DANCE, PRAY, LOVE - GOD'S PLAN FOR US SAY ANNIE AND THE CALDWELLS
- Bernard Zuel
- Apr 16
- 7 min read
WELL, THIS IS A BIT WEIRD, and I don’t mean a long conversation about gospel music in 2025 with two women who laugh often and with such joy that you too might start to believe just for the pleasure.
People are talking about a debut album from a Mississippi gospel family band, Annie And The Caldwells, when the constituent parts have been on this earth for somewhere more than six decades (hello singer/mother Annie Caldwell and husband/guitarist Willie Sr) or at least three or four (hello singers/daughters Deborah and Anjessica and goddaughter Toni; rhythm section sons Willie Jr and Abel Aquirius), and several of them already recorded in some form or other.
“Debut” must feel odd to hear.
“It don’t feel odd at all,” chuckles Anjessica. Her mother, not for the last time today also laughing with a whole-body shake, concurs. “It feels good, it’s a good feeling.”
“It makes you feel good when you see other people enjoy what you do,” says Annie. “It’s from heart to heart and everybody else enjoying it with you.”
They certainly have had an impact with this interviewer at least as I made sure I had on a much better shirt before I turned the camera on. You can’t be in the presence of the Caldwells – led by Annie who is the owner and proprietor of Caldwell Fashions, who do womenswear and “church outfits” in their hometown of West Point – in something plain or ordinary. Have you seen what they wear on stage? That stuff positively hums with colour and vibrancy – to borrow from country music, the higher the brightness, the closer to God! – and I am not worthy to share the space.
“You look nice,” consoles Anjessica, which is sweet but possibly endangering their reputation for being truth-telling Christians.
In their press material, a point is made of identifying the day jobs that each of the family still have, from Annie’s fashion store and Anjessica’s work in customer care (which clearly I’ve already seen in action) to Willie Jr and Abel Aquirius, who are a forklift driver and hospital driver respectively, Deborah the hairdresser, and Toni who is a school teacher. Why does it matter that they are workers?
“I think it’s a normal lifestyle, that you’re supposed to work. You gotta eat, you gotta survive, you got bills to pay,” says Anjessica. “I feel like we gotta work.”
What it does look like is that while the bond of family is a given, these off-stage jobs is a reminder that they are part of that community, that they are grounded in that community, they testify like other people in that community. It’s just that maybe they are up the front of the room on a Sunday in that community.
“I feel like being part of the community is we need to love one another, you know what I’m saying,” says Annie. “We all work together and love and do things together, and love God together.”
Do they have much time for those jobs at the moment? Who has time to make other people’s clothes or do other people’s hair when there is an Australian tour or British interview interfering?
“We make time,” they say in unison, laughing at the same time, before Annie says plainly, “we gotta make sure the job get done.”
So are they taking orders? Asking for a friend, with the same size as me.
“We got you,” each says.
Let’s be frank though, there is one very good reason for having had the day jobs. Gospel hasn’t been cool for 60 years – it’s not exactly where the kids and the charts and the money are at – yet gospel is where they are all from. But what exactly is gospel to the Caldwells?
“Let me speak to that,” says Annie to her daughter, before turning back to me. “Gospel means to me when I’m going through my worst and I need to hear a song, it lets me know to hold on just a little bit longer, that the Lord will make it alright, and I can have faith that God gonna do just what he says he gonna do.
“Walking by faith, not by sight, that’s what gospel means to me.”
Her daughter leans in. “Gospel is teaching you to do better and strive to do better and heal in the process. Because you could be going through a million thoughts, a million things, a million headaches, and you listen to the message in these gospel songs and that is what turns that mess into …”
“… a blessing,” Annie finishes. She continues. “I have been at my lowest point and heard a song say ‘it’s gonna get better’, and I believed that. Sure enough, my sadness turned to joy.”
There has always been a place for that, but even for the sceptical now may be the most important time in the 60 years since gospel was last near the centre of popular culture for gospel’s message to get to us.
“There’s something every day,” says Anjessica. “You don’t hear any good news anymore, none whatsoever; every day it’s something. So in order to look past everything that’s going on, or trying to survive what’s going on in the world today, you listen to a preacher or listen to gospel music. It actually helps you try to get past the bad days when everything is so corrupted now, it’s something that’s gonna make you happy or joyful.
