“No Charge”: Shirley Caesar and a Black Mother’s Sonic Archive by Mark Anthony Neal

In retrospect, I was enough of a smart-ass as a child that I might have been that little boy in Harlan Howard’s classic song “No Charge.” The song is about a boy who invoices his mother for his household chores — because it could only be a male child that would think that way. And I think my mother knew that when she began to play Shirley Caesar’s Gospel cover of the song around the house, often with the directive that I listen closely. “For the nine months I carried you…no charge,” Caesar sings in her famous retort. That it was my mother who purchased my first album, The Jackson Five’s Third Album — I was five-year-old — meant she already knew music was the way to my heart. Why not deploy her own love of music to do some emotional labor with her young son.

Though Aretha Franklin was my mother’s favorite artist, the only other artist who ever competed for attention was Durham, NC born Shirley Caesar. My mother would have never claimed to be a feminist, though it was in her collection that I discovered Angela Davis’s Women, Race & Class and The Black Woman: An Anthology, edited by Toni Cade Bambara. Caesar may not have described herself as a feminist either, but her music offered a nuanced Black-woman centered view of the spiritual and secular worlds.

My parents were not particularly religious folk. The times we physically entered a brick-and-mortar sanctuary were usually reserved for Palm Sunday, Easter Sunday or a visiting family evangelist from my mother’s hometown of Baltimore; rarely did my father accompany us. Yet, most Sundays, my father rose early to cook Sunday breakfast to a soundtrack of The Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Highway Q.C.’s, The Swanee Quintet, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Swan Silvertones, and of course Sam Cooke and Soul Stirrers. My father’s love for Black male Gospel quartets and quintets aligned with a belief that the word should be delivered by a man, especially if that man was a preacher.

Instead, my mother held her church on Saturday, when my dad was away at work. My mother’s volume preference on a scale of ten, was always somewhere between eight or nine, which meant most of our tenement building and later project building, shared in the Gospel of Elsie Neal. Years later, I realized that my mother’s listening practices — the music she played when my father was at work — was as much about her love of music, as it was an attempt at meaning making for her own life. It was about hearing women’s voices who reflected a vision of herself, and the voices of men, who desired that vision of herself.

To be sure Al Green, Luther Ingram, Teddy Pendergrass, Joe Simon and Isaac Hayes visited my mother and I often during those Saturday morning house-cleaning sessions, but so did Millie Jackson (“Hurt So Good”), Betty Wright (“Tonight is the Night”), Inez Andrews (“Lord Don’t Move the Mountain”), and the aforementioned Aretha Franklin. These were all women vocalists that approximated my mother’s own audacious, sassy and larger than life personality — she was not a fan of Diana Ross — but no one captured my mother’s lifeforce better than Shirley Caesar.

For far too many Americans, Shirley Caesar was largely unknown, until an unauthorized remix of her song “Hold My Mule” (1988) went viral in 2016. For Black Gospel audiences of a certain generation, she was the once wunderkind who joined the supergroup, The Caravans, alongside Inez Andrews and Albertina Walker at age 19 in 1958.

Now in her 80s, Pastor Caesar, as she is known, is one of the last figures standing from that generation of Gospel artists — Mahaila Jackson. Rev. James Cleveland, Marion Williams, Clara Ward, certainly among them — who pushed the tradition forward in a historical moment of political and social shifts in the 1950s and 1960s. My mother’s investment in Pastor Caesar’s music occurred as she began her solo career, after a decade with the Caravans.

It’s on that debut album I’ll Go (backed by the Institutional Radio Choir) and the title track that one hears an early iteration of Pastor Caesar’s signature singing “sermonette,” a style of talk-singing that had been popularized by Black gospel groups. As women were not allowed to speak from the pulpit in many Black churches, the “sermonette” was Pastor Caesar’s cultural hack. By the beginning of the 1970 those sermonettes were a definitive feature of Shirley Caesar’s recordings.

It was one of those sermonettes from the album Stanger on the Road (1969), that arguably was my mother’s favorite. A Caesar original, “Don’t Drive Your Mother Away” is the story of a mother, raising two sons: one a miscreant, the other studious, self-centered and ambitious. As the story goes, the “good” son goes away to college, while his mother works “scrubbing floors” to help pay for his schooling. While the “bad” son dithers his life away, the “good” son returns years later, now an MD and married a schoolteacher. The “good” son offers to take his mother in, so that she can help with the kids.

What seems like a heartwarming story unravels, when the “good” son announces to his mother, “you’re getting in the way around the house…you’re using bad English. We don’t want this to rub off on our children. I’m going to take you to an old folk home.” This was Caesar at her storytelling best, and as a child, the 10-minute song always made an impression on me. My mother was cognizant of her own use of “bad English” — it’s the reason she scraped and saved to send me to Seventh-Day Adventist school, even though there was a public elementary school two blocks away.

But I’m also sure that my mother was wary about what kind of impression the world of “good English” would make on her “good” son, and even the kinds of threats that Caesar’s “bad son” succumbed to. In the end, those stories of Caesar’s that my mother shared were an effort to keep me close, as she faced the inevitability of me leaving the fold and hopefully making something of myself. That the song ends with the “bad” son taking his mother in, so that she didn’t live out her days in a nursing home, was a reminder that there is always a pathway to atonement.

My favorite Shirley Caesar song is “Stranger on the Road,” the title track of the album where “Don’t Drive Your Mother Away” first appeared. Though the song is about traveling alone, with a production trick (at least for the early 1970s), Caesar’s vocals are layered as she sings in harmony with herself. The point that Caesar makes is that we are never alone. My mother passed away 15 years ago, and I still take comfort in hearing Caesar’s music as if my mother is still listening with me.

Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. The author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, both from NYU Press. His next book Save a Seat for Me: Meditations on Black Masculinity and Fatherhood will be published by Simon & Schuster.