The Rising of Gospel Music and How It Inspired the World.

Imagine a people, passing through the crucible of slavery, for hundreds of years, until the first people in your new lineage are often lost in time – because slaves have no more families or histories any more than cattle or sheep do – and coming out the other side, proud, shining, and triumphant.  Imagine using that experience to lay the foundations of music that became the soundtrack within the lives of billions of people around the world.  In the wake of so much devastation, the sounds of faith, love, dignity and freedom were heard and shared until they echoed the world over.  Many times, they were there to drown out more modern pains, and were used to inspire other people to face new adversities.  It started with African Spirituals, and those Spirituals gradually became Gospel Music.  

This is a music that has given people a sense of holy urgency and righteousness all over the world.  The Christians that created this music believed with everything they had in them that it was ‘the holy spirit’ that gave them the authority.  This was not performance.  This was leadership.

PS.  My sincerest thanks to all of you repeat listeners out there in the following cities.  Your interests in what I'm doing makes this so rewarding!

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Included in this episode:

·        Excerpt from Amistad

·       Excerpt from Fountain Hughes interview; WPA and John Lomax

·       Work Holler

·       West Indies Slave Chant - Roger Gibbs (Earliest Recorded Slave Chant from 1775)

·       Roll Jordan Roll - From 12 Years a Slave

·       Title Unknown - The Singing and Praying Band

·       Title Unknown - The McIntosh County Shouters

·       Rock My Soul - The Spirit Chorale of Los Ang

Transcript

The Rising of Gospel Music and How it Inspired the World

The path to a fundamental belief in God is different for everyone.  Sometimes, people are simply born into it and raised in it and faith is just a natural extension of the way a person learns to think about everything else in life.  Sometimes though, the journey is much more difficult, and comes from hard lessons learned, through thousands and millions of experiences of personal and collective, overwhelming pain.  In those instances, personal ‘trials and tribulations’, to use an old-fashioned, churchy way of expressing things, are the devices God uses to get our attention.  Many Christians believe that God uses hardship to transform us from the inside out.  When there is nothing else to hold onto except faith, God can become very real for us.  Out of these experiences, faith is made complete.

So, imagine the experience of being stolen from your homeland, shackled in iron chains, shoved down into the berth of a pitching, leaking, stinking ship.  Swallowed up in the belly of a whale, like Jonah, captured with hundreds of other wretches having the same experiences you are, and involuntarily being forever removed from everyone you’ve ever known and loved, everwhere you’ve ever called home.  It would be so easy for the delicate, flickering candle-flame of your dignity and humanity to be snuffed out completely.  Imagine enduring forces meant to dehumanize you – you are no longer a member of a family, or a friend, or a nation.  That life has been stripped away from you, and you have been denigrated to the status of livestock.  You will never be recognized as a human being again.  Not you, not the people caught in the same demonic fishing net as you, not the ones whom came before you, or after you, not now, not ever.  And the same will be true for your descendants.  Forever.  As far you know.  

FOUNTAIN HUGHES – LIFE AS A SLAVE

Now imagine passing through that crucible, for hundreds of years, until the first people in your new lineage are often lost in time – because slaves have no more families or histories any more than cattle or sheep do – and coming out the other side, proud, shining, and triumphant.  Imagine using that experience to lay the foundations of music that became the soundtrack within the lives of billions of people around the world.  In the wake of so much devastation, the sounds of faith, love, dignity and freedom were heard and shared until they echoed the world over.  Many times, they were there to drown out more modern pains, and were used to inspire other people to face new adversities.  It started with African Spirituals, and those Spirituals gradually became Gospel Music.  This is the topic of today’s podcast; The Rising of Gospel Music and How It Inspired the World.

Since Spirituals and Gospel music rose from the Black Christian church, it can only really be understood in the context of the faith life that slaves and - post-emancipation – freed blacks lived.   So, we’ll start here.

SLAVE THEOLOGY

Most churches have an indoctrination process, where new members can be taught the principles that the congregation believes in.  Catholics call it catechesis.  Saddleback Church, where I go to in Southern California, has four different half-day courses – we call them 101, 201, 301 and 401 – where the basics of Christianity and Worship and Christian Fellowship, and Ministry are taught.  Colonial and then later antebellum America had their own ways.  In these lessons, the Africans and their descendants were taught a form of Christianity meant to pacify and eliminate any form of resistance to slave life.  White preachers would teach the slaves about being ‘obedient to their masters’, because that line is in the Bible.  Forget about the entire book of Exodus, where Moses led his people to freedom.  Forget about the Babylonian Captivity, where God allowed his people to be taken into slavery, as a punishment for their disobedience.  In the American version, slavery was ordained by God.  It was the natural, holy order of things.  

The Africans closely identified with certain Bible stories – Moses and the Israelites especially.  The North became the promised land, Canaan, in the Bible.   As in many parts of the world, Christianity was grafted onto the thriving tree of a faith that had been in place long before it.  Belief systems were combined and their form of worship was heavily influenced by the religious practices, customs and traditions they had brought with them from Africa.  

