GROWING up in the Jim Crow South and singing gospel from 1939, Jimmy Carter saw plenty of things most people would rather forget.
But Carter, one of the two original members still in the Blind Boys of Alabama, formed at the Talladega Institute for the Deaf and Blind, seems relentlessly upbeat – not only about the gospel group’s new album, “Down in New Orleans,” out next week, but about those old days, too.
“We started out in the South – it was segregated back then,” recalls the 75-year-old, in a voice gravelly with experience.
“And we wasn’t allowed to go in certain places. We would sing, and instead of going to a nice hotel, [we’d have to find] a rooming house, a black hotel, which wasn’t good.
“We just had to, as the old saying goes, grin and bear it. But that was OK. God is just and he is fair. We knew that someday … we could do what we wanted to do.”
That time has come. The group’s new album, recorded in New Orleans, has guest turns by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the Hot 8 Brass Band and Allen Toussaint, as well as backing by other Big Easy artists.
Carter, who is blind, couldn’t see the destruction from Katrina in New Orleans – but he could feel it.
“The atmosphere is there, but the hope is there, too,” he says.
“We told them that we couldn’t get a hammer and help build a house, but we could bring hope through our music.”
The Blind Boys of Alabama began as the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, performing for black soldiers at a local Army base and going from house to house in the black neighborhoods of Talladega, singing and earning a little bit of money.
Today, Carter says, their audiences are “mostly white.”
And when the group finally did sing to mixed crowds, “I found out they wanted it all the time – we just weren’t allowed to give it to them.”
Over the years, the Blind Boys had offers to cross over from gospel to secular music, the way Sam Cooke (“Another Saturday Night”) did.
“Sam was a very nice gentleman,” Carter says. “He said, ‘I’m going over there and see what I can do. You’re welcome to come with me, but if you don’t, I’m going anyway.'”
Today, Carter says, “We want to stick to our gospel music because we’re Christian people. We’re not perfect, but we’re Christians and we don’t want to go that way.”
Carter may be singing gospel, but his iPod’s full of country.
“I got some Alan Jackson, I got George Jones … Hank Williams, of course, Loretta Lynn,” says the singer, now working on his first solo album.
“I think I’m gonna call it ‘The Country Side of Jimmy Carter.'”
The Blind Boys of Alabama perform Friday at City Center, W. 55th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues; (212) 581-1212.