by Leonard Goines
Black gospel music grew out of the late 19th and early 20th century folk church and is essentially created in a context of individual and collective spontaneity. As a total manifestation, black gospel can be viewed as a synthesis of West African and Afro-American music, dance, poetry, oratory and drama. An urban contemporary black religious and musical statement of rural folk origins, it is a celebration of the Christian experience of salvation and hope. According to gospel singer and historian Pearl Williams Jones, it is at the same time, "a declaration of black selfhood which is expressed through the very personal medium of music." Though gospel music has exerted a great deal of influence on today's popular music forms and styles, it has been an underground or counterculture body of music for most of its sixty years of existence. As a result, it is among the least understood of the many black cultural expressions.Music in traditional African culture served as a powerful instrument of psychological actions, a means of communicating with the supernatural, as well as a means of conveying an interpretation of the external world and expressing a particular world view. Music geared toward a ritual or magic action, toward a psycho-physiological action creating states of trance, or else toward the development of an emotional climate designed specifically to calm or stimulate, will, of course, be based on elements that are utterly different from those of music which is principally concerned with aesthetics in a more or less abstract form. It is quite impossible to judge one of these musical conceptions utilizing the criteria of another.
Like the spiritual which preceded it, gospel is a testament to both the continuation of significant elements of an older world view among black Americans and also to the perpetuation of a strong sense of community. The process by which these musics were created allowed for simultaneous individual and communal creativity. Furthermore, their overall form and design provided simultaneous outlets for individual and communal expression. The antiphonal structure, the call-and-response pattern which is so much used in African and Afro-American music, for example, places the individual in continual dialogue with his community. This permits one both to preserve his or her voice as a distinct entity and to blend it with those of the other members, thus presenting a potential outlet for individual feelings while allowing one to bask in the warmth of assumptions shared by the group.
Though some confusion exists in reference to gospel music and its relationship to the spiritual, it is perhaps wise at this point to mention some important differences. Spirituals are a product of the slave experience in the United States and have been passed down largely through oral traditions. Gospel music, as we know it today, on the other hand, dates back only to the mid-twenties and is in most instances an arranged or composed music. Secondly, unlike the folk spiritual, gospel music utilizes instrumental accompaniment as an integral part of its performance. These accompanying instruments range from piano and organ to percussion instruments such as drums and tambourines to complete brass bands.
In much the same way that classic and city blues replaced country blues as blacks migrated in large numbers from the rural areas to the cities, gospel music was created to more adequately reflect a new environment, psychological stance, and religious consciousness. As blacks traveled from rural to urban environments after the First World War, they found that music which was appropriate in their country setting did not completely meet their new urban needs. Consequently, religious music such as hymns, anthems, and spirituals were supplanted by gospel, which was a highly expressive, joyful type of music characterized by improvisation and instrumental accompaniment.
It was within the context of a sharpening dichotomy between "church music" and "street music" that gospel song developed. The incomplete distinctions and blurred barriers constructed to separate the two have been problematic throughout the Afro-American musical experience. A division between sacred and secular was not a part of the African world view as it is in the West.
The early Holiness churches were the churches where these amalgamated sounds first became prominent around the turn of the century. It was here that Charles Albert Tindley's creations, which were neither spirituals nor hymns, but prototypes of the gospel songs of the post-World War I years, were first used.
During the same time that many black churches were seeking respectability by banning the shout, fostering more sedate hymns and concretized versions of the spirituals, and in general discouraging an enthusiastic approach to religions, the Holiness churches constituted a revitalization movement which emphasized healing, spirit possession, speaking in tongues, gifts of prophecy and religious dance. In a musical sense they reached back to the traditions of the slave past and out to the rhythms of the secular black musical world which surrounded them. They drew not only the sounds of ragtime, blues and jazz into the church but also the instruments on which they were played. Drums, tambourines, triangles, guitars, saxophones, trumpets, trombones, double basses and anything else that seemed musically appropriate were used to accompany the singing, which served such a central functions in their services.
Charles Albert Tindley, a Methodist minister and the pioneer gospel song creator, began composing his first songs in the early 1900's. The composer of such hymns as "Stand by me," his songs moved into the black sacred oral tradition, with the most famous titles being sung in the various black gospel singing styles - solo, duet, quartet, ensemble and choir.
