Pre-teen prodigies The Junior Dynamics are often referred to as “the Jackson Five of Louisville gospel music.” They won the gospel singing contest at the Louisville Defender Exposition in 1967 and became an instant sensation.
The group formed in 1965. Clifton “Peewee” Bentley recalls how it all began:
We were at my dad’s church, and Zeke Thomas was putting up plaster on the wall. One day my brother Frank and I were setting up chairs and having “church”—a game we used to play. Frank was always listening to gospel music, so he said, “Hey, Peewee, let’s get Lawrence and let’s sing.” Zeke was downstairs and we already knew Zeke could sing. So Frank asked Zeke, “Teach us how to sing quartet. That’s what we want to do.” Zeke had heard us singing in the choir, so he already knew we could sing, and he said, “Okay.” It didn’t take him any time to teach us our parts for the song “This Light of Mine.” History started right there with me and my brothers and Zeke. I was eight years old.
Our original name was The Prodigal Sons. Zeke organized our rehearsals and gave us all the songs to sing. He taught us choreography and told us, “Always look your best when you go on that floor.” He taught me how to tie a tie. Zeke started taking us to sing on other groups’ programs. I was so little and Frank and Lawrence were so tall that I had to stand on a box to even it out. I carried this little box around to programs. And people loved us. Then an older group came around with the name The Prodigal Sons and we changed our name to The Junior Dynamics. We added Marion Caldwell as musicians and Ricky Reed as lead singer. Then we heard LeRoy Elliott sing at King Solomon Baptist Church, and we brought him in to be the lead and put Ricky in the background.
Lawrence Bently recalls:
We lived upstairs from my father’s church, Lamentations Baptist Church. On Sundays, he had services all day. He had a morning program, then an evening program, and then a night service. Of course, there were programs all over town, but afterwards, all those groups would come over to Lamentations. When a program would be going on, us kids would lie down on the floor of our bedroom and look down through the vent and watch the services from upstairs. It was quite an experience.
Back in those days, coolness was the thing in gospel quartets. We were into sunglasses and flashy suits and things like that. I saw a lot of that in gospel singing when I was a young kid. But it didn't matter how cool they were or how fly their hair was; what really captured the people was the voices that these guys had. Those guys could sing.
Sometimes, people would demand that we sing before they would leave. So my dad would actually come upstairs and get the three of us out of bed to go downstairs and sing for folks. That happened on the regular, actually. We weren’t even teenagers, but we would turn the church out. LeRoy would get up and do his ministry to kick off his songs.
When we were going out of town, people would actually bring their babies up to the stage for LeRoy to touch them. Once we sang before The Mighty Clouds of Joy and we did so well that when they got up, Joe Ligon got up and said, “Don't you ever bring me here and put those boys in front of us again.”
