Minister with Music
The King James Boys’ latest music has been heating up a lot of excitement like an old-time gospel tent revival. Their 13th studio album, Get a Transfer, on Pinecastle Records has only eight songs on the entire CD, but the six singles that have been released so far have earned solid radio play and chart action.
“We believe this is the best record we’ve ever done, vocally, sonically, and the song selection is the best,” lead singer and group founder Randy Spencer told Bluegrass Unlimited. “That’s why there’s only eight songs. We picked the eight best songs we thought that fit together for this album. They all have the potential to be singles.”
The southern gospel bluegrass group’s latest chart-topping success is “The News That Never Changes,” written by Jerry Salley, David Haley Lauver, Karen Bowles, and Bobby Johnson. “Jerry Salley has become a good friend of ours,” Spencer said. “He actually sent us that song maybe three years ago. It was such a great song with great words, and we were waiting for the right project to put it on, and we cut it.”
Salley says he was writing with his Knoxville-based songwriting friends at Karen’s home when the idea began to germinate. “As we shared ideas to write, David threw out the title, ‘The News That Never Changes Changed My Life!” Salley recalls. “The moment he said it out loud, we all knew we needed to write it! David has had a long and distinguished career in journalism, and he came up with this creative title while recognizing all of the bad news around us and contrasting that with the Good News of the New Testament. Good News that NEVER changes and yet has changed countless lives!” “We love it, and I think it’s one of the best messages on the CD,” Spencer said.
The other five singles include “Ready and Waiting” (written by Barney Rogers, Russell Dale Johnson) “Glory Ride” (written by Rickey Graves), and “I Can Hear the Savior” (written by Randy Fox), all of which landed in the Top Ten of the Bluegrass Today Weekly Gospel Chart along with “The Best Selling Book Of All Time” (written by Christopher Burton), and the title track, “Get a Transfer” (written by Janet Dowling, Michael Dowling).
Several notable songwriters contributed to the album. Fellow label mate Daryl Mosley penned “Everything Heaven Won’t Be.” “I was actually thinking about all of the sermons I had heard about the glory and majesty of Heaven,” Mosley said. “The streets of gold, the mansions, etc. But I realized I was just as excited about all of the hard things on Earth that won’t be included. I had never really heard a song written in that direction. Once I had the basic idea, the song wrote itself pretty quickly.” “It is such a great song of what won’t be in heaven, and I thought it just turned out great,” Spencer said. “It’s kind of a play on words.” “The King James Boys are truly one of my favorite groups,” Mosley says. “They are genuine in their faith and true to the music. And they are just the best guys!
Hit tunesmiths Rick Lang and Troy Engle penned the album cut, “Power of Prayer,” in the spring of 2021, in the middle of the COVID crisis. “There wasn’t much folks could do but stay in their homes and pray their own lives would be spared from this deadly outbreak,” Lang remembers. “We were a society living in fear, even non-believers desperately turning to God to protect them. That’s when I came up with the idea for the song. It focuses on how powerful prayer can be, that God hears and answers our prayers.”
After the two finished the song, they sent it to Randy Spencer. “He was on the road listening to a few songs I’d sent him,” Lang said. “When ‘Power of Prayer’ came on, he was so overwrought with emotion, he had to pull off the road.”
“When I first heard it, I picked up my phone and called and said Rick, ‘That’s my song!’” Spencer says. “We completely stripped this song down. It is just the guitar and me. Will Hart plays the guitar, and I do all the lead singing on the song because we didn’t want the music to take away from the words of this song. It’s a very, very powerful song, and I hope everybody will hear it and feel the same way we do about it.” Named after the KJV bible translation, the King James Boys released Get a Transfer earlier this year after the success of their 2022 album, Walk on Faith.
The Back Story
The King James Boys began on Father’s Day in 1994 at their home church in Cowpens, South Carolina. “People started asking us to come to other churches and nursing homes,” Spencer says. “A few years later, we recorded a cassette tape for our family and friends. Things grew from there.”
Continuing to perform regionally, the group recorded a CD with a small independent label, Sun Sound Music in Gastonia, North Carolina. “We recorded an old Southern Gospel song called ‘Somebody Prayed for Me,” Spencer said, and theSinging News magazine picked it up. It went number one on their bluegrass charts, and it started getting all kinds of radio airplay.”
Then, in 2014, Pinecastle Records signed them. “We’ve been going since then and basically traveling all over the country. It’s been a real crazy ride!” Influenced by The Osborne Brothers, IIIrd Tyme Out, and the Primitive Quartet, the King James Boys’ popularity increased. Their approach didn’t change. “It started out as a ministry,” Spencer said. “We still consider it a ministry, but there is a performance involved, of course. Now, we’re playing at all these bluegrass festivals, and we probably do 70% in churches and a lot of high school auditorium type concerts.”
The King James Boys perform more than 100 tour dates throughout the year and have been nominated on several occasions for the SPBGMA Gospel Group of the Year. Though there have been a few personnel changes, the group has remained the same for the last several years. In addition to Randy Spencer on guitar and vocals, his son, Cole, joins on bass and vocals, Curtis Lewis picks the banjo, and Will Hart takes the stage with mandolin/guitar/vocals.
Cole, 28, was a toddler when the band started and would ride along at times on weekend trips, but he wasn’t in the spotlight. He did sing with Dad sometimes at home. “It was organic,” Cole says. “We sang around each other for fun at home and never really purposely tried it out to see if I would fit before I ever came into the band. I just knew there needed to be a position filled, and I jumped in.”
“A lot of people, too, even to this day, tell us it’s hard to tell if I’m singing lead,” Randy adds. “He does the tenor. I do most of the lead. We do switch a little bit, but people always tell us it’s hard to tell who’s singing what.” His son joined the band in 2011, but it wasn’t until March 19, 2017, that he was saved at his home church, Mount View Baptist in Cowpens. “I was 20 years old when I accepted Christ,” Cole said. “I struggled with my salvation for a couple of years, and I came to the realization that I was lost. I wasn’t saved.”
“I raised him in church just like I was raised in church my whole life,” Randy adds. “I found out when I was 14 years old that I needed the Lord, and He saved me. When you’re 14, you’ve still got a lot of life to live. I’ve done things I’m not proud of, but the Lord’s always been there. I never got into drugs, never got into heavy drinking, but I was a rebellious teenager at times, but the Lord’s always been good to us.”
As they travel with the band, the Spencers and the other members share their faith as an integral part of their music mission. “Giving our testimony on stage, giving our testimonies afterwards, talking to people, if they have anything they want to come up and share with us at the table—we’re glad to do whatever, whenever,” Randy says.
Finally, there’s the pride and joy that Randy feels as a dad, seeing his son join him in the music. “Now, me and Cole get to travel around all over the country singing bluegrass gospel music,” Randy says. “It’s the best! All of these guys are great musicians and singers and I am grateful to have them in the band and stand on stage with them every week. Without them with me it wouldn’t be possible. People will never understand until it happens to them, of course. I don’t want to get too sentimental, but when you’re up on stage with your son, and he’s playing and singing all these songs, and even when we sit down, trying to write songs together, it’s the best feeling in the world!”
