Dorothy Love Coates

Gospel Harmonette who 'sang for the people'

Dorothy McGriff (Dorothy Love Coates), singer: born Birmingham, Alabama 30 January 1928; twice married (two daughters); died Birmingham 9 April 2002.

"I've been anointed to sing gospel music, I can't walk away from this gift," said Dorothy Love Coates and, all her career, she resisted offers to make secular records and leave gospel to become a soul singer.

Born Dorothy McGriff in 1928, she was one of seven children of a minister in Birmingham, Alabama. Her parents divorced when she was young and she left school at 13 to work in service. She formed the Royal Gospel Group and, she said, "On weekdays I worked for the white man. On weekends I sang for the people."

Birmingham, Alabama, is noted for its male gospel quartets, but in 1940 five young women formed the Harmoneers. McGriff joined them in 1947, having married Willie Love of the Fairfield Four. She left the following year to take care of her daughter, who had been born with cerebral palsy. That marriage soon ended, but her second, to Carl Coates of the Sensational Nightingales, lasted until his death in 1999.

In 1950, the group, renamed the Original Gospel Harmonettes, found national success on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts television show. Dorothy Coates rejoined them and was acclaimed as an extraordinary and forceful entertainer. The group's singles "I'm Sealed", "Get Away Jordan" and "Ninety Nine and a Half" were very popular. They recorded her songs "You Must Be Born Again" and "That's Enough", which was covered by Johnny Cash (and by Ray Charles, who amended her lyric and claimed the songwriting credit). Coates wrote "(You Can't Hurry God) He's Right on Time" after recovering from pneumonia.

In the early 1960s, Coates became a civil-rights activist, working with Martin Luther King. She regarded jail as a honour. She took traditional gospel songs and changed them to fit contemporary events. In 1964 she wrote "The Hymn" on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

When the Original Gospel Harmonettes broke up in 1970, she formed the Dorothy Love Coates Singers and worked with her sister, Lillian, and her daughter, Carletta. She was featured in the civil-rights film The Long Walk Home (1989) and the film about American slavery Beloved (1998). Her recording of "No Hiding Place" can be heard in the 1990 film Ghost.

Coates influenced Little Richard, Cissy Houston and Mavis Staples, and the Jerry Garcia Band recorded "Strange Man". She never made much money: the preachers, she said, could be as unscrupulous as the promoters.

Spencer Leigh