Reviewed by Tony Cummings

Kicking off with the last seven sides that Mitchell's Christian Singers ever recorded (all at a Chicago session on 7th August 1940) and including one of the finest cuts, the surging "Don't Drive Them Away", the rest of the CD is taken up with the 17 sides the Wright Brothers Gospel Singers recorded between 1940 and 1948. If, like me, the only Wright Brothers you'd heard of before were flyers of airplanes let me advise that these guys, like Mitchell's, were a homespun aggregation - all brothers from the town of Cleveland, Texas. James and William Wright alternated on leads with the three other Wrights giving solid harmonic support. In his The Gospel Sound book expert Tony Heilbut described the Wright Brothers as "heavily characterised by falsetto and melisma" and with their chanting repetition building up the rhythmic tension the results here are often effecting though the shrill, brittle sound quality on a few of the tracks is rather disappointing. Still, the Brothers' take on the much recorded "Gospel Train" is well worth investigating.

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