“There’s a groove in gospel that make you .. [and she begins to dance even while sitting on the arm of the lounge she’s sharing with her mother].”
I’m not sure we could all do that as well as Anjessica is doing it right now, I tell her, and she laughs uproariously.
“If I see you, we gonna get it together,” she assures me, gleefully.
Hey I grew up in the Catholic Church where hymns were plentiful but never danceable, I’m starting from a long way back. It might take a miracle.
Anjessica mentioned the groove in the gospel, a clue that the sound of the Caldwells isn’t just what you thought gospel was: there is also soul and funk and maybe even a step towards disco in this family song. Is the groove deep down the same?
“The groove is the message that you bring out and the music that you get behind it is gonna make you listen to it,” she says. “You listen to what they’re saying and then you move with it. So you ain’t gotta be all stuck with everybody doing the same thing, the same songs, the same everything; it’s something different on our end because that’s how we enjoy music and how we can make people hear it and get in their car and listen to it on a daily basis.
“Because it’s a groove. Because it’s the words and the music that put a pep in your step.”
And some pride in your stride.
The famous story around the family is that Annie formed the band decades back when she heard some of the decidedly secular music her kids were listening to – Chaka Khan or Sly and The Family Stone to name a couple – and thought she needed to save them. It’s half right it turns out.
“When they were coming up, I heard them outside one day singing in harmony, one of the Clark Sisters’ songs, Is My Living In Vain, and their harmony was so pretty, I thought wow, I better get these kids before the devil gets them. So I grabbed them in my group in the church and we’ve been doing it ever since.”
She had them close and could mould them, but what about someone like me who is about as non-religious as you can get though I love devotional music from Pakistan and Africa to New Zealand and Tennessee. Does that mean that I am doing it wrong, listening but not doing the “god bit”, or is it just not my time yet? Should I still have hope of finding the path or can I just enjoy the gospel music?
“There is always hope,” says Annie. “I remember what the Lord said, we all are short of glory. None of us have been saved, nobody – we are going to sin. So we don’t know how God will change your life or turn you around. I had a preacher one day let me know that God will forgive you for your sins, and that day I didn’t give the preacher my heart, I gave God my heart. So when you give God your heart, that’s all we need and there are people who have never heard of God or believe in God are now accepting him.”
Sure, but the church isn’t for everyone you know.
“Sometime people hurt you so bad that you have no trust in nothing, but I remember my mother saying trust in God, he’ll never leave you or forsake you. When you want this triumph for yourself, then nobody can tell you what God can give you; you already know for yourself.
“I raised my children the same way: they didn’t go to church and believe in God until they really had a triumph for themselves.”
Is it okay for someone like me to enjoy their music and not believe or have that full connection?
“Why wouldn’t it be,” asks Anjessica, to which her mother adds. “You listen to the music and I don’t know which of the words might be in the music that can help you believe one day.
“We were in Richmond, Virginia singing at a festival and a young lady walked up to me. She said, ‘young lady I don’t believe in God, I’ve never believed in God’. She said, ‘but your music changed me and now I believe in what you say’. She said, ‘this day I believe in God’.
“So we don’t know how God is gonna change anybody and this woman let me know that my singing is not in vain. See you one day could be walking along and you can hear a voice saying, ‘hey, I love you’, and you wonder where that voice comes from, ‘I’m here with you, I’ll never leave you’. One day it might happen.”
So move our hips and one day our minds might follow? They crack up laughing at this.
“You move your own hips on your own time,” grins Anjessica.
Given all that they do is, in a real sense, for God who is in everything they do, could they be doing the same thing for us in songs that weren’t faith-based? Could they bring some of that devil music into their repertoire and enrich it with their inmate faith?
“Let me tell you about that devil music, okay,” says Annie. “You call that devil music, but all music belongs to God: music come out of the church and they stole the music from the church. So I take some of the devil music and somebody might put it in a devil way, but I put it in a godly way.”
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Annie And The Caldwells play:
June 5 – City Recital Hall, Sydney
June 7-9 – Rising Festival, Melbourne
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