A rare interview with St. Louis legend Willie Mae Ford Smith, recorded in 1973 and now heard for the first time

Almost half a century ago, on September 1, 1973, a young man named John Sullivan sits with Willie Mae Ford Smith at a card table in his Laclede Town apartment, just south of Grand Avenue. Smith is 69 years old and has just recorded her first album. Sixteen years later, she will be pronounced “one of the most important gospel singers of the century” by The New York Times. To Sullivan’s knowledge, she’s spoken on tape only twice before.

She was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, she tells him. “My grandfather, Alfred Williams—he’s dead of course. He died, I think it was 1911 he died, in Natchez, at the age of 110. My mother said that he came from Africa as a slave, and they brought him to Mississippi…. He came from Liberia, and his great-great-grandfather was the king of Liberia.”

Sullivan asks what happened to the money her family learned was sent from Africa.

“As far as we know, it stopped at Natchez,” she says. “You know, they didn’t send money by checks and things like that; it was all in barrels. During that time, there was so much prejudice and slavery and what have you, my grandma was afraid to talk about it. So they didn’t bother about finding where it was. They sent that for him to I guess get back home. But he was pretty wealthy in Mississippi. When he passed, he had 180 acres of land, which neither of us received any benefits from. We didn’t pursue it because my grandmother was always afraid they would kill her children if you go down there and fool with it. So we didn’t miss what we never had.”

Willie Mae’s parents moved to Memphis when she was just a baby, and she grew up hearing the blues in Memphis. “There was a clubhouse in back of our house where men would gamble and do other bad things,” she told music professor William Thomas Dargan in 1988, “and they would throw money down out of the window for me to sing the ‘Boll Weevil.’ . . . I was a kid, I didn’t know anything ’bout the blues, but I thought I knew, and the Lord got me outta that. When I got saved, I had no more desire to sing the blues.”

Instead, she sang gospel with her family. Gospel, she later told the National Endowment for the Arts, was “the Christian blues. I’m like the blues singer; when something’s rubbing me wrong, I sing out my soul to settle me down.” Her style was categorized as “blues-influenced gospel”—a subgenre created by Thomas A. Dorsey. She worked for his National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, in the early 1930s.

Sullivan learns all this after he’s introduced to Smith. The only gospel he’d ever heard drifted through the open doors of the church near his childhood home. But he worked with trumpeter Clark Terry’s daughter, Linda Terry, at Malcolm Bliss Hospital, and one day, Terry informed him that he had to meet Mother Smith.

“Ms. Terry and I used to talk about jazz, but what had her take me to Ms. Smith, I don’t know,” he says now. “We caught the elevator and went up to the first floor and walked down to the day hospital, and I saw this bespectacled volunteer sitting at a table with patients. She was warm, friendly, gracious. Just glad to see me, even though she didn’t know who I was.

“You couldn’t research online back then,” he adds, “but I tried to find out as much as I could about her. I went to the library. If it was a book about gospel, she would take up a lot of the index.”

They talked again, and Smith let him know she wasn’t into the commercial side of music: She was disappointed in some of the talent she had “mothered” that went commercial, saying, “You know that eagle is a big bird.” So she didn’t care about making a lot of albums herself.

“But there are going to be folks who never heard about you,” Sullivan pointed out. “Would you mind if I did an interview so I could at least get something on tape?”

She agreed, and a friend of Sullivan’s found him a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder he set up on a card table in his living room. “We’d hand the mic back and forth to each other.”

Early in the recording, Smith tells him how she and her three sisters started singing with their father at Prospect Baptist Church in Memphis. When she was 11, they moved to St. Louis, and The Four Ford Sisters sang in the gospel choir at True Light, “a little church on the corner. This is where we started making a name for ourselves.” Their brothers wanted no part of it, she adds. “My son, now, he’s got a beautiful voice, but he didn’t want to sing, just like my brothers. But the girls kept singing until we got married.”

Luckily, the man she’d fallen for, James Peter Smith, loved her singing and urged her on. “He’d say, ‘Oh, they are calling for you to sing. Go on and sing!’ And I just hopped out there.” She’d adopted a daughter, Bertha, who became her accompanist, and when Bertha finished Sumner High School, she and her mom took off, traveling the country. They were “like pig and pork,” people said, with Bertha always able to anticipate what her mother was about to sing.

“We went everywhere singing,” Smith recalls. “Only on invitation; we didn’t just go. And funny thing, we never even asked for money, but somehow the Lord provided, and we got the money, not trying to capitalize on the churches. I loved the churches. My husband was a very fine deacon of the Galilee Baptist Church. At times, he would take his own money and send us.”

She became known as “Mother Smith”; Sullivan asks her why.

