Founded in 1939 at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind in Talladega, the Blind Boys of Alabama survived the birth of rock and roll, the civil rights movement, the rise of hip hop and the digital age while never abandoning gospel. This episode begins with a faculty that forbade the boys from singing Black gospel, and the children who huddled around a radio in the dark memorizing the Golden Gate Quartet in secret. From sneaking off campus to sing for World War II soldiers as the Happy Land Jubilee Singers to a 1948 Newark battle of the blind boys against the Mississippi group that gave them their name, the story is one of pressure turned into power.

We break down the physical demands of hard gospel and the relay-race lead-swapping that let them scream night after night for decades. We examine why they turned down a lucrative se ...