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This chapter focuses on the collaboration between the South African choral isicathamiya group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and US pop star Paul Simon on the Grammy Award winning album “Graceland” in 1986. Far from showcasing the vitality of South African musical tradition alone, a track such as “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” seeks to soften the more strident tonalities of the anti-apartheid struggle by foregrounding collaboration and stylistic closure.

Using the new “Best Zydeco and Cajun Music Album” Grammy Award category as an analytical lens, this conclusion denounces Cajun isolation by suggesting a revaluation of the cultural processes that have shaped the community’s cultural and musical orientation through time.

In this chapter, Clark shares his experience on the show; where Johnny played a popular game called “Stump the Band,” on the Tonight Show. The requests from the audience were named “mumbles” by Clark Terry, as this described how they sounded to him. Later, he recorded “mumbles” with Bob Brookmeyer. “Mumbles” became popular among musicians, as well as the audience. Bob Brookmeyer and Clark developed a mutual admiration for each other and they loved playing together, so much so that they got a little group together in the early 1960s and named it the Clark Terry/Bob Brookmeyer Quintet and got a nice gig going at the Half Note. They recorded many albums together and won the DownBeat Jazz Critics Poll award. “Mumbles” was nominated for the Grammy and became the most requested tune of Clark's career.

With First Baptist Church under construction and fears that Trinity Temple could not hold the larger crowd expected to turn out, Roberts secured St. John’s Baptist Church in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, to record volume 4, I Stood on the Banks of Jordan. For all of the popularity of Peace Be Still, it was volume 4 that earned the troupe its first Grammy nomination. This chapter chronicles the grand opening of the First Baptist Church and the impact the recordings had on the lives of Angelic Choir personnel and church membership and visibility. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how the success of the Cleveland-Angelic Choir disks stimulated a live recording frenzy for Savoy and its competitors, a practice that dominates the industry today.

The strands of Steiner’s life emphasized in earlier chapters—his yearning for commercial success, his growing debts, and his emotional neglect of his son—reach their fulcrum here in ways both triumphant and tragic. After an anxious year of unemployment, Steiner found a sympathetic partner in director Delmer Daves. Daves’s 1959 film of a racy bestseller, A Summer Place, inspired 71-year-old Max to write a pastiche of dreamy ’50s rock ballads. Steiner had no commercial expectations for the tune, but a recording of the theme rose to Number One on the charts, won a Grammy (beating Elvis and Sinatra), and became the best-selling instrumental of the rock ’n’ roll era. Almost simultaneously, Steiner won his decades-long battle with ASCAP, which agreed to collect royalties on film music. Max would soon receive millions. But in 1962, Steiner received shattering news from which he’d never fully recover: his 22-year-old son, Ronald, had committed suicide.