Singing soul music was never about profit for singer Little Jake Mitchell — it’s about seeing people happy. Even now, at 80 years old and 50 years into his career, his band, Little Jake and the Soul Searchers, continue to use Gainesville’s historic R&B music scene as inspiration for innovation in their music.
Growing up in Tampa, Mitchell won talent shows left and right, but in 1957, he recorded his first record on the same original tape as rock ‘n’ roll legend Chuck Berry. It was shortly after in 1961 when he led his then-band the Fabulous Blenders to be the first Black performers at UF’s Gator Growl in front of 60,000 people.
Over the years, he performed alongside soul and blues artists James Brown and Marvin Gaye.
Mitchell formed the Fabulous Blenders with Earnest Long, Harold Lewis, Elijah "Buzzy" Walker and Henry Lewis while he attended Lincoln High School, a former public school for Black people during the segregation era.
The role of soul music in uniting communities
In the 20th century, The Chitlin’ Circuit, a network of venues for Black performers in the South, served as a creative outlet in response to the ever-changing social landscape. For just $1.50, one could experience passionate, authentic soul performances with over 500 hundred other fans in a single juke joint.
The Fabulous Blenders weren’t able to play in white establishments, Mitchell said, so their jobs mostly came from juke joints.
“Even if the white man owned a juke joint, he had the front part for the whites and he had a back for the Blacks,” he said. “That’s where we played at. It was something that we had to just get used to for a period of time.”
For years, social gatherings in Black communities lacked enjoyment because of segregation, Mitchell said. It was a struggle between Black and white people. But his music intrigued everyone.
Eventually, people began to question why they were separated in the first place, he said, and white and Black people came together to enjoy themselves.
Music broke that barrier, he said. Among all the other cities of the South, Gainesville was different.
For almost the entire time he’d perform, Mitchell felt his love for music shine through to his audience. He knew if he felt something, his fans would feel it, too.
For Mitchell, sometimes the music was fulfilling enough that his band, the Fabulous Blenders, could have performed all night. Mitchell and his band at the time believed in putting everything they had into their shows — “200% all of it,” he said.
In the audience of a typical 1960s Fabulous Blenders concert, Black and white people shared a love for music’s power to cross boundaries.
“Music was a thing of freedom for people, because it brought us together,” Mitchell said. “Music stops violence; music doesn’t start violence. People are the ones that start violence. If the world would listen to music, there would be no violence, because music is something that grows on you. It’s love.”
Little Jake and the Soul Searchers
Years later, in 2009, after most of the original members of the Fabulous Blenders passed away, Little Jake and the Soul Searchers were formed by Charles “Charlie Blade” Steadham. Steadham, the band’s saxophone player, introduced Mitchell to the rest of his current bandmates. Steadham played alongside the Soul Searchers’ trumpet player Lanard Perry in the early 1970s funk ensemble, Weston Prim and Blacklash.
Playing in Weston Prim and Blacklash as part of the horns section, now 70-year-old Perry saw how music challenged racism and encouraged social integration even within his own band. Many of its members came from various backgrounds, he said, anywhere from hippies to Black power advocates.
Since soul music gave the Gainesville community freedom, Perry knew he had to give back to the Black community through his music. Even early on in his career while he played with his first band, The Uptights, he felt the Black community in Gainesville raised him like a family member would, he said.
Perry recalled one day when he sat at the counter of a local Gainesville restaurant, waiting to rehearse.
“The proprietor, Denise Henry, said … ‘Are you hungry?’ and I said, ‘Yes ma'am, but I don’t have any money,’” he said. “And she said, ‘I didn’t ask you if you had any money. Are you hungry?’ [and I said] ‘Yes ma'am, I am hungry.’ And she fed me.”
Even though soul music is marked by history, the community associated with it shows Perry that it’s not a dying genre, he said.
Communities can easily limit a person’s perspective when they lose sight of how vast the world is, he said. Part of the reason Perry plays the trumpet is because of music’s educational value that pushes him to improve his skills. Just because Perry wasn’t “gifted enough to be a heavy hitter” like many recording artists, didn’t mean he couldn’t play and have fun, he said.
“When you stop learning, you start dying,” Perry said.
Another member of Little Jake and the Soul Searchers is 41-year-old trombonist Brian Stevens, who joined the band after playing at local jam sessions in Gainesville. While performing at venues with the Soul Searchers, Stevens learned musical skills from his well-experienced bandmates and saw the way in which music crosses all generations, boundaries and walks of life, he said.
“It’s important that people get exposed to [soul and R&B music],” Stevens said. “I think that’s how I can keep on continuing to have an audience — that people see it live … That’s when, for a lot of people, it clicks.”
Contact Autumn Johnstone at ajohnstone@alligator.org. Follow them on X @AutumnJ922
Autumn Johnstone is a freshman journalism/art student and a music reporter for The Avenue. When they're not writing, you can find them enjoying a nice cup of coffee at a nearby café or thrifting for vinyls. You may find their other published work in Strike magazine, Atrium magazine and Musée magazine in New York City.