Thomas Dorsey, often called the father of gospel music, was greatly influenced by Rev. Tindley, Dorsey, or "Georgia Tom" as he was called when he was Ma Rainey's piano accompanist, began composing religious music in 1921 after becoming a member of the Pilgrim Baptist Church of Chicago. Having been deeply moved by the singing of one of Tindley's songs entitled "I Do, Don't You," he was overcome by a desire to write music that would similarly inspire others. The composer of over 400 songs which include "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," "We Will Meet Him In The Sweet Bye and Bye," and "When I've Done the Best I Can," he wrote free-swinging religious songs with driving rhythms and blues-like melodies which combined religious music with the popular style of the day. Over the years he inspired many gospel singers and was responsible for the organization and development of numerous gospel groups.
Though Dorsey retired from the world of the blues in 1929, this basic root material permeated everything that he later composed. "Blues is a part of me," he said, "the way I play piano, the way I write." "I was a blues singer, and I carried that with me into the gospel songs." "I started putting a little of the beat into gospel that we had in jazz. I also put in what we called the riff, or repetitive (rhythmic) phrase. These songs sold three times as fast as those that went straight along on the paper without riffs or repetition." Dorsey's lyrics were imbued with the hope of the Christian message and his music was gleaned from the entire black world around him. Many of his great successes became popular during the Great Depression. "I wrote to give them something to lift them out of that Depression," he stated. "They could sing at church but the singing had no life, no spirit...We intended gospel to strike a happy medium for the down-trodden. This music lifted people out of the muck and mire of poverty and loneliness, of being broke, and gave them some kind of hope anyway. Make it anything but good news, it ceases to be gospel."
Gospel singing style is a performer's art. It is a method of delivering lyrics so demanding in vocal skills and technique that its performing process, like that of the jazz musician, is highly spontaneous and intuitive in approach. The greatest gospel artists, therefore, are usually born close to the source of the tradition. Though these highly aesthetic standards are evident in the performances of many of the best-known gospel singers, such as the late Mahalia Jackson, the late Clara Ward, Reverend James Cleveland, and Alex Bradford, among others, they can also be observed in many obscure and unknown gospel churches throughout the United States.
During the 1930's the gospel movement was centered in Chicago, where the organization of gospel groups and choirs was encouraged by many churches, usually of the storefront type. Blacks who migrated to the North could not afford to build or purchase churches; consequently, they molded their houses of worship out of the low rental ghetto stores that became so plentiful as the Depression engulfed the nation.
By 1940 gospel music has been accepted on a national scale. Singers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson, made a great many records during the forties. This added greatly to the rapid spread and growth of gospel music; as did the organization of many traveling gospel groups such as the Kings of Harmony and the Thrasher Wonders.
Probably the best known of the gospel singers is Mahalia Jackson , who achieved worldwide fame as a result of her 1953 concert appearances throughout Europe and the United States. Long a familiar voice to black audiences, but introduced to the critics in 1950 by Marshal Stearns at a special session of the Newport Jazz Festival, she went on to become gospel music's leading recording star and a concert artist of international stature. Billed as "The World's Greatest Gospel Singer," her first single gospel record, "Move Up a Little Higher," sold over eight million copies after its 1953 release.
Though religious in origin, the gospel has had a tremendous influence on many areas of popular music - from soul to country-western. Around 1954, for example, Ray Charles blended the blues and gospel music and came up with one of our most distinctive soul sounds. One of his first big hits was created when he took the gospel hymn, "My Jesus is All the World to Me," and rewrote it as "I Got a Woman."
The gospel singing style, characterized by special vocal timbres and sonorities, is to a great extent the essence of soul music. A large number of our leading soul artists began their musical careers as gospel singers, pianists or organists performing various musical functions in Baptist, Methodist and Pentecostal churches. This impressive list includes, among others, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Lou Rawls, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding.
There are two basic sources from which the aesthetic ideals of gospel singing have been derived. These are the free-style collective improvisations utilized by congregations in the black church and the black gospel preacher's rhetorical solo style.
Since the beginning of their history in the plantation praise houses, black preachers have utilized folk poetry and the vivid phrase to excite the emotions and involve the participation of their congregations. Possessing special oratorical skills marked by a call-and-response format and punctuated with groans and gestures, these master preachers have been able to create an aura of excitement and hope rarely equaled.
It has been said that gospel has distilled the aesthetic essence of the black arts into a unified whole. This might well be true. Few people can experience gospel in its true cultural setting and fail to hear black poetry in the black preacher's sermon. Nor can they fail to see drama in the emotion-packed performance of a black gospel choir interacting with its congregation; nor fail to see dance in the gospel shout.
Leonard Goines is a Professor of Music at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, lecturer on Afro-American music and jazz history at New York University and post-doctoral research fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University.
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