not take their eyes off me until I leave that stage. If they holdin' their baby and their baby starts to cry, they won't even hear it. That's the way I try to capture people's minds, that from the beginning to the end they won't take their eyes off me or my group.

"I couldn't do that when I first come," he concludes. "That's something I had to learn by experience. Can't nobody teach you that."

This feature first appeared in Rejoice magazine, published by the University of Mississippi and is used with permission.