Blues singer's painful past fits a church's mission

Frank Bey, 70, sings the blues from deep within a soul that bears the scars of a 1950s childhood in rural Georgia in the Jim Crow era, when African Americans were denied basic human rights.

"You feel that you're never good enough," the Glenolden, Delaware County, resident recalled of the times. "My mother was a gospel singer in the black Welcome Baptist Church, but we weren't ever allowed to walk across the yard to the white church.

"I heard angry old white people threaten violence toward the black people who lived on their property. I saw white people spitting and throwing rocks at black people. . . . It was a collective form of insanity."

On Saturday evening, Bey will bring his living history and soulful blues to St. Paul's Elkins Park, an Episcopal church built in the 1860s in a Cheltenham Township community that sheltered runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad.

The Rev. Paul Reid, St. Paul's rector, said Bey's blues are part of the diverse congregation's mission to explore its multiracial roots, dating to founder Jay Cooke. A wealthy banker and abolitionist who lived nearby, Cooke raised millions of dollars to finance the Union Army, and teamed with Quaker activist Lucretia Mott to hide escaped slaves on his estate.

From 1863 to 1865, St. Paul's was the only church to hold regular worship services at Camp William Penn, the largest training ground for the Union's African American troops.

More than 150 years later, St. Paul's honors its roots with programs that examine the racial histories and cultures of its congregation, including former members of the predominantly black St. Matthias Episcopal Church in West Oak Lane, which closed in 1992.

"Half of our people of color are from West Africa and the Caribbean, and a number of our white members are recent European immigrants," Reid said. "Music, like all the arts, is a bridge to understanding each other's culture. That is why we will hear Frank Bey sing the blues on Saturday night."

Before Bey left Millen, Ga., and Jim Crow behind at 17 and came to Philadelphia in the '60s, he had been singing rhythm-and-blues for years "in hole-in-the-wall juke joints down in the swamps," he said.

Here, he sang with a soul band called Prophecy. They toured the Chitlin' Circuit - venues, including the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, where it was safe for black entertainers to perform - night after night, month after month, until, he said, "the wives was telling their husbands, 'You come home or you won't have no home to come home to.' "

From the ruins of Prophecy, Bey created the disco-funk Moorish Vanguard band in the '70s, which dressed in Moorish clothing, recorded "Sitting in the Sunset of Your Love," and dissolved over misunderstandings and bad feelings about a record deal.

Bey was so heartsick, he walked away from music for 17 years. He started working nearly around the clock with his own construction business, his Chappy's Seafood in North Philly, and his Smith's Bar at Broad and Olney, where his musician pal Frank Austin brought him back to his first love.

"I was in the kitchen cooking dinner," Bey said, "when Frank calls me out to the bandstand and tells the crowd, 'What the heck is this guy doing in the kitchen? He ought to be out here singing.' I was in my apron, holding a spatula, and we did the Lou Rawls song 'Lady Love.' "

By 1997, Bey had sold his construction and restaurant businesses, and was singing blues standards and his originals with his seven-piece Swing City Blues Band, which is coming with him to St. Paul's.

"I think about Frank Bey's history and about the church's history, and a number of things resonate," said Ernest Bailey of Wyncote, the church warden and a St. Paul's member for 20 years.

"The blues brought the work song and the field holler into the church, because the church was the only place slaves could congregate and talk," Bailey said.

"For me, the blues is your sorrow, your pain, your anguish, your frustration, your dreams. Frank puts all that into his blues, so when he sings, you can't just sit there. You are moved."

Bailey said he is particularly moved by Bey's memories of the South, for he experienced similar feelings growing up in 1950s Philadelphia.

"I was in the second grade of Catholic grade school at St. Stephen's, Broad and Butler," Bailey said. "There were four black kids in a class of 30 and all of us were seated right by the nun's desk. The nuns would never look at us, call on us, or ask us a question. We were totally invisible."

On television, Bailey said, newscasters referred to African Americans as Negroes, and one day, a nun addressed the four black children as "the Negroes in the class."

"I realized she was talking to us," Bailey said. "It was an affirmation. Somebody finally gave me an identity. I was no longer invisible. So I didn't object to being called a Negro. What a travesty that was."

Bailey leads occasional tours of a tunnel beneath St. Paul's replicating an Underground Railroad station. It is "deep, dark, and dirty," he said. "There are straw mats on the floor."

He asks visitors to be silent, to give themselves up to the tunnel's desolate depths and imagine the possibility that slave hunters with tracking dogs waiting at the end.

The tunnel is one visceral way to bring the black experience to life, Bailey said. Another way, he said, is Frank Bey's blues.

Frank Bey and the Swing City Blues Band, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, St. Paul's Elkins Park, 7809 Old York Rd. (Old York and Ashbourne Roads.) Tickets: $20. For more information: 215-635-4185 or www.stpaulsfriends.org/frank-bey/

geringd@phillynews.com

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