FAITH LIFE OF SLAVES

The slaves retained remnants of their African tribal beliefs for a long time.  In the 1930’s the Work Project Authority – part of FDR’s work program to put depression-era unemployed people back to work, captured dozens of transcribed and recorded narratives from former slaves who were still alive.  There were more than 100,000 still living at that time.  Flying spirits was one belief that most all the former slaves reported.  One transcription – written in dialect – goes like this.  I’m using the dialect to give you a feel of what it sounded like, not out of any disrespect.

Many stories featured the spirit of the witch taking on an animal form in order to fly to gatherings where the spirits of other witches congregated to consume a soul. A former slave named Serina Wyle recalled, “witches kin tun demsefs intuh any shape, an insec, a cat, aw a dog, aw any kine uh animal. Dey kin go tru any kinh uh hole and den tuh git yuh.”9 They also believed that the spirit of a witch was capable of leaving her body at night in order ride her victim. An ex-slave named Robert Phillips said “Now das sumpum reel” “I bin rid lotsuh time by witches. Jist sit on yuh ches and ride yuh. Yuh wake up an feel lak yuk smudduhin. Ef you kin git duh succulation an tro um off, it all right. Uf not yuh dead ur

powsessed.”

If you’re a plantation owner, living among as many as several hundred angry, resentful, oppressed and captive “house guests”,  I suppose it’s pretty normal, and probably justified, to worry about what might be going on when you’re not looking.  To keep a lid on things, Africans were forced to abandon their native languages and adopt a pigeon-dialect English.  And if you are suspicious that foreign and tribal drumming might be used to pass messages about slave revolts or escapes, you’d probably want to suppress that, too.  And that’s exactly what happened.   However, in other ways, the slaves were initially allowed to worship in ways that somewhat resembled their native practices……. UNTIL…. 

1831 when a slave named Nat Turner led a failed slave rebellion which resulted in the deaths of over 200 slaves, and the enaction of a series of draconian laws meant to closely restrict the movement, and assembly of slaves.  Plantation owners also hired ministers to frequently preach to their slaves about obedience to their masters.  Also, worship practices became more restrictive, leading slaves to begin holding secret, clandestine worship meetings.   

Even though their lives were very difficult, the Christianity that the slaves practiced was incredibly positive.  Their faith was built on a doctrine that said

·      They were Full “children of God” despite their condition of slavery and despite slave owners’ teachings. Identifying closely with the children of Israel and the Exodus story, the slaves embraced a vision of God as the deliverer of the oppressed. 

·      They believed in a conquering King who had also been a suffering servant, and that this King understood them and loved them.  

·      They believed He was a friend to the oppressed.  

·      They expectantly awaited him, through the power of his resurrection, to deliver them from their oppression.

·      They affirmed in song that they were valued in the eyes of God and that one day they too would experience deliverance from their bondage. 

Theirs was the kind of faith that a trusting, innocent little child places in a parent.

From this reliance, they learned messages of love, hope, resistance, survival, deliverance, and self-worth.

SLAVE WORSHIP PRACTICES

Slaves participated in things called camp meetings.  Originally, these had begun in Scotland – so they were popular among Presbyterians - and England, and then carried to America by immigrants.  Out on the frontier, where people did not have regular church attendance or a stationed pastor, traveling preachers would hold a camp meeting over several days and folks would come from all around to celebrate and fellowship with each other in song, dance, and sermons.  Eventually, white preachers helped slaves plan and hold their own camp meeting where they were allowed to worship.  The ritual of the “Ring Shout” developed at these black camp meetings.  They began in the southern tidewater region, which is easternmost Virginia, along the Chesapeake Bay and it’s eastern shore.  Ring shouts included African rhythm and chants performed with a shuffling movement since actual dancing was not allowed.  

Throughout the South and mid-atlantic region, there are a number of musical groups working to keep traditions like Ring Shouts alive.  Let’s listen to “The Singing and Praying Band” from a performace they gave in 2012 at Library of Congress in 2012. 

The McIntosh County Shouters are another group that celebrate this heritage.  They come from the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, and perform in an African American dialect called Gullah.  This the McIntosh County Shouters in concert at the Library of Congress in 2010.

I found a description of a Shout meeting from May, 1867, and written in the New York Nation.  It goes like this:

The true shout takes place on Sundays or on praise nights through the week and either in the praise house or in some cabin. The benches are pushed back to the wall when the formal meeting is over. And old and young, men and women, all stand up in the middle of the floor and, when the spiritual is struck up, begin first walking and by and by shuffling around, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion which agitates the entire shouter and soon brings out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently. Sometimes as they shuffle, they sing the chorus of the spiritual.

SPIRITUALS

Over time, Ring Shouts gave way to Spirituals.  Spirituals are a type of religious song typically sung in a call and response form that uses a technique called “lining the hymns”.  By intent, most slaves were illiterate, so hymn books were not possible.  Instead, there was a song leader who would lead the group by singing out the first line, which would be sung back to him by the group, in unison.  In this way, the community shares their faith, sorrows and hopes in song. 

