By Don Harrison
All photos: Del Ray Grace, Sr.
It's not uncommon for listeners to hear Fran Grace play the steel guitar and come away completely unaware that she's performing religious music. And that's just fine with her.
"When you listen to it, you can't really tell that it's gospel. It's just music," boasts the veteran lap-steel player who will bring to the 2022 Richmond Folk Festival a gritty, soulful sound steeped in a distinctive Pentecostal musical tradition known as "sacred steel. If it sounds like we're playing blues, OK then, to you, we're playing blues," Grace says with a laugh. "We're just glad you are enjoying it. That's all we care about."
Fran Ella Grace lives in Toledo, Ohio, where, in 1965, she became the seventh child of eight born to Curtis and Loretta Brownlee Grace. She and her siblings were raised in the Jewell Dominion branch of the Church of the Living God faith, where her one-armed grandmother Ella Mae Dupree assembled the band of grandbabies—with mom on piano—to play for the congregation at her own State Line Church. (It was so named because it was near the Ohio/Michigan border.) “She prayed for us to come of age so we could be her musicians, and the Lord blessed us. So, when the Jewell Dominion [hierarchy] shut my grandmother's church down and tried to band all the musicians in the churches together, it didn't work.”
While not an official member of the Jewell Dominion now, Fran is still steeped in the unique praise music of the faith, which has approximately 38 affiliate churches across the U.S., most in the Deep South. “They say that when you are a Catholic, you're always a Catholic,” she quips.
Grace learned several instruments at an early age. “They would call me the fill-in girl,” she recalls. “My brother put me on the drums at age nine, just after he showed me how to play them, and I could carry the service. Or if my sister had to work and couldn't play the guitar, I had to play. Or the bass. I filled in on every instrument, but my love is lap steel.” She picked it up at age nine or ten, again tutored by her brother, and found that she was good at making it sing.
“I was aware growing up how unusual our music was,” says brother and manager Del Ray Grace, Sr. "I had friends who were Baptist, and I was in the high school jazz band, so I knew it was something that wasn't heard in the mainstream. For a long time, it just stayed in the church. That's where it developed."
As the founder of the Sacred Steel Hall of Fame and co-founder of the Sacred Steel music label—he even has plans for an impending museum to honor the music—the promoter and musician has done much to spread the genre to a wider audience beyond the pews.
"You can't go into a music store and buy tablature for sacred steel," he says. "This is music that was passed along through oral tradition. You sat there and you were taught by these guys the terms and the style. It had to be that way because most of them couldn't read music."
Two Styles of Sacred Steel
Sacred steel's special sound is centered on an instrument that is normally the province of country music players. Folklorist Robert Stone, the author of Sacred Steel: Inside an African American Steel Guitar Tradition, says that the steel is routinely found in contemporary white country gospel but is nearly unheard of in African American denominations. The exception is in the Church of the Living God faith, established in 1903 by Mary Magdelena Lewis Tate, where steel guitars have "reigned supreme."
There are two different forms of this music, however. Due to a schism that occurred after Mother Tate died in 1930, the original Living God church became divided into different sects, known as Dominions. The faith's use of the steel dates to a pair of brothers, Troman and Willie Eason, who were intrigued by the unfamiliar sound of "Hawaiian guitars" that came into prominence in the 1930s. They brought the sound into the churches, where it flourished. But the denominational split caused the music, and its use of the steel, to develop in different ways by two of the separated branches, the Jewell and the Keith Dominions.
Fran Grace plays steel in a self-described “old school” musical style developed by Jewell Dominion leaders, namely Bishop Lorenzo Harrison. “When Lorenzo started, both sects were playing the music the same way," says brother Del Ray. “It was real up-tempo, but he was the guy who called the shots and set the tone for the Jewell Dominion to be a little different.”
“The Jewell style is a lot like boogie-woogie," says Stone. "Harrison was known to play the bass strings. He would alternate between the bass and treble strings and start off with just this bom-bom walking bass line on one string up and down the neck. And the backup guitar players had a whole canon of these shuffles to draw from."
The two Dominions actually feature different instruments, Fran notes. “In the Keith style, they play pedal steel and learned from the country musicians, but the Jewell musicians, from the start with Bishop Harrison, played lap steel but with the legs on it. And he used a foot pedal called a Morley, which is what I use. It can sound like an organ and other sounds.”
“In the Jewell” Stone adds, “they pretty much play with a thumb pick and one finger pick, while most of the Keith musicians use a flatpick.” But the branches share similarities too. "When the steel players perform, you can't tell that they're using the pedals. When you think of that country sound, you think of a crying twang, but they don't do that in sacred steel churches, the Keith or Jewell.”
If mainstream audiences are familiar at all with sacred steel, it is probably through crossover musicians such as the Campbell Brothers and Robert Randolph, who got their start in Keith Dominion churches. “When you hear the Keith style, you think of the Blind Boys of Alabama,” Stone says. “They'll start a song with words and melody and then they'll get to a repetitious, one-note drive. So they dance right off. The Jewell style, as evolved through Harrison, features a bit slower, more loping tempo that changes, accelerates and slows down, and almost always has a three-chord structure.”
“We can sound like soul, or a little bluesy. I mean, we can play fast but that’s not our main go-to. We kind of slow it down to a funky mid-tempo.””
The Jewell style is not as fast, Fran Grace verifies. “We can sound like soul, or a little bluesy. I mean, we can play fast but that's not our main go-to. We kind of slow it down to a funky mid-tempo.” Even though he passed away in 1986, she still emulates the style of Bishop Harrison, who was directly influenced by the acknowledged “father of sacred steel,” Willie Eason. “I follow Bishop Harrison's plan because he set the trend,” she says.
Females on Strings
Grace is still in the family band. Joining her onstage in Richmond will be a seasoned group that includes older sister Angela Russell (a formidable sacred steel figure in her own right) on guitar and piano, sister Tresser Boles on vocals, her son (and musical director) Chris Pope on drums, and Del Ray Grace, Jr., her nephew, on bass. Guitarist Johnell “Jay” Caver fills out the group.
Even though there are a few prominent female players in the genre—most notably Nikki D. Brown, who Fran Grace has performed with—sacred steel is still a male-dominated field. "You can count on your hand the young women on strings," she says. “It's all patriarchy. Men don't share. I'm just being honest—they don't. In most churches, you won't find females on strings. My brother is one who will give up his seat to women but there are few others.”
“You can count on your hand the young women on strings,” she says. “It’s all patriarchy. Men don’t share. I’m just being honest—they don’t. In most churches, you won’t find females on strings. My brother is one who will give up his seat to women but there are few others.””
"It's not that they don't have the opportunity to play," says brother Del Ray. "It's a female-dominated church, so it's not that they are discriminated against. But for some reason, they gravitate to the drums or the guitar." He says that he's currently at work on a book that will chronicle the music's small-but-formidable pool of female players called Queens of Sacred Steel. It, of course, will include a chapter on his younger sister.
Incredibly, the Richmond Folk Festival performance will be Fran Grace's folk festival debut, even though she's been a leading player for years, and became enshrined in Del's Sacred Steel Hall of Fame in 2019. Since she retired last year from a full-time job with a solar panel company, the woman who answers to "Ladystrings II" is happy to devote herself full-time to performing again. "Hopefully it's not my last festival," she says.
But there are limits. While the praise music she plays may appeal to secular audiences, you won't find this grandmother of three performing it in a bar or nightclub.
"You've got to draw the line somewhere and that's one thing we won't do." She lets out a laugh. "I mean, what would I be doing playing my music in a bar?"