New Music From Bobby Jones
For 35 years Dr. Bobby Jones was the face and voice of gospel music for millions of people who tuned into his weekly Bobby Jones Gospel program on Black Entertainment Television (BET). As the longest running host of a TV program (even longer than Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and Don Cornelius’ Soul Train), Dr. Jones and his Nashville Super Choir were Sunday morning staples for a generation of church folks. After a nearly thirty-year recording hiatus, they have come together to record one last live album entitled, Dr. Bobby Jones & The Nashville Super Choir Live: The Legacy Finale (Bender Boys Music Group / Tyscot Records), at Nashville’s Mount Zion Baptist Church. The ten-track set will feature cameos from an array of dynamic vocalists such as Kim Burrell and Tamela Mann as well as longtime Super Choir alumni Everett Drake and Denise Tichenor-Davis, among others.
As a tease to the forthcoming album, the 87-year-old Jones (known as the Ambassador of gospel) and the 30+ member choir have released the first radio single, “We Will Sing.” The uplifting, horn-driven singalong was written by the choir’s longtime music director Derrick Lee (who passed in 2022) with the project’s producer Ay’ron Lewis (Aretha Franklin, James Fortune & FIYA, RiZen, Zacardi Cortez). It fuses the flavors of contemporary and traditional gospel with an inspiring message about eternal rejoicing in heaven. The track is available on all major digital music platforms. It’s been embraced by Apple Music’s editorial team which programmed it on their popular Gospel Worship, New in Christian, Sunday Soul and Take Me to Church playlists.
“I’ve been along the journey with Dr. Jones and the choir for a long time,” says Jovan Bender who joined the choir in 1997 and continues to perform with it. “When Derrick Lee died a couple of years ago, Dr. Jones needed somebody to step up to run the show, so I just took the lead to become the vocal director, and I thought it would be honorable to do a new project…I asked Dr. Jones about it and at first, he said, no. Eventually, he said it would be great to do one more album for his legacy and that’s how it happened. Then, I asked my brother Jimmy [Bender] to help me because he was already producing and decided to come on board as executive producer.”
The new album will tentatively release in 2027, but fans can enjoy the new radio single “We Will Sing” now
