For Clarence Fountain, singing gospel isn’t merely a career or even a mission. It’s payback. "God says, if you serve me, I’ll serve you," relates the 72-year-old leader of the Blind Boys of Alabama. And Fountain believes that after he and five other young men devoted themselves to spiritual singing when they met at Alabama’s Talladega Institute for the Deaf and Blind in 1939, God opened the gates of that cruel institution and let Clarence and four others walk out to carry His messages in song.

"We hadn’t intended to be done with schoolin’," says Fountain, who brings the Blind Boys, with the innovative bluesman Otis Taylor as their opener, to the Somerville Theatre next Friday, February 28. "But there was a supervisor who was a wild man. They would beat you for nothing. It was terrible."

The 60 years he’s spent making records and traveling on the strength of his group’s traditional harmonizing and charged performances haven’t always been easy. During lean times, they’ve literally run on faith. And over the years, the group — originally known as the Five Blind Boys of Alabama — has dwindled to three: Fountain, Jimmy Carter, and George Scott, who still manage to sound like a wide-ranged angelic choir.

"Once you get on the path of righteousness, you’re out there alone and you are subject to anything God chooses to subject you to," Fountain explains. "All of us in the group are up around the same age, and the Lord has spared us from cancer and all kinds of things, so I think he’s decided it’s my job to go out and tell people that he’s coming. It doesn’t matter if you listen or not; my job is to tell you."

And right now, Fountain’s got plenty of work. In 2001, the Blind Boys released Spirit of the Century, their first CD on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label. The disc, which balanced songs by Tom Waits and Ben Harper with traditional jump-up numbers like "Motherless Child" and "Amazing Grace," won a Grammy and made them the gospel group of choice among the secular-music cognoscenti. That reputation was shored up by the release of their new Higher Ground and a tour opening for Gabriel last fall.

The new album, which has also been Grammy-nominated, takes its name from Stevie Wonder’s 1973 hit, which the Blind Boys recorded with a little help from sacred steel-guitar hotshot Robert Randolph. "Now I liked that song, because when the Lord comes he’s gonna make it rain one thousand days and we’re all gonna have to meet him on higher ground," says Fountain. "We got to arrange and approve all the songs on this album. The last one, some of the songs they had us do I just didn’t understand what the words were talking about." When pressed, Fountain says that a match between the Blind Boys and numbers like Waits’s impressionistic "Way Down in the Hole" (which became the theme song for HBO’s cops-and-drugs drama The Wire) and "Jesus Gonna Be Here" wasn’t exactly made in heaven. Nonetheless, Higher Ground is eclectic, embracing tunes by Aretha Franklin ("Spirit in the Dark"), Curtis Mayfield ("People Get Ready"), Jimmy Cliff ("Many Rivers to Cross"), and Funkadelic ("You and Your Folks"), along with traditional fare like "Wade in the Water."

Although the golden age of gospel — when groups like the Blind Boys, the Spirit of Memphis, and the Golden Gate Quartet were played on commercial radio — is over, these golden agers seem to have entered their own El Dorado era. "Back in the earlier days, we were performing to the black audience," says Fountain. "Now we’re playing to the masses of people. Playing with Peter Gabriel or doing our own shows, we have a good crowd comin’."

All that’s different from Fountain’s perspective "is that maybe my voice has dropped down a little, and we don’t jump off the stage anymore. We go into the crowd, but we don’t do it silly like we used to. When you’re young, you do silly things. And that might have even been the devil pushing us to do that, to put ourselves in a little danger. You never know."

The Blind Boys of Alabama show at the Somerville Theatre on Friday, February 28 is officially sold out. Call (617) 876-4275 or (617) 931-2787 for further information.

BY TED DROZDOWSKI