Editor's note: Did you know the "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" trailer that aired during the Super Bowl has ties to Northern Kentucky?
The Johnny Cash song “Ain’t No Grave,” heard in the trailer for the Disney movie, is actually a cover of the hymn written by Pentecostal-Holiness preacher Brother Claude Ely in the 1930s. Ely recorded the hymn, alongside other religious tunes, for Cincinnati’s legendary King Records in the 1960s.
Ely also raised his family and preached in Northern Kentucky for more than two decades. Learn more about Ely, his famous hymn and the influence he had on the history of rock 'n' roll in this story originally published in 2015.
NEWPORT, Ky. — Two men stand waist deep in the middle of the Ohio River in early December. One of them is dressed in his Sunday best -- dark pants, a tie and a button-down white shirt. His right arm is raised in the air, head tilted back toward the sky.
The other is soaking wet. The photograph was part of a 1971 story in the Kentucky Post. The man looking up is Brother Claude Ely, a reverend at the Charity Tabernacle Pentecostal Church in Cold Spring. The man next to him is William Howard Stafford, an inmate at the Campbell County Jail, who was just baptized.
“I didn’t go to church too much until I got to jail,” Stafford said at the time.
Ely, though, lived and died in the service of God.
In May 1978, the 55-year-old Pentecostal-Holiness preacher collapsed and died in front of his congregation while playing "Where I Go To But the Lord" on an organ during a Sunday service, according to his obituary.
"He was well-known," said the Reverend Lee Brock, a deacon at Charity Tabernacle in Ely's obituary. Brock has since died. “He preached at a lot of camp meetings, in every state but Alaska and Hawaii. He had a number of albums."
As it turns out, Cincinnati's King Records owner, Syd Nathan, recorded many of those albums starting in 1953 after he helped Ely secure the copyright to a song he wrote as a 12-year-old in Puckett Creek, Virginia.
Daniel and Daisy Ely with their young son, Claude.
That song was Ely's most famous tune,“There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down.”
A bed-ridden Ely composed the simple song about death and eternal life in 1934 after doctors told his parents he would likely die from tuberculosis, according to an oral history of Ely's life released by his great nephew, Macel Ely II, in 2010.
The song grew into a staple in churches throughout Appalachia after Ely recovered from TB, went on to serve in World War II and worked in coal mines before dedicating himself to ministry in the Pentecostal-Holiness faith.
A man named Bozie Sturdivant made the first known recording of "There Ain't No Grave" as part of the US Library of Congress' field recordings project.
King Records recorded Claude Ely singing his song for the first time during a tent revival in 1953 and released it on a 45 RPM record.
Brother Claude Ely warming up in 1953 as King Records producers tried to persuade him to let them record his singing and music.
Those tent revivals and King's recordings would in part guarantee Ely's place in the history of American music.
In the following decades, multiple artists recorded covers of "There Ain't No Grave" and testified to Brother Claude Ely's influence and inspiration on their own careers.
Little Country Preacher . . . Big Influence
One of the most recent covers of Ely's song is in the American Recordings album "Ain't No Grave" released in 2010. The album -- and title track -- was Johnny Cash's last studio recording before his death.
“John Carter Cash had contacted me and told me it was coming out,” Macel Ely said about Cash's last album. "He told me it was his dad’s last recorded sessions.”
More than five years after that conversation, Macel Ely is still astounded by the honor his great uncle, dead for 30 years by that point, received.
"It was very touching, but unbelievable to me,” he said.
But Macel Ely had developed a decade-long obsession with his great uncle's ministry and family history long before Carter Cash's call.
The University of Tennessee training program manager spent years finding, traveling to and talking to people who shared their own stories of Clyde Ely for the book, “Ain’t No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely,” published in 2010.
Macel believes the start of his own journey into learning his great uncle's legacy of singing and church life was divine intervention.
In 2001, he was inside a London, England record store when he recognized the voice of his long-dead relative coming through the store’s speakers.
“It was the old King Records of my great uncle Claude Ely,” Macel said. “It was really eerie. I went up to the counter and asked the clerk if this is Claude Ely’s music being played? He laughed at my southern accent and I laughed at his accent. When he became aware that I was a family member of Claude Ely he became mesmerized.”
RELATED: See more images of Brother Claude Ely
The clerk led Macel to a display of “Brother Claude Ely: The Gospel Ranger” CD reprints of old King Records albums.
