Rodessa Barrett Porter, the last living member of the Barrett Sisters, a Chicago gospel trio renowned for their exuberant operatic sound and thrilling harmonies, died on Dec. 16 in Harvey, Ill. She was 94.
Her grandson Jonathan Scrutchens said her death, in a hospital, was from complications following a stroke.
The Barrett Sisters were an electrifying act, anchored by Delois Barrett Campbell’s extraordinary range. She sang most of the leads, but Ms. Porter, the youngest, and Billie Barrett GreenBey, the middle sister, were potent soloists, too.
The three of them had grown up listening to the Andrews Sisters on the radio and modeled themselves after them. There is nothing, they often said, quite like sisters harmonizing.
If the mission of gospel music is evangelism, the Barrett Sisters surely must have been responsible for more than a few converts. Their smiles were beatific. They were known locally to many as the Sweet Sisters of Zion.
“What we do is a ministry,” Ms. GreenBey told The Wisconsin Journal in 1990. “We don’t ‘entertain.’ We’re not ministers and we’re not preachers, but we’re singing about the good news and the good times happening with the Lord.” She added, “Jazz will make you tap your feet, and gospel will make you search your soul.”
The sisters grew up singing together at their local church. They later sang on the Sunday-morning gospel television show “Jubilee Showcase,” a Chicago institution known as “the church before church.” Seen on an ABC affiliate for nearly two decades, starting in 1963, “Jubilee Showcase” featured gospel pioneers like James Cleveland, the Staple Singers and Albertina Walker.
The Barrett Sisters, who came from a tradition of ensemble gospel music developed in the 1930s by celebrated performers like the Roberta Martin Singers, were a Chicago institution, too.
“It was a rich Baptist sound,” Robert Marovich, a gospel historian and the founder and editor of the Journal of Gospel music, said in an interview, “and they continued that tradition. And they came from the best musical school in the world, the Black church.
“Each one of them could solo and harmonize,” he continued. “Delois brought that wide vocal range. She could hit the high notes and get real deep. Rodessa threw out these soprano fireworks that would light up the congregation. Billie added the alto scoops to the mix. It was like a sophisticated musical conversation they were having together.”
The Barrett Sisters sang at Sam Cooke’s funeral, at the Tabernacle Baptist Church, after he was shot and killed in Los Angeles in 1964. They appeared at rallies for local politicians, like Harold Washington when he ran for mayor of Chicago in 1983.
After their star turn in “Say Amen, Somebody,” George T. Nierenberg’s 1982 documentary about the Chicago gospel music scene, they appeared on “The Tonight Show” and began touring the world, from Europe to Australia. The State Department sent them as good-will ambassadors to Africa and the South Pacific. They performed for the king of Sweden and the president of Zaire.
Their adoring European audiences often clamored for three and four encores, and they obliged, up to a point. In “Sweet Sisters of Zion,” a 2013 documentary about the trio directed by Regina Rene, the sisters recalled one such evening when Delois, exhausted, addressed the crowd: “Can you speak English? Read my lips. Go home!”
In Sweden, Ms. Porter recalled in the documentary, a woman approached them after a show and said, “I didn’t understand it, but it gave me goose bumps.”
Rodessa Barrett was born on Dec. 15, 1930, in Chicago, the seventh of 10 children of Susie Barrett and Lonnie Barrett Jr; four of their siblings would die of tuberculosis by the end of the decade.
Delois, Billie and Rodessa grew up singing together and harmonizing to the Andrews Sisters on the radio. Yet each had her own ambitions. Delois and Billie wanted to be opera singers; Rodessa wanted to sing the blues, like Etta James, or maybe dance. But their father, a deacon at their church, was adamant that they stick to gospel music. He was the boss, they said, and a strict one.
Growing up on Chicago’s South Side, they were surrounded by gospel royalty. Mahalia Jackson lived nearby. So did Thomas A. Dorsey, the composer often called the father of gospel music — his catalog of more than 1,000 songs, including his early hit, “Precious Lord, Take my Hand,” is known collectively as “Dorseys” — who encouraged the sisters.
Delois launched first. She joined the Roberta Martin Singers in the early 1940s, while she was still in high school, and toured the country with them. She and Billie also performed at home with a cousin, Johnnie Mae Hudson, as the Barrett and Hudson Singers. When Ms. Hudson died in 1950, Rodessa joined the group, and the Barrett Sisters were formed.
Rodessa, who had graduated from Englewood High School, married Lee Russell Porter, who worked at the Ford Motor Company, that same year. They spent a decade in Gary, Ind., before returning to Chicago in 1962.
Ms. Porter is survived by their children, Rochelle Boyce, Lee Russell Porter Jr., Pamela Rayson, Lonnie Porter and Cynthia Porter; 13 grandchildren; and many great-grandchildren. Mr. Porter died in 1992.
The Barrett Sisters performed into their 80s, even as Ms. Campbell lost her voice and her mobility. Tina Brown, a Chicago-based gospel singer who grew up listening to the Barretts, would fill in her for vocally, with Ms. Campbell at her side in her wheelchair. It gave congregations joy just to see her.
Ms. Campbell died in 2011, at 85. Ms. GreenBey died in 2020, at 91.
The Barrett Sisters recorded some 15 albums; their first, “Jesus Loves Me,” was released in 1963. But theirs was not a lucrative career. They weren’t savvy about business, they said, and royalties were slim to nonexistent. (Their records are now collector’s items.) They often saw no money for their performances in the U.S. after the promoters had taken their cut.
Things picked up once they began touring overseas, they said: The Europeans paid their bills.
“The Barrett Sisters are a bookmark to a time period in American history,” Daniel Walker, founding director of the Gospel Music History Project, said in “Sweet Sisters of Zion,” “where out of a place called Chicago a sound came out and revolutionized the world.”
Speaking to The Chicago Tribune in 2008, Ms. Porter said: “We feel we have succeeded. Maybe not financially, but we have motivated people; we have made people happy. We have served.”
Ms. Porter and Ms. GreenBey last performed in late 2019 at the Trinity United Church of Christ.
As their niece Mary Campbell told The Chicago Sun-Times, “They wrecked the place.”
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