The great Mahalia Jackson once said of gospel music that while the blues are “songs of despair, gospel songs are the songs of hope.” Hope has taken local gospel group The Sojourners from a well-loved regional act to the threshold of national success in a short span of time.

“It just takes a while. We’ve only been around for three years,” says group co-founder Randy Rowsey of the The Sojourner’s growing success.

Gospel, or Southern Gospel in this case, is the music of religious celebration. Locally, The Sojourners have been celebrating their faith at various events, and their harmonizing has not only thrilled local and regional fans of the genre, but also a recording label located in Music City, or Nashville, Tenn.

The Sojourners are taking their act national with a recording and distributing contract with Nashville-based label Mansion Entertainment, says Rowsey.

“We have a contract for multiple CDs,” he says. “They will market our current CD through their distribution, then record the next one.

“In February, they will do a DVD and series of TV productions featuring their artists and do promotions through radio and TV to get us known.”

In addition, The Sojourners have also signed with a national booking agency. That means their music will be heard well beyond the Albemarle and Tidewater areas.

“I think we just fell into stuff,” says Rowsey of the group’s recent success.

Well, not exactly fell; this group of singers has been around the musical block a time or two, and collectively they possess a great deal of experience, and faith, says Rowsey.

Rowsey is an educator and a professional singer. He sang with the Chicago Lyrical Opera for 12 years. Woody Kitchen, Richard Toms and Gwen Music — her last name really is Music — all possess strong backgrounds in song.

Rowsey and his wife Marty are Mid-Westerners. Neither of them had been exposed to the genre of music known as Southern gospel. Rowsey says when they moved to Elizabeth City, he began to listen to this music and fell in love with it.

“Southern gospel music, if you listen to it, tells a whole story,” says Rowsey. “It has a whole message involved with it. … Usually they’re quite tied in with scripture; little lessons you can learn from music and that’s why I like it.”

Rowsey met Kitchen through their local church and formed a group called New Journey. That group disbanded fairly quickly and the two men decided they wanted to put together another so they took out an ad in a

national magazine, Singing News, “looking for local people.” Richard Toms, who is the musical director at Elizabeth City Middle School, responded and since the group sought to be a quartet, he suggested a woman from his church in Chesapeake, Va.

“She sang solo at Great Bridge Baptist Church,” says Rowsey. “(Richard) noted that her voice would fit in well. Gwen just sort of fell into our lap.”

There are a great many Southern gospel groups in the region. And while many have great sound, The Sojourners are clearly bringing a level of professionalism to their music, not only from their backgrounds, but also through their dedication to the art of singing.

“One of the things that characterizes our music from others, it’s a close, smooth harmonic sound,” explains Rowsey. “We blend so you don’t have one voice sticking out. A lot of family groups are popular because of that so I think the female voice makes the blend take on a family-type sound.”

Once The Sojourners brought their sound together, they began to make the rounds, performing their music. At first it was one local church, then another before they began to expand regionally and include recording to their list of accomplishments.

The group recorded their first CD locally and while they were happy with the inaugural effort, they wanted more from the effort so they looked into Nashville recording studios. That’s when things started to change a bit for the group.

They chose a well-known gospel-recording studio, Day Wind. It was a professional label and Rowsey says the effort worked out well for the group.

He and the others took that CD to a national music conference and handed it off to a guy at Mansion Entertainment. It was a good move for the young quartet.

While Mansion is a fairly new label, they’re a big presence in the music industry both in Nashville and Branson, Mo. They own a large, high profile theater in Branson, showcasing national acts such as “Peter Pan” starring Cathy Rigby.

Rowsey says the label liked what they heard from The Sojourners and signed them on as a new act. This move will take them well beyond their comfortable weekend gigs, and potentially put them on a national map.

“It’s interesting,” says Rowsey of the recording contract. “It’s all new to us. It can get us out of just northeast North Carolina. It will make it an opportunity for us to reach people in California, Nevada, places we can’t go just on weekends.”

Pretty nice turn of events for a group of singers who “just fell into stuff.”