There were several types of Spirituals:  

Sorrow Songs are intense, slow and melancholic.   Examples include 

"Sometimes I feel like a motherless child," and 

"Nobody knows de trouble I've seen," 

They give voice to the immense misery slaves experienced, and the way they identified with the suffering of Jesus Christ. 

Jubilees are the polar opposite of Sorrow Songs.  They’re also known as "camp meeting songs".  Camp meeting songs shared the joy of salvation and called people to worship.   Since they’re jubilant, tempos are fast, and the meter is rhythmic and often syncopated. Two examples include "Rock My soul" (Spirit Chorale of Los Angeles) 

 and 

"Fare Ye Well," 

Some of these were preserved and passed on in later African American Churches and African American college singing groups. 

And, surprising as it may be, the white plantation owners did have at least a degree of empathy – because it turned out they were right.  Music could be – and was – used to share messages among plantation slaves. Spirituals became a way of passing news about secret meetings, protest messages, and even escape plans.

In 1939, John Lomax and Ruby Terrill recorded Louisiana Deacon, Sylvester Johnson perform a spiritual called “Samson”.  This spiritual told the story of the fallen Hebrew prophet who disobeyed God and lost his strength when the Philistine woman he loved, Delilah, betrayed him to his enemies.  In the Spiritual’s setting, Samson became a vehicle to express anger about slavery.  

One very famous Spiritual, is called  “Follow the Drinking Gourd”   This song was used to communicate instructions to escaping slaves, fleeing to the via the Underground Railroad   Some of the lyrics are:

When the sun comes back and the first quail calls,

Follow the drinking gourd.

For the old man is waiting to carry you to freedom,

If you follow the Drinking Gourd 

Let me help you crack the code:

A drinking gourd is a slave term for a water dipper.  Since most slave escapes were done by cover of night, the Big Dipper was an easily seen constellation and the North, or Pole star points the way north for the runaway slave.

And since runaways would be exposed to the cold North American winter, it was better to travel when the sun came back, and the weather got a little kinder, but not so late as summer when night times were short.  So, Spring became the ideal season for escapes.  And what kind of birds are common in Spring time?  Why, quails, of course!

Let me lay a little more ‘code on you, straight from some of the best loved spirituals ever written.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is a renowned call and response black gospel song in which the preacher sings the first line and the congregation responds. When a slave heard this tune, he would know that he had to be prepared for the big escape. The song talks about an angel band that takes the slave to freedom. The Sweet Chariot is a code name for The Underground Railroad which comes south (swing low) to take the slave to the free north (carry me home). 

Wade in the Water

Wade in the Water is a Negro spiritual song that teaches slaves to hide and make it through by getting into the water. It’s a perfect map song example with lyrics that offer precious coded directions. 

Steal Away

This song’s message is that the one singing it is planning to break free from enslavement. The lyrics say the Lord calls the slave to freedom and that there’s not much time left to stay on the plantation.  

Thorny Desert

A version of this gospel hymn was sung by Harriet Tubman, an abolitionist and political activist, to signal her presence to the slaves who were looking for her help to escape.  

Once, the former slave, and famous abolitionist, Frederick Douglass made a comment about the Spiritual 'O Canaan, sweet Canaan’ when he wrote, "A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of 'O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan,' something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the North, and the North was our Canaan."

That musical expression of faith, joy, sorrow, anger, in fact, every facet of the slaves existence could be, and often was expressed musically shouldn’t surprise anyone.  Western African culture was saturated in music.  Think about this:

·      Their various language were tonal -  ideas were shaped as much by the inflection of a word as by the word itself. 

·      In their native cultures, sound and rhythm were used by Africans to communicate about their conditions.  The lived in a world of to chanting, singing and shouting.

·      Rhythm was primary, melody was secondary.  

·      Music was pervasive in every aspect of daily life.

‘We Shall Overcome’.

We’ve been listening to John Legend singing the great spiritual, We Shall Overcome.

Maybe one of the most remarkable points that can be about about these early black Spirituals is how universal their appeal and their power has been.  Many spirituals were sung during the civil rights protests of the 1950’s and 1960’s.   For instance, “Oh, Freedom!” and “Eyes on the Prize” were used to unite demonstrators during marches and sit-ins across the south.  What’s not as well known though, is that these songs were also sung and celebrated around the world during other pivotal moments.  For instance, there are instances of the famous song “We Shall Overcome” being sung in 1989 as German demonstrators pulled down the Berlin Wall.

It was sung in the middle east during the Arab Spring.  There were even references of it having been sung in 1989 in China when student protestors gathered and demonstrated at 

Tiananmen Square.  That was a moment that so threatened the Chinese Communist Party that it has been completely struck from Chinese history books.  Chinese students who grew up in the decades after Tiananmen Square have never even heard what happened.  The photo of the solitary student who single-handedly stared down the barrel of the Chinese tank have never even seen this picture that so galvanized the west.

Before spirituals could evolve into gospel music, there had to be wide acceptance in the black church.  And in the beginning, there was a pretty vocal push-back.  As moving and sincere as spirituals are, they still have a direct connection to the trauma of slavery, which had only been abolished a few years before. 

