Biography

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Sister Elizabeth Eustis
Walk With Me
Delmark DD-737

*1. In My Home Over There (2:49)
*2. My Heart Is Fixed Alright (2:13)
*3. A Sinner’s Plea (2:42)
4. The Last Mile Of The Way (2:35)
5. Just A Little While To Stay Here (3:56)
*6. Old Rugged Cross (3:35)
*7. Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho (2:04)
*8. Faith And Grace (3:26)
9. He Knows My Heart (2:59)
*10. It Is No Secret (4:42)
*11. Walk With Me (2:22)
*12. The Silent Communion Of Prayer (2:46)
13. Lord, Lord, Lord, You Certainly Been Good To Me (3:05)

*previously unissued

Sister Elizabeth Eustis, vocals
Richard Peterson, piano
Ruby Mae Summers, organ
John Joseph, bass
Alverta Mills, soprano

Recorded by Grayson Mills on May 2, 1962 at 2nd Mount Olive Baptist Church, 2108 St. Anthony, New Orleans, LA (Reverend Rudolph Roussel, permission).

This album resurrects the definitive 1962 recording session by an historic pillar of New Orleans’ gospel singing community, Sister Elizabeth Eustis. Only four of the thirteen songs from this session were originally released, on a hard-to-find 45rpm disc from the patently obscure Euphonic Sound Recording Company. The other nine songs - which include some of the session’s most brilliant moments - are issued here for the very first time. They recall a classic New Orleans gospel vocalist, not a bench-breaking sanctified shouter, but a venerable Baptist church-house singer. (continued inside)

The Euphonic Series
The Euphonic Series derives from music recorded or collected by Paul Affeldt, publisher of Jazz Report magazine, for release on his Euphonic Sounds label, an outgrowth of his interest in early jazz and blues, particularly the piano. Paul discovered jazz in his home state of Wyoming before moving to southern California and named his label after his favorite rag. Delmark recently acquired the master tapes and is proud to add these fine titles to its catalog.



The early ’60s saw gospel singers reaching out from the insular black communities that originally sustained them to capture new audiences in the world at large. The reigning queen of church-house prima donnas, Mahalia Jackson, was enjoying recognition as a major recording star and network television show host. Back in the city of her birth, Mahalia’s future biographer, Laurraine Goreau, was penning a local interest column for the daily States Item, and on October 25, 1963 she noted:

New Orleans’ home-based counterpart to Mahalia Jackson is beaming over the new popularity of gospel singing over the land... Sister Elizabeth Eustis has been on several small labels... Strictly gospel music, though; she won't touch anything else. "Somebody's always trying to get me to sing blues, because I have the voice for it, but no; indeed," she said emphatically. "The blues have no hope. Singing gospel you have a hope, a vision in view that you want to reach other people. Even though this present popularity of gospel singing may be a fad, it's a good thing, because people who don't go to church will hear a true message."