“I had a group of young people, they used to follow me around,” she says. “I organized those young people into the Willie Mae Ford Smith Specials, and when we’d go out of town, I was their mother until we came back home. Anyone who was in distress, Mother Smith could help out, give money or part of my clothes. My friends would say so many times, ‘Why don’t you stop those people calling you Mother?’ I said, ‘Anytime anyone see enough in you to call you mother, you ought to be grateful’… And now I just feel like I am the mother of the world! I like it.”

Sullivan asks about the careers she nurtured, including that of Mahalia Jackson. She recalls a young Jackson saying, “‘If I had your justice, oh, I would go places.’ I said, ‘Oh, you can do it. You’ve got it. You’ve got what it takes. All you have to do is get out.’ She said, ‘How you gonna get out?’” At the time, Jackson was a beautician, making her own face powders. Smith remembers telling her, “‘This is fine. Give that recipe to somebody and take your voice out there for the Lord. People need to hear your voice that’s down in the dumps and need to be lifted.’ And she could lift you.”

So could Brother Joe May: “I took him right under my wing and tutored him, carried him all over this United States until he became strong enough to get on his own two feet.”

Smith met Aretha Franklin “when Aretha was about 6 years old. Her father and her mother were pastoring, they had a Friendship Church in Buffalo, New York. And I was singing ‘Give Me Wings’—they were not doing it until I began to do it. And Aretha, oh, she was a sweet little girl, and she had a beautiful little voice. I used to say to her all the time, ‘Aretha, one of these days you could be America’s number one gospel singer. You can sing like nobody’s business.’ It was shortly after my husband passed. They had a big parade for me, and the mayor gave me the key and blah blah, and from the church they selected Aretha to sing with the young people, and I heard that sweet voice. There’s something about real talent. When you hear it—even on Sunday morning when I’d go to service, if I’d hear a voice, I’d have to find it. So I would look for Aretha, and that little voice was just so sweet.

“I don’t know how Aretha got into the jazz world,” Smith adds, sounding less than happy about it. “In the church world, they don’t have money. I’m not a jazz singer. I don’t understand the jazz. I think about Dinah Washington. I brought her here with Sally Martin, and she wasn’t a blues singer, but for the money… They leave the church.”

(One bit of irony: It was Smith’s appearance at the 1972 Newport Jazz Festival—singing gospel—that catapulted her out of the church world and onto the wider national music scene.)

When Sullivan asks her to recap the evolution of gospel music in the United States, she can’t just sum it up; she has to sing her way through it. “I think about my grandparents,” she tells him. “My grandmother said if they had a meeting—you know, in slavery they weren’t allowed to have church—they would sing. Her rich, deep contralto sings it low as a lullaby: ‘Meeting tonight, meeting tonight, meeting on the old campground.’ If the others didn’t get it, they’d sing, ‘Shouting tonight, shouting tonight, shouting on the old campground.’ They could point their fingers whatever direction it was going to be. They had places where they would meet. Not every meeting would be in the same place, because they knew the boss man would find out, and he would give them a good flogging.

“If they had been mistreated,” she continues, “they’d sing, ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, and nobody knows my sorrow… Glory hallelujah.’ They had been beaten so bad, knocked them all over the ground and to let the other people know what they’d been through, ‘And sometimes I’m almost to the ground, oh, yes, Lord. Oh, nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen…’

“And then after they had their little meeting, they would get in the field in the hot sun,” she says. “‘Swing low, sweet chariot, and carry me home.’ When they’d been beaten until they were almost out of their mind, they’d sing, ‘If you get there before I do, oh, yes, Lord, tell all my friends I’m coming too, oh, yes, Lord.’”

Smith reminisces about her beloved grandmother: “I used to sit at her feet and just listen to her tell things that had happened in her day. She had a big scar on the back of her neck, and I would have my arm around her and I’d feel the back of her head. I said, ‘Grandma, where’d you get this?’” The horrible answer came: When she was a baby, her mother had laid her in front of the fire to keep her warm while she cooked. One day, an ember fell on the baby, and she screamed and cried, but her mother was not allowed to go to her. Finally, the fire went out, and when her mother saw the ember that had seared its way into her baby’s flesh, “she like to have fainted,” Smith’s grandmother told her. “She showed it to her mistress, and her mistress almost fainted, because the fire had burned me almost through to my bones.’ And the Lord just let that baby endure that misery, and she came out of it all right. She said her mother nursed her back to health again, but it left that terrible scar. All the time I would put my hand back there, and I would rub it and I’d think about it.”

Sullivan, who’s been reading about archaeology, asks what Smith thinks about Africa being the birthplace of humankind and of religion.