 And then, to make it worse, Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a horrible racist, canceled reconstruction plans.  There was another side though, that wanted to preserve the heritage in the spirituals.  Eventually, that side won out.    During those years – starting in the 1870’s – a number of black choruses began to travel, exposing more people to the beauty of those songs and increasing the popularity of the music.

Fisk Jubilee Singers; The Great Camp Meeting 1916.  

I Done Done What You Told Me to Do. 1920

John Wesley Work, Jr. was the librarian at Fisk University, Tennessee.  He’s also recognized as the first African American collector of African American folksongs and in 1871, he founded The Fisk Jubilee Singers there at the university.  The Fisk Jubilee Singers were an a cappella African American men's and women's chorus and they were instrumental in introducing spirituals to a wider audience. Work and the Singers toured extensively throughout the country, beginning by touring along the routes of the Underground Railroad. Even though their music stirred some controversy even among certain groups of ex-slaves, they won the hearts and minds of critics and their work helped preserve the spirituals.  The greatest complement is said to be competition, and other choruses, also doing spirituals, either sprang up or, at the African American colleges, introduced spirituals into their repertoire.   

Gospel, as a genre in its own right, starts where Spirituals end.   Gospel songs combine the lyrics of the Spirituals (which are African American folksongs) and inject them with the blues, and four-part harmonies.  The results can be super-charged with emotion, highly entertaining and even  exhilarating!  The first published use of the term “Gospel song”  probably appeared in 1874 when Philip Bliss released a songbook entitled Gospel Songs: A Choice Collection of Hymns and Tunes. It was used to describe a new style of church music, songs that were easy to grasp and more easily singable than the traditional church hymns.

Phillip Bliss

It Is Well With My Soul

Bliss was a caucasian, American composer, conductor, writer of hymns and a bass-baritone Gospel singer. He lived from 1838 to 1876 and his best known hymn, co-written with a man named Horatio Spafford, is called “It Is Well With My Soul”.  The simple message in the hymn is that life can be unpredictable and challenging, but faith and trust in God can help us to overcome hardship and tragedy.   Spafford knew a lot about tragedy;  He was a successful attorney and real estate investor who lost a fortune in the great Chicago fire of 1871. Around the same time, his beloved four-year-old son died of scarlet fever.

Thinking a vacation would do his family some good, he sent his wife and four daughters on a ship to England, and he was going to join them as soon as he finished up the odds and ends of a business project.  This is where life’s unpredictability changed his life:  While crossing the Atlantic, the ship carrying his family was in a major collision.  The ship sank, and all four of his daughters were drowned.  His wife, Anna, survived the tragedy. Upon arriving in England, she sent a telegram to her husband that began: “Saved alone. What shall I do?”

It takes super-human faith to survive a tragedy like that and still say “It is well with my soul.”

But this is ALSO the example and the message that the Black community have been able to produce generation after generation when things have always looked so bleak for them.  Maybe this is why I love and respect that race like I do.  They have so often shown us the best of what we can be.

Bliss’ life was cut short at the age of 38 when he died in a train wreck.  Before he died, he’d moved to Chicago where he lived and worked as a singer and teacher during his final 12-years.  Philip Bliss was one of the most famous religious songwriters of his era. His work has been a major influence for many gospel performers since his time, and this has ensured him a place in gospel history.

Before spirituals could fully evolve into Gospel music, there had to be widespread acceptance of spirituals being sung in even black churches.  But spirituals were a link to  In the beginning there was a lot of pushback, since there was resistance

Thomas Dorsey

Spin the clock forward forty years and we’re now in the time of Thomas Dorsey, the next major force in gospel music.  Dorsey was an African American gospel composer who started his career as a blues guitarist, and with an ironic nod toward Phillip Bliss, also living in Chicago.  

Tight Like That

Thomas Dorsey had grown up in the Christian church.  His father was the epitome of the black, southern preacher with a very flamboyant style, and Dorsey used to mimic his father’s speaking style, preaching to the chickens in the front yard.  He became a secular musician, and sort of ‘fell away’ (to use a churchy term) from his faith.  He had a second conversion experience in his early 20’s and in an interview, years later, he explained it like this:

“There was a Baptist convention up the street from where I was staying. I was playing rags and blues at parties, and things on Saturday night. There was a fellow who came to the convention by the name of Nix who stayed with my uncle, and he got up one night and sang “I Know a Great Savior, I Do Don’t You?” After he finished, the minister said anyone could join the church. If you were interested, they would send you to a church of your choice. I thought, “Here’s my chance.” I was playing jazz music. In fact, I was working in clubs. So I quit. I walked off my job”.

But money being scarce, he eventually went back into the blues scene under the name 

“Georgia Tom”.   His blues career spanned the years 1919-1925.  He actually had considerable success in those early years.  Some of his major wins included 

·      Being one of the first musicians to copyright blues music; a song he wrote in 1920 called "If You Don't Believe I'm Leaving, You Can Count the Days I'm Gone"

·      , and among his achievements, 

·      Two of his secular songs were recorded by Monette Moore and another by Joe "King" 

·      Oliver.  This made Dorsey one of Chicago's top blues composers. 

