(GALLOWAY, NJ) -- Six-time Grammy-winning gospel group The Blind Boys of Alabama, who state they are the longest running group in American music, will perform at Stockton University's Performing Arts Center on Saturday, February 1, 2025. Showtime is 7:30pm.
The Blind Boys of Alabama have a career that spans more than 70 years. They have been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Recording Academy/Grammys with Lifetime Achievement Awards and inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. The living legends are known for “crossing multiple musical boundaries” with their performances encompassing traditional and contemporary gospel music.
The group’s latest album “Echoes of the South” won the 2024 Grammy for Best Roots Gospel Album.
Tickets are $40 for the general public, $38 for senior citizens (65+) and military, $35 for Stockton alumni, $30 for Stockton faculty and staff, $18 for children under 12 and $12 for Stockton students. Tickets are available for purchase online or at the Stockton Performing Arts Center box office from 10:00am to 3:00pm Monday through Thursday and 90 minutes before showtime. Call 609-652-9000. Stockton Performing Arts Center is located at 101 Vera King Farris Drive in Galloway, New Jersey.
In the seven decades since the Blind Boys of Alabama first began singing together, America has witnessed a World War, the civil rights movement, and the Summer of Love; the moon landing, Vietnam, and the fall of the Berlin Wall; JFK, MLK, and Malcolm X; the invention of the jukebox, the atomic bomb, and the internet. Through it all, the Blind Boys' music has not only endured, but thrived, helping both to distinguish the sound of the American south and to push it forward through the 20th century and well on into the 21st.
Consisting of Jimmy “Jimster” Carter, Ricky McKinnie, Paul Beasley, Rev. Julius Love, newest addition Sterling Glass, and led by Music Director and lead guitarist Joey Williams, the group has the rare distinction of being recognized around the world as both living legends and modern-day innovators. They are not just gospel singers borrowing from old traditions; the group helped to define those traditions in the 20th century and almost single-handedly created a new gospel sound for the 21st. Since the original members first sang together as kids at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind in the late 1930s (including Jimmy Carter, who leads the group today), the band has persevered through seven decades to become one of the most recognized and decorated roots music groups in the world.
Touring throughout the South during the Jim Crow era of the 1940s and 1950s, the Blind Boys flourished thanks to their unique sound, which blended the close harmonies of early jubilee gospel with the more fervent improvisations of hard gospel. Since they released their debut single, "I Can See Everybody’s Mother But Mine," on the iconic Veejay label in 1948, the Blind Boys have been hailed as "gospel titans" by Rolling Stone Magazine. In the early 1960s, the band sang at benefits for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and were a part of the soundtrack to the Civil Rights movement. But as the years passed, gospel fans started to drift away and follow the many singers who had originated in the church but were now recording secular popular music. And the Blind Boys, who refused many offers to ‘cross over’ to secular music, also saw their audiences dwindle. However, the Blind Boys persevered, and their time came again, starting in the 1980s with their starring role alongside Oscar winner Morgan Freeman, in the Obie Award-winning Broadway musical “The Gospel at Colonus,” which began a new chapter in their incredible history. It’s almost unbelievable that a group of blind, African-American singers, who started out touring during a time of whites-only bathrooms, restaurants and hotels, went on to win five GRAMMY® Awards, a Lifetime Achievement GRAMMY, be inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, and to perform at the White House for three different presidents.
Stockton University is ranked among the top public universities in the nation. Our more than 9,000 students can choose to live and learn on the 1,600-acre wooded main campus in the Pinelands National Reserve in South Jersey and at our coastal residential campus just steps from the beach and Boardwalk in Atlantic City. The university offers more than 160 undergraduate and graduate programs.
