Elder Jack Ward - Already Made (2021) Hi Res

Memphis gospel singer Elder Jack Ward was born in the landwhere the blues began, the often mythologized MississippiDelta, but as his new Bible and Tire album Already Made aptlydemonstrates, the area's gospel heritage is every bit as rich asits secular counterpart. "I was born in the country and I wouldhear Elmore James, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins,Howlin' Wolf, all of them guys - and I used to patronize them,and sing like them a little bit, but I came back to my roots. Iused to do a lot of blues singing but I broke from that and gotinto the gospel."I grew up around Itta Bena, Mississippi, that's about six milesfrom Greenwood, and I used to sing with a group there calledthe Kings Of The South. I did a lot of singing, but I was a farmboy, worked on the farm. I chopped cotton, picked cotton, drovemules with a one row planter. But music's been in me since Iwas about seven or eight years old when I first tried to sing. Mymother, my father and my two sisters would be in the cottonfield and I did a little song called 'I Woke Up This Morning' - Ididn't know how to put it together but my mother said, 'Hey,boy! I don't want you singin' no blues.'"What she couldn't have known then was that a journey toMemphis when Ward was a teenager would inadvertently insurethat he would take the right road. "My mom came up here tosee her grandmother. I was sixteen at the time. And I said tomyself, 'When I turn eighteen I'm coming back to Memphis andmake me a hit record.' And I did."That disc was 1964's "Don't Need No Doctor" by the ChristianHarmonizers, a group comprised of old friends from Ward'shometown. "I knew the Brooks brothers, who organized theChristian Harmonizers, from Itta Bena," he explains. "And I hadmy mind set to come to Memphis to sing blues or rock 'n' roll.But I found them and they said, 'Look, man, we need you to sing gospel.' Ward got down to business with the brothers, andeven briefly replaced soul sensation O.V. Wright in the SunsetTravelers during one of Wright's secular.