·      His reputation led him to become a music arranger for Paramount Records and the Chicago Music Publishing Company. 

·      In 1923, he became the pianist and leader of Ma Rainey’s back-up group, the Wild Cats Jazz Band.  Dorsey remembered the night Ma Rainey opened at Chicago's largest black theater Dorsey as "the most exciting moment in my life".

·      In 2014, and on the merits of his song, "It's Tight Like That" Dorsey/ Georgia Tom was posthumously inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame. 

Near the end of Dorsey’s time as a blues musician, he formed the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir at the request of the pastor, Reverend James Smith, who loved the so-called Negro spirituals and native singing styles. Dorsey and Ebenezer's music director Theodore Frye trained the new chorus to deliver his songs with a gospel blues sound: lively, joyous theatrical 

performances with embellished and elongated notes accentuated with rhythmic clapping 

and shouts. At their debut, Frye strutted up and down the aisles and sang back and forth 

with the chorus, and at one point Dorsey jumped up from the piano stool in excitement 

and stood as he played. When the pastor at Pilgrim Baptist, Chicago's second largest 

black church, saw the way it moved the congregation, he hired Dorsey as music director, 

allowing him to dedicate all his time to gospel music.

Among other things, the Reverend Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker was an African-American pastor, and as a national civil rights leader, he was a chief of staff for Martin Luther King Jr., He also helped found the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).  Reverend Walker said this about Dorsey’s impact on the Black community:

Reverend Walker

Arizona Dranes

Chicago really was an epicenter for the development of Gospel music.  Not only did the “Father of Gospel”, Thomas Dorsey rise from that city, but so did Arizona Dranes, a blind piano and guitar playing African American woman.  Arizona was called “the Mother of the Gospel Beat”.

She created a high-energy style of gospel beat, which fused barrelhouse and ragtime music with black Spirituals to create a unique music that still can be heard today in the Pentecostal Church.  It was Arizona who really gave Gospel the heavy rhythmic style we know today.  Eventually, she got a recording contract with the race records label, Okeh, and recorded her very short discography in the years 1926 and 1928 before the Great Depression hit.  

Thomas Dorsey once said this, about Arizona.  "She was Pentecostal.  She was from the Church of God in Christ. I think they call them 'holy rollers' — they believe in speaking in tongues and really letting it go. Her music totally fit the church: The preachers would preach about spirit possession and then say, 'Here's Arizona Dranes.' And she would show them what they were talking about."

In her youth, Arizona had been classically trained in piano.  She grew up in Texas and was a student at The Institute for Deaf, Dumb and Blind Colored Youth in Austin, TX, and she played the compositions  of Mozart and Beethoven.

Michael Corcoran is a song-writer, music producer, and musician. He’s produced records for Victoria Justice, Ariana Grande, and Miranda Cosgrove among others.  Corcoran also wrote the liner notes for a CD retrospective of Arizona Drane’s music.  In a recent interview with National Public Radio, he shared his expertise in early Chicago Gospel.  Let’s listen to Corcoran now:  

Swing Low Sweet Chariot – Apple Music

Blessed Assurance – Apple Music

Marion Williams

Marion Williams may have been the greatest Gospel singer that ever rose from that genre.  Born in 1927 in Miami, FL she lived until. 1994.  During her lifetime, she was acclaimed as "the most lyrical and imaginative singer gospel has produced."  During her long and successful career, she toured her music across three continents; United States, Europe, and Africa, she brought together the best of the many different traditions that make up gospel music. She’s recognized for having created a highly personal sound which has major impact throughout American music, in everything from jazz to blues, rock to soul, in the music of instrumentalists and singers alike. 

As a live performer, she blew everyone away, establishing a heady reputation rhythmic control, perfect timing, and an ability to sing everything from opera to blues.  Whether she sang as a solo act, or as a member of a number of different groups – including the Ward Singers and the Stars of Faith, fans and critics alike, in countries including the United States, Great Britain, Scandinavia, and throughout the European Continent, fans and critics alike hailed her as a triumph. Even stuffy British theater critics, like Kenneth Tynan, called Marion Williams "unforgettable!"

In addition to everything else she accomplished, Williams also paved the way for early Rock and Roll, R&B and Soul artists like Little Richard, James Brown and Otis Redding – in other words, some of the most impressive performers American music ever produced.

In 1993, Marion Williams was honored at the Kennedy Center for her contributions to music and American culture.  This is an excerpt from that occasion

Mahalia Jackson

Among Thomas Dorsey’s major contributions to Gospel music, he discovered Mahalia Jackson and had a formative roll in the development of her career.  The grand-daughter of slaves, she grew up in poverty, living in New Orleans.  She’d been turned on to Gospel music at the Baptist church she attended, and she also discovered early blues singers like Bessie Smith by listening to her aunt’s record collection.  Her childhood experiences in the church led to her dedicating her life to bringing God’s word to His people via her musical talents.

With those early life experiences, teaming up with the Father of Gospel, Thomas Dorsey, was a natural progression.  Together, they bypassed the establishment and took their new Christian sound to the street corners of Chicago and eventually across the country. Jackson helped bring more attention to Dorsey’s compositions by singing his songs while he hawked copies of his sheet music.

