This is track 2 from the 1980 album "Rejoice".
Written by Archie Jordan
Caesar was born in 1938, when "the tobacco factories were blooming," she remembers. "As a child growing up, we still had dirt streets. And potholes." She remembers being carried to church; church has been one constant in Caesar's life, and singing has been the other.
Caesar's father, Big Jim Caesar, was a gifted gospel singer. He died when Shirley was still a child, leaving behind her handicapped mother and 11 other children. Times were incredibly difficult, but Caesar says she had a wonderful childhood nonetheless, immersed in church and family life. "My brothers, they had quartets ... we were just like chips from my father's tree," she says. "It was marvelous. Pretty much all of the Caesar side of my family are singers, either singers or preachers."
To hear her tell it, Shirley Caesar has never experienced adversity: from getting a whipping to being hungry and penniless in a strange town, it's been "a blessing in disguise" to her.
"Mama told me and my sister Anne to wash the dishes," Caesar says. "I didn't want to do it, I said I'm not going to put that water on my hands. Got in trouble. After we'd gotten that whipping, I would wash and Anne would dry. We knew nothing about having air conditioners then, all we had was the big window. So, when we had the windows up, our voices just penetrated the atmosphere, into the hearts and the homes of people and passersby."
Baby Shirley Caesar, as she came to be known, would sing from then on, every chance she got, traveling on weekends to churches all over the Carolinas and Virginia. In 1957, when Caesar was 19, the premier gospel group The Caravans, headed by gospel music icon Albertina Walker, came through North Carolina to perform. Noting that the group needed a fourth singer to form a quartet, Caesar followed The Caravans to a show in Kinston. "I felt in my spirit that if Albertina Walker heard me sing," she says, "she would want me in her group."
Caesar wrote a request on a piece of paper: "Please call on Shirley Caesar to sing a solo." Walker did call on Caesar; she sang her solo, Thomas A. Dorsey's "The Lord Will Make a Way Somehow." Walker was so impressed with Caesar's performance that she asked her friend the Rev. C.L. Franklin (father of Aretha) to ask Caesar's mother for permission for her daughter to travel with The Caravans.
Having finished her first year at North Carolina College (now N.C. Central University) and unable to afford tuition for the next one, Caesar said, "I sold my biology book and caught a bus to D.C.," where The Caravans joined her the next day. Thus began her singing career and her new life on the road.
"We have far more fond memories than we do bad memories," Caesar says of touring with The Caravans and other gospel groups. She recalls singing in venues such as the Apollo, Madison Square Garden, the Grand Ole Opry, Radio City Music Hall. In Kentucky, which Caesar knew was the Bluegrass state, she looked for grass "the color of the sky or a robin's egg."
To anyone else, Caesar's bad memories would be spirit-crushing. "There have been times when I've gone to cities to sing, and while we were singing the promoter would just skip with the money," she says. She remembers being lonely, broke and hungry, occasionally, while traveling on the road; even groups as well known as The Caravans were not well paid.
"Racial discrimination kept us out of the more decent hotels and restaurants," Caesar writes in her autobiography, The Lady, the Melody and the Word, "but even if it hadn't, it wouldn't have mattered. We didn't have the money to stay in the nicer places anyway."
After eight years with The Caravans, during which, Caesar notes proudly, she never missed a single show, she decided that it was time to go solo. She wanted to minister God's word, she says, and her packed schedule with The Caravans didn't allow for that. Caesar took to the road herself, singing and preaching all over the country. She won her first Grammy in 1970. She's released more than 20 albums and a dozen singles, including one in 1984 with Al Green, "Sailin' on the Sea of Your Love."