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The Blind Boys of Alabama celebrate their seventieth anniversary in the music biz this year. But when the vocal band's former lead singer and founding member, Clarence Fountain, went missing from the Gospel Music Hall of Fame group's roster in 2006, little fuss was made over the split, originally attributed to the nearly 80-year-old singer's sensitive diabetic condition and later revealed as a creative feud between Fountain and the Blind Boys' management. Forging on with his first release since leaving the lineup, the Grammy Award-winning vet volunteers his own take on the controversial break-up, talks about his recent release, Stepping Up & Stepping Out (One World Entertainment), with ex-Blind Boys' guitarist and friend Clarence Butler, and explains why even though he's gained a young cult following, he'll always sing gospel music.  

Fountain (right) with Sam Butler

You recorded the new album with Blind Boys' veteran guitarist, Sam Butler. So is it any different than a Blind Boys record?

Clarence Fountain: It ain't no different. We just cut it down, took the Blind Boys off, put on another background and went ahead. The record's all right.

Your left the Blind Boys for what has called "creative differences." Blind Boys manager Charles Driebe expounded on that by saying, "It's hard when you're king of the jungle for 60 years to have to slow down." Is that what it boiled down to?

Fountain: When you've been doing something all your life, and here comes somebody else telling you, "You ought to sing this," how you gonna tell me what to sing when I've been doing this all my life? You get tired of somebody telling you what to sing when you know you can do better. We put this record out because we thought we could do better.

So your vision with the Blind Boys was being overruled?

Fountain: You're on the right track. I'm gonna' clear the whole thing up. [Laughs] You are not me, and I'm not you. And if I can't be me, I don't want to be nobody.

So this record was about being able to have a choice?

Fountain: You got that right. I like to pick my own songs. The whole thing boiled down to one thing: Don't bring me a pile of songs and tell me I got to sing this. Because I'm the singer and you're the talker. I've been saying my whole life, "You can't come along and tell me what to do. You're a different person from what I am. You don't feel what I feel. You don't know the God I know."

"You don't know the God I know?"

Fountain: I'll put it like this: "You might be serving the same God but he's not telling me the same thing he's telling you."

The Blind Boys celebrate 70 years as a group this year. Were you really just 10 years old when the group started?

Fountain: That's about right. It all started in school. We all got together and said we were going to form a group. So that's what we did because there was nothing else to do. 

Was the group's original sound similar to your current sound?

Fountain: No, we've changed. Whatever sounded good to us, that's what we went with. We didn't have no [particular] sound.

When did the group start "gigging" professionally? 

Fountain: 1944. We were traveling from Alabama to Mississippi to Tennessee. In 1945 we went to Chicago. As the years went by we just kept going into towns and tearing 'em up. We were young and barely making it, doing the best we could. 

What kind of venues were you guys playing back then?

Fountain: Black churches. We might go into the town's school or something like that, if the [promoter] had a special program that he put on.

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