While Mahalia’s name is etched in eternity, her "home-based counterpart" has all but disappeared from popular history. She was born Elizabeth Anderson, around 1899, to a poor sharecropping family in Daisy, Louisiana. Not on any map, Daisy was a "little country settlement" some thirty miles downriver from New Orleans in the backwaters of Plaquemines Parish, around Pointe a la Hache, where vestiges of plantation slavery still haunt the countryside. In this bleak environment, religion was the source of all hope, and every Sunday, after a "long week of working in the rice fields," Elizabeth and her family would walk together to the Bethlehem Baptist Church and "in their humble way Serve God amid hand clapping, feet patting and real Good Gospel Singing."
Elizabeth was still in her teens when her mother died, and her father was forced to send her to New Orleans to live with an aunt. Little is known of her early life in New Orleans, save that she survived some "dark days of despair... in the French Quarters" and "continued her early church activities as a choir member or wherever she was needed." Eventually she met and married Henry Eustis, a World War I veteran and a plasterer by trade. They settled in the historic Treme neighborhood and joined the Zion Hill Baptist Church.
It was well before World War II when Sister Elizabeth Eustis established herself as a licensed missionary evangelist. Her surprisingly prolific recording career began in 1947 with a single release on the Harlem label that features one of the earliest recorded versions of Kenneth Morris’ "gospel blues" classic, "I’ll Let Nothing Separate Me From His Love." Her next release, a 1953 effort on the Bayou label, brought forth the first recorded version of her own powerful composition, "A Sinner's Plea." In 1954, Sister Elizabeth entered a long-term recording relationship with local impresario Joe Mares, whose Southland label was dedicated to "authentic New Orleans jazz." As Mares’ "house gospel singer," she recorded gospel songs and hymns with bands led by Percy Humphrey, Thomas Jefferson, Don Albert, and other heroes of the New Orleans
jazz revival. Whether or not there was a true community component to these gospel singer-jazz band experiments, they became the vehicle for much of Sister Elizabeth's later work.
For some brief period of time Sister Elizabeth inherited an unlikely accompanist in future New Orleans music star Dr. John, who met her through her guitar-playing nephew Roy Eustis Montrell, who played in Fats Domiino's band from 1963 until his untimely death in 1979. As the good Dr. recalls in his 1994 autobiography, Under a Hoodoo Moon, "She dragged me around here and there... I had to learn on the run; it got so I could follow tunes like''I Shall Not Be Moved" through alleys inconceivable to man."
Dr. John righteously observed that Sister Elizabeth’s sound at local church programs and tent revival meetings was different from what "she’d lay down when she spread the gospel stuff with a Dixieland band," and this same observation appears to have guided the session at hand. Ken Grayson Mills, who produced the session, was an early "jazz pilgrim" who arrived from California in 1961 to establish himself at Preservation Hall and launch his Icon Records label in the interest of "real New Orleans jazz." Mills understood that black religious music was a primal ingredient of jazz, but he also wanted to explore the gospel tradition on its own terms, and to this end, he arranged to record Sister Elizabeth in context at the Second Mount Olive Baptist Church, on May 2, 1962.
The result is a wonderfully loose, informal session with Sister Elizabeth backed by sympathetic, church-based musicians Richard Peterson on piano and Ruby Mae Summers on organ. Together they instinctively negotiate the winding musical "alleys" that Dr. John referred to, and Peterson brings special meaning to the term "battered upright." The third musician in the mix is bassist John Joseph, a true jazz pioneer who was musically active in New Orleans
before the turn of the twentieth century. In 1963, at thg age of 88, "Papa" John toured Japan with clarinet legend George Lewis. He died on the bandstand at Preservation Hall in 1965.
Rounding out the session, and grounding it ever so firmly in the church, is a small, mixed voice choral ensemble which, in its finest moment, transforms Sister Elizabeth’s signature "Sinner’s Plea" from its originally recorded conception as a gospel juke-box hit to a deep and timeless church-house moan. Indeed, they bring the whole session to the moaners’ bench. The bright light of the ensemble is Alverta Mills, whose soaring soprano voice forms the
perfect foil to Sister Elizabeth’s resolute contralto. She sparks the quartet-inspired chanting on "Last Mile of the Way" and "He Knows My Heart," and she hovers over the melody of "It Is No Secret" and "Silent Communion of Prayer" with an other-worldly quality that might otherwise be effected only by a masterfully bowed musical saw.
Running the gamut of her expansive repertoire, from spirituals like "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho" to "gospel blues" like "Faith and Grace" and "Walk With Me" to weathered hymns like "The Old Rugged Cross" to brass band favorites like "Just a Little While to Stay Here" and "Lord, Lord, Lord" (with her own personal twist on the melody line), this session survives to convey the "true message" that Sister Elizabeth talked about. Fused by her utterly disarming sincerity, it is the same message that she beamed out every Sunday morning for more than a decade on her popular fifteen minute "live" broadcast over gospel radio station WYLD.