“Well, as you know, I’m kind of young to know about all of the origins of religion,” she teases. “But from the Bible I understand quite a bit…how they had to pray and how they would look up to God for whatever they needed and whatever task was oppressing them. Some of the masters would get into difficulties, and they’d come out and say to the ones they had beaten for prayer, ‘Whatever this is that you know about, hold on to it, hold on to it for me.’ They’d ask for prayer, but they didn’t want to say ‘prayer.’”

That turns her mind to her experiences in Haiti: “I saw things over there that really kind of burned me, but I know that it has to be until God lifts His hand. They suffer for meat and rice, they don’t have that. When it rains, they come down that mountain and they pay a penny at night to sleep on the floor. The men work for $2 a month and the women work for $1 a month. They are just as poor as they can be, and if you send clothing over there, they won’t get it. It’ll be in the capital and it’ll dry rot. I saw a lady take potato peelings and make a soup out of it. And the soup was delicious. If they have a can, they don’t let that can go to waste. They make something out of it. They make a cup and use it until it gets rusty and the bottom falls out.”

As a kid, Sullivan lived on St. Louis’ West Side; when Mill Creek Valley was taken over by developers, his father, who was white, refused to follow the white flight to the suburbs. So Sullivan was one of only two white kids in his kindergarten class, the only white kid in a performing dance group in grade school, the only white player on his high school basketball team, and later, the only white employee in the psychiatric ER at Malcolm Bliss Community Center. He grew up thoughtful and became a social worker, then a psychotherapist and an instructor at the University of Indianapolis.

In the interview, he mentions his impression that “the nonwhite people on this planet, which just so happens to be nine-tenths of the people on this plant, have always been in harmony with nature. They rely on nature for their medicine, their clothing, their housing, their being.” Does Smith think that kind of harmony with nature makes people more spiritual?

“This is what I feel about these people who are in harmony,” she says. “They know that there is a bigger something, bigger than you or I. Who made the mountains? Who made the trees? Who made the rivers that flow out to the seas? Somebody bigger than you and I, and if that somebody made a river, made a mountain, He can watch over me.” She sighs. “So many people don’t have understanding. If you harm me, God knows it. He doesn’t want me to strike back. He’ll do the fighting.” If a man looks at the sun to know the time, she adds, “there’s something in him cooperating with the one who made time.” She mentions Native Americans’ ability to communicate by smoke signals, how “God gave them that instinct. They didn’t have a manual. Whatever God gives you, honey, it’s there.”

Amusement creeps into her voice. “I never had a dream that I’d make an album at my age. Sixty-seven when I made that album. But God gave a little boy in New York City the nerve to send for me and bring me in to New York to sing in Radio City Music Hall. Now that was not me encouraging him. That man upstairs knows everything. When God makes something, it’s there. He made the mountains.”

Smith wasn’t this fervent about her faith as a young woman. “When the Holy Ghost hit me, I hit the floor,” she told the musicologist, Dargan. “On the train coming back to St. Louis, I kept everybody up all night long, trying to talk, speaking in tongues.... Honey, this child got soused good. The Lord had to fix me up, because you see I was a wild person, just like a wild buck. I made fun of holiness people. I laughed at ’em and tried to do the holy dance. I would just cut up.”

After that experience, she stopped cutting up and joined in. Soon her singing was blended with preaching, the music and the faith inextricable.

In the 21 years after Sullivan’s unpublished interview, Smith’s reputation gathered momentum. She received national awards, was featured in the documentary Say Amen Somebody. Well into her eighties, she was performing regularly at the Lively Stone Apostolic Church in St. Louis, where she’d been ordained a minister. And when, after years of mothering the world, her heart finally failed, she was 89 and living at Tower Village Nursing Home in St. Louis.

Sullivan remembers her two decades earlier, when she was the one helping. “Older African-American ladies would come into the outpatient clinic with anxiety or, more often, depression.” He breaks off to remark, “You won’t find this in the DSM, but much depression is a side effect of oppression.” Then he recollects: “

Ms. Smith used to be invited to all these big churches, and people could hear her on the radio. So that whole generation knew about her. If the lady was of a certain age, I’d say to her, ‘Have you ever heard of Mother Smith?’ And she’d say, ‘Oh, yes, everybody’s heard of Mother Smith.’ So I’d go upstairs and find Ms. Smith, and the lady would realize who it was, and, oh, you should have seen them. At that point I left. When I went back in, these women were sitting up straight, and they had almost a glow about them. When I walked them down to the outpatient checkout desk, and they left, the staff members who’d seen them earlier would say to me, ‘What did you do?’ Well, it wasn’t me. It was Mother Smith. But I wasn’t gonna try to explain!”