The 101 strangest records on Spotify: Little Cedric the Hailey Singers - Jesus Saves

30 years ago this month, Little Cedric and his eight-piece band - including his father and his brother - released this, their debut album on Baltimore's GosPearl label. While a lot of religious music, in both black and white communities, focussed on the traditional, Leonard F Moyer wanted his imprint to be a bit more upbeat and contemporary. Cue the impossibly sweet-looking 14-year-old Cedric Hailey and his crew, schooled in the Pentecostal temples of America. With a voice untroubled by hormonal imbalances, Master Hailey was free to soprano the bejeezus out of a handful of super-funky boogie-groove jams. Be Born Again is all about the bassline, it starts out like a Funkadelic album track before morphing into a masterpiece of hand-raising amazingness. Then there's A Little Bit Of Love, which enjoys a parping Shalamar-like synth line, while Cedric and pals shake and shimmy their way to aural heaven.
As with all codified musical styles - be they be bop, black metal, indie pop or gospel, what's most interesting is when the people involved drop the mask for a minute and let something really off-message appear. On this album that moment arrives with Drive Satan Away which kicks off with a truly great, ghostly intro before breaking into a verse about the Hebrew children in a fiery furnace, Daniel in a li-hi-hi-hi-oooon's den and, of course, Old Man Satan. The lyric is pure gospel, but it's all wrapped up in this super-dense production, you can hear a great band who, perhaps, at one point in their life might have wanted something a little more secular, but it's all delivered with such incredible style and grace, you end up loving them anyway. A handful of years later Cedric, his brother Jojo and their friend Donald "DeVante Swing" DeGrate (himself the scion of a great Gospel family) would form another group, this time called Jodeci and Jodeci would, for a while at least, become one of the very biggest R & B groups in the world.

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