Imagine all that talent pouring out of a self-taught, entirely instinctive musical soul like Mahalia’s.  What really set her apart from others was her keen instinct for music, a completely original delivery style that was built on a foundation of extensive improvisation with melody and rhythm. Her powerful contralto voice and immense range was unmatched.  But combine that with her enormous stage presence, and her authentic ability to relate to her audiences, bringing them to emotional peaks through her performances, and Mahalia Jackson was capable of producing exquisite feelings of joy.  

Her music career happened during a very strained period in race relations, coinciding with segregationist Jim Crow laws and everything that went with them.  Still, during her lifetime, she sold over 22 million records and performed for integrated and secular audiences across the world.   Her recording career earned her many Grammy awards in 1961, 62, 1972, and 1976 and she was also nominated for several others in 1963, 69, and 1980.    She’s best known for songs like

"Move on Up a Little Higher." her biggest seller, and now ranked in both the Grammy Hall of Fame and Rolling Stone's Hall of Fame.  Other milestones in her recording career include

·      "How I Got Over." ...

·      "Take My Hand, Precious Lord."

·      "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho" and

·      "His Eye Is on the Sparrow."

Eventually, Dorsey and Jackson's vision spread through their alliance with a few likeminded musical pioneers to form of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, which is still thriving today. The National Convention hold annual meetings where people gather to learn about, and participate in Gospel music performance.  There are 45 different regional unions across the country.  In August, 2020, this convention had its 87th annual meeting.  

Mahalia won the Vincent DePaul award in 1971, and gave a follow up tv interview shortly afterward.  Here’s a little of what she had to say.    Mahalia Jackson Interview

Mavis Staples

Berniece Reagon Johnson

Gospel music played an indispensable role in the Civil Rights movement.  

Out of the thousands of Shouts, Spirituals and Gospel songs that gave voice to the cry for freedom in America, there were dozens that became the voice of the Civil Rights struggle.  They voice to the struggle then, and fortunately, they are here today to give comfort to and unite the protestors who still hold claim to Dr. King’s “canceled check” which continues to come back marked “insufficient funds” at America’s bank of equality and freedom.  People heard them sung in Montgomery, Alabama when Rosa Parks refused to get up from her seat on the bus. And they were sung during the sit-ins where students walked off college campuses to attend much more important lectures in social justice held on freedom buses rolling from Washington DC to New Orleans.  

Some of the most powerful voices leading African Americans, but really all minorities in America,  toward social justice included Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples, and Berniece Reagon Johnson.  

Mahalia Jackson’s music, vision and leadership were one of the driving forces behind the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s.  About her talent, her close friend, Martin Luther King Jr. once said “A voice like this one comes not once in a century, but once in a millennium.”  

So engaged was she in ‘the movement’, she was known to accompany and perform at Dr. King’s events, bringing church outside to the masses, and appearing at some of the most hostile demonstrations.  Some time before his historical, moving and triumphant speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. King had told Mahalia about his famous dream – you know the one, about little black boys and little white girls holding hands and building a better future – and it was Mahalia’s insistence that finally encouraged him enough to include it as the pinnacle of his speech, in which many unforgettable moments had already been included.  

Many of the songs that became freedom songs during the civil rights movement were church songs. A few of them had also been introduced to the Labor Union movement which preceded the Civil Rights movement, among them, "We Shall Not Be Moved".  Here’s a version of it sung by Mavis Staples many years after those turbulent times.  She leads off by sharing memories of those days.

The Gospel songs were so effective when they were used in this social protest movement because they gave the people a sense of holy urgency and righteousness.  These Christians believed with everything they had in them that it was ‘the holy spirit’ that gave them the authority.  This was not performance.  This was group leadership and to be effective, Gospel singers need to possess a voice that " transmits intensity, fullness, and tremendous energy.  It’s all this in combination that moves a crowd to ecstasy.  A music critic once attended one of Mahalia Jackson’s concerts and noted some of the spontaneous audience responses such as: 

o   "She's blowing!"

o   "She's jamming; she can't help it!"

o   "The girl needs to sit down and rest a while!"

o   "I guess after that song that's all you need to do."

Bernice Johnson Reagon (born Bernice Johnson on October 4, 1942) is a song leader, composer, scholar, and social activist.  In the early 1960s, she was a founding member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) Freedom Singers in the Albany Movement in Georgia.  one of the movement’s more radical branches. In the wake of the Greensboro sit-in at a lunch counter closed to Black people, Ella Baker, then director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), helped set up the first meeting of what became the SNCC. She was concerned that SCLC, led by Martin Luther King Jr., was out of touch with younger African Americans who wanted the movement to make faster progress. Baker encouraged those who formed SNCC to look beyond integration to broader social change and to view King’s principle of nonviolence more as a political tactic than a way of life.  In a lengthy 2020 interview she did with National Public Radio, she talked about her upbringing and way spirituals and gospel songs played a special role in unifying her community.  

