The Pilgrim Travelers were a gospel group popular in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Formed in the early 1930s in Houston, Texas, they were strongly influenced by another Texas-based quartet, the Soul Stirrers. They achieved popularity after moving to Los Angeles in 1942, where their new manager, James "Woodie" Alexander, helped fashion a new style that went beyond imitating the Soul Stirrers and the Golden Gate Quartet, the other reigning quartet of the era. Like the Soul Stirrers, the Travelers traded the lead between their two best singers, Kylo Turner, a baritone with the same facility as a note-bending falsetto as R.H. Harris of the Soul Stirrers, and Keith Barber, also nicknamed "Doc" or "Crip", who changed from being a sweet-voiced tenor to a hard gospel shouter under Alexander's direction. They added Jesse Whitaker — whom Ray Charles credited as one of his models when he adapted hard gospel style to secular themes to create soul music in the 1950s — as a baritone in 1947.

Alexander also changed the Travelers' performance style from the "flat-footed" style of early quartets to the church-wrecking style of other groups of their era. The singers would punctuate their singing by jumping off stage and running up the aisles in order, in Alexander's words, "to pull the sisters out of their seats". They cemented their popularity with a series of "mother songs", which replayed the same themes of gratitude and guilt for all that mother had done to steer them toward salvation, and with their "walking rhythm", in which they accompanied themselves with percussive effects made by their feet.

The Travelers gradually fell apart in the 1950s, however, as accidents and drink caused both Barber and Turner to leave the group. While the group continued to tour and record, adding Lou Rawls in 1950, it lost its hitmaking power after leaving Specialty Records in 1956. Rawls left the group in 1960; although he returned to record another album with the group after that, it soon faded from the scene.

External sources

• Gospel Music Home Page

• Short profile of the Pilgrim Travelers

Further reading

• Boyer, Horace Clarence,How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel Elliott and Clark, 1995, ISBN 0252068777.