“I stayed in the store for a couple of hours, watching these people, these strangers, buy my great uncle’s music,” Macel said. "In my mind, he wasn’t a big deal at the time. He was just a country preacher.”
Macel mulled over what he saw in that record shop during his return trip to the United States.
“I was really challenged on the plane ride home,” he said. “I couldn’t understand why people in Europe where interested in my family history in a way I wasn’t at the time."
So Macel started seeking out people who knew Claude Ely.
"People would kind of invite me to sit down on their front porch," he said. "And even though they were telling me my family history, they were telling me their family history. That was one of the most beautiful things."
And many of those conversations took place in the Tri-State.
“I know I made a lot of trips (to the Tri-State),” Macel said. “Gosh, at least 50 trips, easily."
Macel interviewed people like Dennis Hensley, of Taylor Mill. Hensley owned Jordan Records and traveled with Claude Ely during tent revivals playing lead guitar.
"When Brother Claude Ely would get up to sing, I mean he would just get a key on the guitar and when he started singing, it was like the heavens would open up," Hensley said in one interview.
Macel also traveled to Fairfield, Hamilton and Lebanon, all places where his great uncle played and preached.
By the time word got out about Macel's little family history project, Atlanta-based publisher Dust to Digital contacted him about writing his book. At that point, Macel said he had spoken to more than 2,000 people who knew his great uncle.
Elvis and Cash
Macel’s attempts to better know his great uncle also showed how influential Brother Claude Ely, The Gospel Ranger, was to rock 'n' roll.
During this particular event, Sun Recording artists Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley sneaked into the back of the auditorium to show support and admiration of Ely.
“Elvis Presley traveled with Uncle Claude a couple of summers during his teen years,” Macel said.
Macel also learned Elvis kept up with Brother Claude after he became the King of Rock 'n' Roll.
In a small room during a private tour of Graceland, Macel found old King Records of the Gospel Ranger in Elvis’ personal collection.
“(Elvis’) most prized possessions were his records, and there I found the records of my great uncle,” Macel said.
In that talk with John Carter Cash, Macel also learned Johnny Cash attended Brother Claude’s sermons, and was influenced by his boisterous Pentecostal-style of song and worship.
From Sacred to Secular
“These were the churches on the other side of the tracks...in the poor part of town,” Macel said of the places where Brother Claude preached, and the crowds he attracted during those days.
People also told him those Pentecostal services often included blacks and whites in a time and place when people were separated by institutionalized segregation. Those tent revivals offered a crossroads for the blending of cultures key to rock 'n' roll.
Claude Ely’s services and his audiences were a big part of what Macel believes attracted Syd Nathan to sign his great uncle.
“Syd sent his producers in 1953 to record one of (Claude’s) services,” Macel said. “It was super historical because it was the first time that any recording company had recorded a Pentecostal service live. And one of the things is, they wanted to be able to record the services because they were mixed with African-Americans and Caucasians.”
Attracting a diverse audience, and talent, was part of what made King Records one of the biggest independent labels in the country.
Washington Post writer Eddie Dean added King's recordings and "Ely and many others foreshadow the rock-and-soul explosion, when church-reared performers such as Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin fused sanctified and secular style to revolutionize pop music."
Nathan even tried to get Brother Claude to tour with one of his label’s biggest commercial successes.
“They approached him to travel with James Brown,” Macel said.
The story goes, with a bit of irony, that the Gospel Ranger declined the offer, stating he could only sing sacred music and didn’t want to be associated with the new form of secular music he inadvertently helped create.
Claude Ely eventually left King Records before the label was sold in 1971. He did record a few albums on other smaller labels before he died in 1978, Macel said. Reprints of the Cincinnati record company's catalog though is what introduced a new generation to Ely's music.
King Records — Center of It All
Five years after his book published, now nearly 40 since his great uncle died, Macel receives weekly inquiries about Brother Claude from all over the world.
“I sit back at awe that so many people can relate to it," he said. "There is just a real hunger to know more about that history. King Records was at the center of it all."
Family members of people Macel had interviewed also contact him regularly to thank him for capturing a disappearing era of American music, Appalachian culture and their own history.
Referring to King Records and Cincinnati's efforts to save its musical history, Macel believe the region is sitting on a gold mine of history I don’t think they recognize or fully realize."
And those old Post photos of Brother Claude baptizing in the Ohio River, the stories shared in his interviews, and the King Records recordings such as “There ain’t No Grave going to hold this body down,” should endure for another reason, Macel believes.
“It makes you recognize that one day you are going to have to come to the end of your journey.”
