LA032 Interview: John Mauldin (LA032Abbott_Side1)
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Description
Side 1 and 2: Interview with John Willis Mauldin on 1982-02-01. Abstract for Mauldin: [00:00-30:25] Born in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1913, Mauldin relates his history of quartet singing from age 12 until WWII. He describes his early Gulfport exposure to the Gulf Coast Quartet as an exercise in "cornfield singing" - 02:16. He recalls moving to New Orleans at age 22, taking singing lessons from New Orleans University music professor [Euclid] Banks - "learning to sing eradicated my stammering" - 02:41, and joining his first local quartet, the Crescent City Harmonizers with Walter Polk, Varney Cary, and George Adam, with Sam Tophia, "the original bass singer for the Robinson Humming Four," as their instructor. He relates having left the Crescent City Harmonizers in 1939, after a dispute in which he argued that the Robinson Humming Four had better "rhyme, time, melody, and harmony" than them - 10:05. Mauldin says his next quartet venture was with the Red Rose Gospel Singers, an offshoot of the Boyd Brothers, with Isaac Boyd, Henry Boyd, Alfred Harrison, and Andrew Cosey. He recalls them holding rehearsals in the Pailetland community, where they met a group of "girl singers" [the Brent-Quillens Female Quartet], and he gave pointers to the bass singer, Mildred [Brent] - 14:55. Mauldin says he left the Red Rose to enlist in WWII, he did not return to quartet singing after the war. While looking at old quartet photographs, he talks about the competitive nature of the local quartet tradition, and the relentlessness of the Southern Wonders – 22:05. Asked to talk about Gilbert Porterfield and the Four Great Wonders, Mauldin allows that they had "a different type of singing altogether [...] more sophisticated" - 26:40. [00:00-04:17] On LA032Abbott_Side2, Mauldin continues discussing his earliest quartet experiences in Gulfport with the Gulf Coast Jubilee Singers. He reveals that their baritone singer, James Johnson, was yet living in Gulfport, and that they still got together on occasion to sang "a little close harmony."Existence of Extraneous Content Extraneous content not related to this interview found on recording from 04:14-06:23