Clarence Williams and the Rising Sons: Transcript

Gospel Quartet, Waterloo
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(Music-“Without Jesus, No Love”)

Rev. Percy Thomas:  Hello. My name is Reverend Percy Thomas, and I’m the bass player for Clarence Williams and the Rising Sons.

(Music-“Without Jesus”)

Rev. Clarence Williams:  Hello. My name is Clarence Williams, and I’m the lead singer and background singer with the Rising Sons.

Rev. Willie Rocket:  My name is Minister Willie Rocket. It’s probably been what—10, 11 years ago, something like that—when Reverend Percy Thomas, our bass player, he approached me. And he’s, like, “Why don’t we get a group started?” You know, because we played together. Both of us are pastors’ sons, and we played together often throughout the community. And so we sort of vibe off each other. Our music really gels or blends together really well. And he thought that it would be a good opportunity to explore our gift or to pursue having a group.

I believe our first rehearsal was at my dad’s church.

Rev. Clarence Williams:  Uh-huh. St. Luke’s.

Rev. Willie Rocket:  We sort of stumbled around on what to name the group for a long, long time. And we actually had our first concert, our debut, and they called us the “No Name Group.”

And so we kept tossing names around. And I came up with the name “The Rising Sons.” And then our drummer at the time said, “Why don’t we put Clarence’s name on the front of it since he’s the oldest guy in the group, and he’s sort of like a father to us all?” So we decided to name the group “Clarence Williams and the Rising Sons.”

(Music-“Amazing Grace”)

Rev. Clarence Williams:  Well, originally when we first got started, we said we’s going to use the old-time lyrics with kind of like contemporary music. So we have altered away from that a little bit. But mostly we are still in the quartet realm.

Rev. Willie Rocket:  Our style is a little bit of a blend of just inspirational, a blues-type feel. We have some of our songs—we have a couple of songs that might even have that Delta blues-type feel to it as far as the music. Our lyrics are going to always be gospel, but we change our music a lot. You might even hear a little bit of rock ‘n’ roll. You might even hear on some songs—who knows—a little bit of jazz. I don’t know.

Rev. Percy Thomas:  Or some reggae.

Rev. Willie Rocket:  Yeah. Or reggae. We have one tune from our first CD, “Without Jesus, No Love.”

Rev. Clarence Williams:  Gospel music, quartet music, always has been a mixture of music. It’s not just one set way of doing it. But it’s a—you can tell it’s a quartet style at all times.

Rev. Percy Thomas:  The quartet style would be where you take one lead singer and three people in the background singing harmony.

Rev. Willie Rocket:  Depending on what part of the country you’re from—you can sort of tell by the way you sing or the style of quartet music that you do, you can just about tell—I can—where that group is from.

East Coast is much different. Their quartet—in the Carolinas and New York and Brooklyn and all that area—their quartet is a lot different than down south.

(Music-“Amazing Grace”)

Rev. Percy Thomas:  You start with a certain inspiration of a song. You could take a scripture from the bible, and put the lyrics to music, and create the songs that we do.

We give all the credit to God for blessing the group to have these opportunities. And we are having faith to know that we’re expecting greater things to come in the future.