By David Perlmutt
dperlmutt@charlotteobserver.com

He grew up poor in west Charlotte's Greenville community, starting his education in a one-room school with one teacher for nine classes.

That didn't stop Clyde Wright. He's seen more life than most, traveling the world since the late 1950s with the Golden Gate Quartet and filling concert halls with the foursome's brand of jazzy, jubilee-style gospel music.

Wright has sung for royalty and for Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth and Charlie Chaplin. He's sung with gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, French icon Edith Piaf and crooner Eddie Fisher.

And Elvis in Paris - where Wright has lived since 1971.

In late January in Nashville, Tenn., the Gospel Music Association inducted Wright and "The Gates" into its Gospel Music Hall of Fame, along with Johnny Cash and others.

At 82, erudite and full of energy, Wright was the only Gate to attend the ceremony.

Returning to Paris, he stopped in Charlotte to visit relatives and reflect on the unlikely direction his life has taken him.

"Oh-la-la, I am more than amazed about how my life has turned out," he said, sipping coffee at a nephew's house, pressed with French cuffs and ascot. "You can only imagine growing up a poor kid in Charlotte, going to a one-room school - and then seeing the things I've seen and meeting the people I've met."

Innate musical talent

His nephew's house is in Mallard Creek, not far from his grandparents' house where he was born or from the dirt-floored United House of Prayer For All People church where he started singing at age 4 with three brothers.

It was a vastly different world - completely separate and anything but equal.

When Clyde was 2, his mother, a domestic, moved four of her children to a house in Derita near the Puckett's Farm Equipment beer joint. He walked to the one-room Rockwell Rosenwald school, one of thousands that Sears executive Julius Rosenwald funded in the South.

Clyde was never much of a student. But he had an innate talent for music, self-taught as a singer, a horn player for the church "shout band," and later a guitar player.

"There were really only two things open to blacks at that time - the entertainment world or sports world," Wright said. "I was inspired by people in those worlds."

In the 1930s, the radio was the critical medium for gospel quartets spreading their popularity outside churches.

The popular quartets sang jubilee-style gospel, a secularized church music introduced in 1871 by a ensemble of Fisk University students in Nashville, with a jazzy syncopation that ultimately found its way into nightclubs. The quartets featured four males singing in tight harmonies, usually a capella, since churches where they sang didn't allow instruments.

Soon the better quartets were using vocal techniques to imitate instruments. One came from Norfolk, Va., first calling themselves the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, started by Willie Johnson.

In 1937, that quartet arrived in Charlotte and began singing at Carolinas churches. Sundays, they sang on DJ Grady Cole's show on WBT radio - with a clear signal up and down the east coast.

One fan was Eli Oberstein, a record producer for RCA Victor/Bluebird who had come to Charlotte to record bluegrass musicians. He'd set up a field recording studio in the now-gone Hotel Charlotte uptown.

On Aug. 4, The Gates "flawlessly" cut 14 songs in two hours, said gospel music historian Robert Darden.

"The Gates were the first gospel quartet with a national reputation in black and white audiences," said Darden, a Baylor University journalism professor who founded the university's Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. "For the first time, whites were buying (records) by a black group."

Among those listening and learning was a young Clyde Wright. "I was appreciating what I was hearing."

Singing with the stars

By 1939, the Gates had dropped "Jubilee" from their name and left Charlotte for New York.

Soon they appeared in several movies and sang at President Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 inauguration. During World War II, they recorded hits for the war effort: including "Comin' In On a Wing and a Prayer" and "Stalin Wasn't Stallin.'"

To fill the Sunday slots on WBT, Cole recruited the Golden Bell Quintet. Clyde, struggling at West Charlotte High, joined them on guitar.

"I wasn't learning anything in school," he said. "That was the start of my career."

Wright left Charlotte in 1947 with the Selah Jubilee Singers, eventually moving to New York. He was with Selah when he was drafted into the Army, inducted in Boston in 1951 with crooner Eddie Fisher. They performed together there.

The Army gave Wright his first exposure to France and Germany, where he was part of an entertainment unit.

Discharged, he resumed singing with the Selahs, and in 1954 auditioned for The Gates as the quartet began to revive itself after losing a couple of original members and its standing to purer gospel quartets.

In 1955, the group sang in more than 50 countries for the U.S. State Department, and two years later, became goodwill ambassadors for the United Nations.

They performed with comedian Red Skelton for the king of Sweden, and then for Skelton's Hollywood pals in Paris, including Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin.

At intervals, Wright took a break from The Gates to perform on the SS France. By 1959, the quartet was based in Paris and began a two-year stint at the Casino de Paris, a popular theater, in a show starring French singer Line Renaud. One night, they were told that an American soldier was asking for them.

"We came down, and, oh-la-la, there was Elvis," Wright said. "He loved Negro spirituals. He said, 'I've been following the Golden Gate Quartet all my life.'

"He asked if he could sing with us. We said: 'Why not?'"

Elvis, stationed in Germany, sat on the floor, and he and The Gates sang for 31/2 hours. On his return to America, Elvis recorded some of those songs, including a Gates favorite "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho."

'Done some good'

Wright stills sings, in six languages. He manages the latest version of The Gates and visits Charlotte every chance, astonished by its growth.

He tears up when he's asked about his journey, starting from nothing: "If I had been well-educated in America, I probably would not have accomplished what I have."

He admits he wanted to be a lawyer, not a singer.

"I wanted to help people," Wright said. "Now I realize that God has used me to help people in another way. Because in all the world - in France, Japan, Spain, Germany or wherever I've been - it appears I have done some good."

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