Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [23]
From the museum, I moved on into a large whitewashed room at the centre of the building. It was the room where all those hits – ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and the rest – were recorded. I touched a key on a piano, just to be sure I’d definitely touched something that one or more of the greats had once touched. Then I imagined Etta James and Bo Diddley singing, and Chuck Berry duck-walking across the floor, and all the others creating magic in that little room. Some of Ronnie Wood’s drawings were hanging on one of the walls, but it was still quite hard to believe that the Rolling Stones had made an album in there. Can you imagine how that little room must have rocked over the years? I felt precious and churchy and I’m sure you would too if you visited Chess Records. It’s a very special place.
I’d made my pilgrimage to Chess Records earlier in the week, before leaving Chicago on Route 66. But on the Sunday of my departure, a couple of hours before I left Adams Street, I returned to the neighbourhood for a unique experience. It had been a long time since I’d been to church on a Sunday morning, but now I was heading to Quinn Chapel, two blocks south of the old Chess Records building and an equally famous place in music and social history.
Quinn Chapel is the oldest black congregation in America. Services have been held there since the 1850s, when its congregation consisted mostly of freed slaves and abolitionists. When slavery was still a fact of life in the southern states, the chapel was a safe house on the Underground Railroad, a secret network of travel routes that were used to guide slaves to free states and territories in the northern United States and Canada. In the years since then, a succession of black leaders and luminaries such as Martin Luther King, Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, a former slave who became a leader of the abolitionist movement, have spoken from the pulpit at Quinn Chapel.
On its own that would be hugely significant, but Quinn Chapel is also where gospel music really began in America. I’ve always loved gospel singers, especially Ray Charles and Etta James. So I’d been looking forward to experiencing a service of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, but I was very nervous before entering the chapel because I’m as close to an atheist as you can get. I think I am, anyway. It’s probably better to say I don’t believe in religion. So I was nervous in case I offended the congregation by being a disbelieving voyeur sitting among them. Even though they didn’t know it, I knew it. I’m not religious, but I’m not against people who are, and I don’t believe in telling people that they’re wrong. It’s not the right thing to do. All of this was bothering me terribly, but as soon as I got into the church, a big whitewashed hall, I was so overwhelmingly and pleasantly surprised that I forgot all about my qualms.
First of all, there was a choir to one side of the altar and a girl standing front and centre, where the priest or pastor would normally stand. She was half singing and half talking, in that Aretha Franklin soul way. I nearly cried. My lip went all wobbly. I’m not joking, I had to tell myself to get a grip because there were a lot of people around me, singing, ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah’, and I didn’t want to draw their attention.
I found a few empty seats and sat down to listen. Beside me was a chair with a Bible on it. After a while, a man in a light fawn suit picked it up, sat down beside me and started reading the Bible and mumbling. The service continued with more singing, more gesticulating and waving and praying, and I must say it pleased me greatly. A wonderful woman sitting behind the pastor was going, ‘All