Rodessa Barrett Porter’s crystalline soprano spun filigrees in the music of the Barrett Sisters, who gave goosebumps to audiences while giving glory to God.
Mrs. Porter, the last living member of the gospel trio, died Monday, according to social media posts from family members. It was the day after her 94th birthday.
“My heart is sad and our family chain is broken again,” cousin Ron Barrett posted on Facebook on Monday.
The sisters sang together for 70 years and became global stars after their radiant, rousing performance in the documentary “Say Amen, Somebody.”
Mrs. Porter was one of a handful of people left with direct ties to Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of gospel music. She and her sisters — Delois Barrett Campbell and Billie Barrett Greenbey — used to listen to him at Chicago’s Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church.
They learned from him and gospel queen Mahalia Jackson, who lived near the Barretts on the South Side. “They were both in walking distance,” Mrs. Porter told the Sun-Times.
“They were one of the last generation connected to the first,” said famed gospel singer and composer Richard Smallwood of Washington, D.C.
When Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert reviewed “Say Amen, Somebody” in 1983, he called it “the most joyful movie I’ve seen in a very long time.”
The music of Mrs. Porter and her sisters was the soundtrack in many churchgoing homes. People played their records on home stereos, enjoyed them on the radio and watched them Sunday mornings on WLS-TV’s “Jubilee Showcase.” Jennifer Hudson listened to the Barrett Sisters when she was growing up.
In 1964, the Barrett Sisters performed at Sam Cooke’s Chicago memorial. In 1983, they appeared with Curtis Mayfield to promote Harold Washington’s campaign for mayor. They sang at Cook County Jail and before the president of Zaire and Swedish royalty, Mrs. Porter said.
Their sound was joyful; their stage presence, electric. The Barrett Sisters shifted with ease from smooth, swooping harmony to a raw, rollicking sound that made people stamp their feet and throw up their hands. When the “Sweet Sisters of Zion” sang softly, they sounded as if harp strings had been incarnated in human form.
“You feel uplift when you listen to their music,” said Pam Morris-Walton, host of a Sunday gospel music show on WVON 1690-AM.
They wore gleaming ensembles designed by Campbell’s husband, the Rev. Frank Campbell. At concerts, “when the curtain would open, you just saw class, first class,” said Pastor John F. Hannah of Chicago’s New Life Covenant Church. “The long gowns, the eyelashes, the nails. Before they opened their mouths, they commanded the attention of the room. … We were able to see glamour on the gospel stage.”
Mrs. Porter, who spent 20 years as choir director at Liberty Baptist Church, was an entertaining raconteur. She used to talk of how she and her sisters loved popular music, especially the harmonizing of the Andrews Sisters.
At one point, she informed her deacon father, Lonnie Barrett, “I want to be an Etta James,” she told the Sun-Times. “He said, ‘Oh, no, you’re not going to be an Etta James. You’re going to be a gospel singer.'”
She said she started singing in the 1940s with her sisters at Morning Star Baptist Church. “They sang together for so long, they just became like as one,” Smallwood said. “Their voices were angelic.”
With Campbell as the musical anchor, “Billie would do the alto ‘scoop’ and Rodessa would do the high hoot: ‘hoo-hoo-hoo,’ ” said Bob Marovich, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Gospel Music and host of “Gospel Memories” on WLUW-FM (88.7).
She was the seventh of 10 children born to Lonnie Barrett and his wife, Susie. But one baby died within a month. Three other siblings died from tuberculosis in the 1930s and 1940s. The losses strengthened the family’s reliance on prayer and church, Mrs. Porter said. She went to McCosh grade school and graduated in 1949 from Englewood High School.
Her older sisters had been singing with Johnnie Mae Hudson in a group known as the Barrett and Hudson Singers, Marovich said. After Hudson died, Mrs. Porter joined her sisters. They began recording together in the early 1960s. Two crowd favorites were “I’ll Fly Away” and “Jesus Loves Me.”
They experienced many hardships on the road, Mrs. Porter told the Sun-Times. In the South, “there were places we couldn’t stay and there were restaurants [where] we couldn’t eat,” she said. “There were times we would do concerts and didn’t get paid at all.”
But as their fame grew, they toured the world, including Australia, England, Fiji, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland. In 1983, they performed on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” In 1991, the sisters were featured on Patti LaBelle’s special “Going Home to Gospel.”
Once, in Europe, her husband, Lee, and a brother-in-law surprised the sisters with a hometown treat, Mrs. Porter said in an interview with the Rev. Harold E. Bailey of the Harold Bailey Singers.
”My husband brought us some Lem’s barbecue,” she said. “He brought it all the way to Europe and they warmed it up for us. And we had a good time talking and laughing and eating with Lem’s barbecue.”
Her husband preceded her in death. She had five children, 15 grandchildren and many great- and great-great grandchildren.
Mrs. Porter always remembered their rocky entry to South Africa during the apartheid era. She told the Sun-Times how a stern airport official grilled the Barrett Sisters on the purpose of their visit.
Mrs. Porter said, “We came to sing to you, tell you about our God.'”
But the man snapped, ‘Your God? What color’s your God?’ ”
“I said, ‘the same color as yours ’ ” she said. “ ‘OK, go on,’” he said.
“We went on through. We went on through.”
Contributing: Violet Miller