What we have here is some prehistoric Doo Wop for you Sunday morning revelers. The Golden Gate Quartet consisted of Orlandus Wilson, Willie Johnson, Henry Owens and Clyde Riddick and started out as a Barbershop Quartet in Virginia back in the early 1930s. The group began performing for audiences and soon migrated to North Carolina where their brand of Jubilee Gospel was featured over the radio airwaves. By 1937, they came to the attention of the Victor Record company who began recording their sides (including this 1937 track) for the Bluebird label. The Golden Gate Jubilee sound was a heady brew melding their Barbershop harmony roots with Jazz scat singing, Gospel and early Country Hillbilly music, paving the way for Doo Wop some twenty years before the fact. The group still exist in some form today and released their most recent album, “Incredible” in 2010. Listen closely and you can also here a sample of this very song in Paul Simon’s “Love And Blessings,” from his latest studio album “So Beautiful Or So What.”
