He had a number of albums.'Īs it turns out, Cincinnati's King Records owner, Syd Nathan, recorded many of those albums starting in 1953 after he helped Ely secure the copyright to a song he wrote as a 12-year-old in Puckett Creek, Virginia.ĭaniel and Daisy Ely with their young son, Claude. “He preached at a lot of camp meetings, in every state but Alaska and Hawaii. 'He was well-known,' said the Reverend Lee Brock, a deacon at Charity Tabernacle in Ely's obituary. In May 1978, the 55-year-old Pentecostal-Holiness preacher collapsed and died in front of his congregation while playing 'Where I Go To But the Lord' on an organ during a Sunday service, according to his obituary.

“I didn’t go to church too much until I got to jail,” Stafford said at the time.Įly, though, lived and died in the service of God. The man next to him is William Howard Stafford, an inmate at the Campbell County Jail, who was just baptized. The man looking up is Brother Claude Ely, a reverend at the Charity Tabernacle Pentecostal Church in Cold Spring. The photograph was part of a 1971 story in the Kentucky Post. His right arm is raised in the air, head tilted back toward the sky. One of them is dressed in his Sunday best - dark pants, a tie and a button-down white shirt. Two men stand waist deep in the middle of the Ohio River in early December.

Learn more about Ely, his famous hymn and the influence he had on the history of rock 'n' roll in this story originally published in 2015. Ely recorded the hymn, alongside other religious tunes, for Cincinnati’s legendary King Records in the 1960s.Įly also raised his family and preached in Northern Kentucky for more than two decades. The Johnny Cash song “Ain’t No Grave,” heard in the trailer for the Disney movie, is actually a cover of the hymn written by Pentecostal-Holiness preacher Brother Claude Ely in the 1930s.

Editor's note: Did you know the 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales' trailer that aired during the Super Bowl has ties to Northern Kentucky?

Ain't No Grave by Macel Ely II