[Reproduce for illustration: photo and caption, Louisiana Weekly, May 24, 1965]

Still active in the 1970s, Sister Elizabeth embodied the sing-til-we-die philosophy that lies behind so much of the best-loved gospel music. When Mahalia Jackson died in January 1972, Sister Elizabeth was selected to represent "Local Talent" in the "Musical Tribute" portion of the massive memorial service held at the old Rivergate Convention Center. Later that fall, when she took part in a New Orleans Jazz Club function at the Marriott Hotel, a review in the daily Times Picayune assured, "Miss Eustis and her gospel singers fairly brought the aroma of rural churches and riverside baptisms into the ornate Mardi Gras Ballroom... Before working into her opening number, Sister Eustis told the audience she was just trying to glorify God through her singing... From 'Just a Closer Walk with Thee' to 'Down by the Riverside,' she brought sweetness and solidarity to the afternoon."
In the fall of 1974 Sister Elizabeth cut a record for the local Pontchartrain label, with jazz trumpeter Wallace Davenport and a band that thankfully included her long-time radio show accompanist Edwin Hogan. Appropriately entitled "Just a Little While to Stay Here," it is her last recorded testament; on July 4, 1975, following a brief illness, Sister Elizabeth Eustis died at Charity Hospital. Her funeral service at Ebenezer Baptist Church was followed by a "traditional jazz march" with the Eureka Brass Band, who escorted her to her final resting place in St. Louis No. 2 Cemetery. In the end, her heartfelt "Sinner’s Plea" was no doubt answered:

Lord, throw your arms all around me,
Please, have mercy on my soul.

- Lynn Abbott, December 1999

Acknowledgements: The quoted passages about Sister Elizabeth Eustis’ early life are from an unpublished biographical sketch that was written in the early ’60s by her nephew Rev. Lloyd Vincent Montrell. It is in the Jazz Club Archive at the Louisiana State Museum. Another valuable resource is the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. I would also like to thank Royliene Montrell
Johnson, Roy Montrell, Jr., Barry Martyn, Tad Jones, Tom Stagg, Jerry Brock and Yumiko Kishimoto.

1. In My Home Over There (2:49)
2. My Heart Is Fixed Alright (2:13)
3. A Sinner’s Plea (2:42)
4. The Last Mile Of The Way (2:35)
5. Just A Little While To Stay Here (3:56)
6. Old Rugged Cross (3:35)
7. Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho (2:04)
8. Faith And Grace (3:26)
9. He Knows My Heart (2:59)
10. It Is No Secret (4:42)
11. Walk With Me (2:22)
12. The Silent Communion Of Prayer (2:46)
13. Lord, Lord, Lord, You Certainly Been Good To Me (3:05)

All songs Traditional, Public Domain except My Heart Is Fixed Alright, A Sinner’s Plea and The Silent Communion Of Prayer by Sister Elizabeth Eustis, Public Domain and He Knows My Heart by Mahalia Jackson, Bess Music Co., BMI.

Album Production and Supervision: Robert G. Koester
Original 45rpm Production: Paul Affeldt
Design: Kate Hoddinott

Other Delmark albums in the Euphonic Series include:
Biddle Street Barrelhousin’ (739) St. Louis blues piano with Speckled Red,
Henry Brown, Stump Johnson, James Crutchfield, Lawrence Henry
Charles Thompson, The Neglected Professor (738) Ragtime, jazz & blues
pianist from St. Louis
Piano Red, Dr. Feelgood (740) Younger brother of Speckled Red, Piano Red
had a stream of hit records for Victor in the ’50s

Another Delmark album of interest:
Robert Anderson & The Caravans, Working The Road - The Golden Age of
Chicago Gospel (702) also with Albertina Walker, Rev. Robert Ballinger,
The Little Lucy Smith Singers, Singing Sammy Lewis


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