Oh, Freedom!  The Sojourners

In protest music

Besides Gospel songs, “Freedom” songs from the time of slavery were also an important part of the uniting protestors in their struggle.  The example we’re listening to now is called “Oh Freedom!”

This is a live version by a small, Canadian group called The Sojourners.  Their leader,is the fifth generation descendant of a slave woman who fled the south and found refuge in Canada.  In concert, the Sojourners songs from the time of the Underground Railroad and McClelland shares his great-great-great grandmother’s stories about her flight out of slavery along the Underground Railroad.  The connection with the Civil Rights movement is obvious, but these songs are just as relevant today, in our era of Black Lives Matter and the continuing deaths of African Americans at the hands of the police.  Hey, Republicans?  Are you listening?

Gospel Choral Union of Chicago

Whatever You Want, God’s Got It. 

It was in the field of blues-based, gospel music that Thomas Dorsey had his greatest influence as a musician though.  He completely re-wrote the rules for what a church choir could be and could sound like.  Dorsey began introducing uptempo Negro spirituals, what he referred to as "jubilees", alongside published hymns in worship services. Just like today, there have always been people who, in the face of change and a departure from status-quo, will push back.  The old-timers in the congregation wanted calmer, more conservative church music.  Some of them complained about how the worship experience had been denigrated through blues shouting.  Others felt that the music was taking prominence over the sermon, or how women in the choir were taking attention from the male pastor.  

            But things were also changing in the composition of the congregation!  The Great Migration had begun, and southern blacks from rural areas were flooding into midwestern and northern cities like Chicago.  These folks were hungry for blues, and for experiences that were more like the camp meetings they’d left behind.  Progressive ministers saw the opportunity to attract new church members and knew that Dorsey’s new Gospel sound could be what drew them in.  

            Just like at the end of the 19th century, the beginning decades of the 20th also had their fair share of push-back as the new music was taking root in black churches.  Although the black community had made a sort of peace with using Spirituals in their churches, Thomas Dorsey (old Georgia Tom) was actively blending the blues with those spirituals!  The result?  Well, we’ve seen it forever if you’ve ever heard the Rock and Roll is Satan’s Music argument.  Black religious leaders originally rejected Dorsey's approach because of its associations with the widely frowned-pon secular music styles like ragtime, blues, and jazz.

But the music was so good – and the choirs were so obviously sincere, and physically caught up in some kind of spiritual ecstasy – that Dorsey’s gospel music won over those conservative pastors and it did take root in Chicago’s black churches!  

Black gospel choirs were asked to perform at several white churches in Chicago. And Dorsey's own Pilgrim Baptist Church choir performed at the 1933 World's Fair.  Hallelujah!

Between 1930 and 1933, Dorsey’s new style of Gospel music caught on in a big way and not just in churches in Chicago, but in other cities across the nation.  His musical partners wanted him to start a national convention to train other musicians to play Gospel blues.  This led him to co-found the Gospel Choral Union of Chicago, which became the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses and then tragedy struck – just as it had struck Phillip Bliss before him.  Flush with the success of his music, and happily awaiting the birth of his child, his wife Nettie died in childbirth, and then also his infant son, 24 hours later.  In his grief, he wrote what is probably his most and enduring compositions, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord".  Once again, too, we have another example of an African American enduring crushing grief and hardship, and then rising from it to create something of exquisite beauty. 

            At the age of 70, he looked back on that experience and had this to say about his experience in that moment;  “The price exacted for ‘Precious Lord’ was very high.  The grief, the sorrow, the loneliness, the loss, the uncertainty of the future, but I was requited or repaid with double dividends and compound interest.”

The last song we heard, performed by the Gospel Choral Union of Chicago – the descendant members of the original Gospel Choir Thomas Dorsey began – is an example of a Gospel Quartet.  And here I need to explain something:

The gospel choirs were often referred to as Gospel Quartets, but were not always .  Which is pretty confusing!  As in this case, sometimes, they were large choirs singing in four-part harmony.  

This is the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, a great example of the Gospel Quartet sound, and in this group, an actual four-member quartet.  You can definitely hear the R&B feel coming on strong.  This recording is from 1943, and in it you can hear the rocking beat that began to assert itself in the music.  

Singings Conventions

We’re listening to the sounds from the Sacred Harp Western Massachusetts Singing Convention

Just like the black church has a tradition that grew out of black folk music, so do white southerners.  It’s referred to as Southern Gospel or White Gospel, and it too emerged from the white folk music (the Appalachian Mountain music we’ve heard in earlier episodes).  There were a number of important ways that Southern/ White gospel music grew its audience.

Music publishers saw the rising popularity in Gospel music, and like any business, they wanted a piece of it.  The way they went about it, probably wouldn’t work today.  The methods depended on a thriving small-town America type culture, a nation that was a lot more unified in the Christian faith than it is today, and market conditions that still made success achievable using mostly grass-roots style tactics.  In essence, a way of life that’s  vanished over the last eighty years.

Gospel being a choral music, their strategy was to put as many people into choirs as possible, and then to be the supplier of song books to those choirs.  Gospel music was the happening thing, so that’s where the energy was placed.

