Joy Okorie
Following a few years’ recording hiatus, Elbernita “Twinkie” Clark of the Clark Sisters today released a solo project, With Humility.
With Humility is a brief album by today’s CD standards, clocking in at just under forty minutes, but Twinkie uses every second wisely.
“This project actually started out as me producing a couple of instrumentals for my aunt Twinkie to use as accompaniment for concerts on the road,” explains the album’s producer, Larry Clark. “Eleven tracks later we had a full project that we titled With Humility because that is the posture that we’ve taken in offering it to God’s people.”
The famed “Queen of the Hammond B3” traverses a passing parade of gospel subgenres with effortlessness, her straightforward, no-holds-barred gospel voice fitting in like family on all of them. The opening track and current single, “God’s Got a Blessing,” is a handclapping choir rouser straight from the COGIC experience, while “The Anointing” has that contemporary bounce that put the Clark Sisters on the map. “Did Not Have to Do It” is gospel hip hop, featuring a rap by RIME. The harmonious Clark Brothers, sounding like Take Six meets the Christianaires, accompany Twinkie on “The Righteous.”
Most notable are the album’s memorial tributes. Clark salutes her father, Pastor Elbert Clark, with “For You I Am Praying,” a song he used to conclude his services. “A Tribute” is a conversation between Twinkie and Larry about Dr. Mattie Moss Clark’s legacy. They reminisce over a melody line that, one discovers, is a motif that was conceived and tape-recorded by Dr. Clark but never fashioned into a song. At the conclusion, we hear a previously unreleased snippet of Dr. Clark singing the melody into a tape recorder.
In the spirit of the album’s title, the finest moments on With Humility are the simplest: Clark delivering a piano-accompanied version of “Precious Lord” that would put a wide grin on Prof. Dorsey’s face. The up-tempo instrumental “Shout” is Clark working her magic on a B3, a tambourine pounding out the backbeat and all of it sounding like the quintessential opening of a prayer service. “Shout” makes one want to hear a whole album of Clark organ instrumentals.1