Farther Along--Stamps-Baxter Choir with Allison Speer

Between 1900 and the mid 1950’s, Singing conventions were sponsored by church music publishing companies and were held In communities all across the nation, but especially in the south and the Midwest.  Trained music instructors were there to teach singing, and the publishers’ songs were the ones they taught from.

The styles varied from region to region, as you can tell from comparing the last song, from W. Massachusetts, which sounds a lot more European/ white with this song we’re listening to now, which plainly has a Southern/ blues sound in it.  

Early on, around 1910 or so, songbook publishers started hiring the better Gospel choirs to help them pitch their published songs.  The first company to do this was called the Vaughan Music Company, from Lawrenceburg, Tennessee.  It made sense, these choirs sounded so incredible, it made the songs themselves sound great.  Other choirs wanted that kind of sound, too.  But of all the publishers that used this tactic, the Stamps–Baxter Music and Printing Company in Dallas, had the biggest number of choirs out on the road, pitching their music for Jesus, who must have needed the money or something!  By 1945, there was more than thirty-five quartets traveling Southern roads selling music for God.  

Singing Conventions began fading out in the second half of the 20th century  andn there were a number of reasons for this.  One, it was mostly a rural phenomenon and as the flood out of the small towns and into big urban centers continued, almost unabated for most of the century, there were fewer and fewer people left to attend and participate.  Also, the best quartets became entertainers, and they didn’t need the songbook publishers to sponsor them anymore.  Finally, music, which once was a participation event became a professional entertainment industry that relied on technology – first recordings, then radio and recordings, and finally internet.   Basically the entire scene changed and the party – at least as far as the Singings went – was over.

In previous episodes of American Song, I’ve told you about how the rise of radio, starting in the 1920’s was a major force in growing the market for different types of music.  In our last episode, Country Music Blazed a Trail, we even saw how one of those radio shows, on WSM, in Nashville, eventually became the Grand ‘Ol Opry!

Stamps Baxter Quartet – Build Me a Cabin in Gloryland

The same is true for the growth of Gospel music, too.  The Texas Centennial celebration in Dallas featured 12 different radio stations broadcasting from glass booths.  People flocked to see it; rural folk were fascinated. They had heard radio broadcasts but had never seen one. The Stamps–Baxter quartet performed several live broadcasts at the State Fair of Texas that went over in a big way, and a Dallas station, KRLD decided to try a noonday program in the fall of 1936. Within a week KRLD was deluged with mail. The broadcasts became a staple in Texas broadcasting.  

When He Calls I’ll Fly Away

Apple Music

The same happened, on WBAP radio in Fort Worth, for another really popular gospel group, the Carter Quartet. They were one of the few White gospel groups in the nation to secure a major record label in the years before World War II.   Raised in the singing-school tradition,  they originally had a wider variety of music they performed.  It turned out that their gospel numbers were what people liked best though.  The group was actually a family act, including Dave “Dad” Carter, his wife Carrie, and daughters Rosa and Effie (renamed “Rose” and “Anna”).  Their sponsor changed the name of the Carter Quartet to the Chuck Wagon Gang -  which actually reminds me of a dog food brand, but whatever - WBAP ended up making the entire show’s format Gospel.  They were actually the group to record, the song “I’ll Fly Away” which eventually became a major hit when the Five Blind Boys of Alabama picked it up.  They were also one of the first groups to feature guitar instead of piano as the chief instrument. 

If this group kind of reminds you of the Carter Family, it’s because they were from the same Apalachian/ Mountain region where A.P. and his family came from.  In fact, they actually had a big cross-over audience with country music radio stations too.  

Al Green.  Aretha Franklin.  Billy Preston.  Bo Diddley.  Carole King.  Chaka Kahn.  Dinah Washington.  Donna Summer. Earth, Wind & Fire. Elvis Presley.  The Four Tops.  Gnarls Barkley.  The Hollies.  Ike & Tina Turner.  The Impressions.  Jackie Wilson. Kanye West.  Little Richard.  Marvin Gaye.  Michael Jackson.  Nat King Cole.  The O’Jays.  The Pointer Sisters.  Prince.  Ray Charles.The Righteous Brothers.  Sam Cooke.  Seal.  Tower of Power.  Usher.  Van Morrison.    War.  Wilson Pickett.  These are just a few of Music’s Greats who’s careers grew up drinking from the deep, cool river of gospel music.  

From A to Z, in any genre you like, in any decade you choose, in any language you speak, there is nowhere in music you can go where you won’t be BLESSED by the power and influence of Gospel music.  

Gospel Music is a testament to the spirit of the men and women who rose from the most difficult hardship most human beings have ever endured.  

I’m Joe Hines, and I’ve enjoyed sharing this time with you today on the latest episode of American Song.  I hope you’ve enjoyed what you heard.  I’d like to remind you that there’s a second way you can enjoy American Song.  Just check out our Facebook page – search for American Song Podcast and you can dig deeper into the amazing journey of America’s music – including the Rising of Gospel music.  The miracle of this music is now how great it is, but that it even happened at all.  You know what, I think “That’s the Way God Planned It”….. take it away, Billy Preston.