Category Archives: Gospel music

Unbroken

I had the very good fortune to be part of GospelFest 10 in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, along with my friend Dr. Jimmy Abbington. Jimmy and I spoke during the academic part of the conference. Then, on the following evening, we were guests at a program featuring some of the best choirs in the Pacific Northwest, directed by the top music directors in the area — Juan Huey-Ray, Elias Bullock, DaNell Daymon, Gary L. Wyatt, Cora Jackson and others.

But just before the music, the organizer of the festival, Dr. Stephen Newby of Seattle Pacifici University (which hosted the event), asked me to give a history of gospel music at the beginning of the program. In “four minutes or less.”

Thanks, Stephen.

That’s not really possible, of course. So I spoke (in 2 1/2 minutes, no less) on the historic nature of the closing concert/service. It is my belief that gospel music, more than any other American musical form, has been handed down from the first African slaves who were brought to North America. The African distinctives of their music remain in African-African music today. In fact, they form the basis of all popular music in this country — ragtime, jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll, rap — as well as gospel.

The gospel blues and jubilee and the spirituals combined together to create black gospel music.

It is an unbroken, almost apostolic, succession. That music, that message still endure. It has been, for most of its history, transmitted orally. There are people alive who learned it from the Rev. Thomas Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, Roberta Martin and the others who were there when it was first dubbed “gospel.” And John P. Kee, Donnie McClurkin, Yolanda Adams, and the others learned from them. And so it goes …

So any time gospel music is sung, it is the same song those who came before sang. There is more of a beat now and the sometimes I fear the electronic instruments will swamp the Message. But at GospelFest 10, that didn’t happen.

Instead, brothers and sisters, we had CHURCH for three very, very short hours … 

(Photo of the Eufaula, Alabama, church choir, circa 1950s)

Jules Bledsoe and Civil Rights

Jules Bledsoe in Harlem
Jules Bledsoe in Harlem

If you know the name Jules Bledsoe at all, you probably know him as the African American baritone who originated the song “Old Man River” from the original production of the legendary musical Show Boat on Broadway. Bledsoe was a popular singer in pre-World War II America, despite the ferocious racism of his day. He was the first black man to appear in a national production of a grand opera. He was in great demand abroad, singing with the major opera companies and symphony orchestras of Europe. He was a composer. He even acted in a couple of pretty bad movies.

But for my research into the influence of black sacred music on the Civil Rights Movement, I’m most interested in Bledsoe as a crusader. I’ve found that he performed numerous benefits for the NAACP, spoke out against racism while appearing on many national national radio shows (often with Eleanor Roosevelt), and once defended his counterpart, Paul Robeson, from those who were slandering him.

Bledsoe, who never married, died in 1943.

And, oh yeah, he was born in Waco, Texas and spent his first 18 years here. He’s buried in Greenwood Cemetery in East Waco, with a tombstone that says, “Old Man River.”

P.S. One last note on Jules. During the height of his popularity, in November, 1933, Billie Holiday made her first record as vocalist for Benny Goodman’s studio orchestra doing the popular song “Your Mother’s Son-In-Law”, written by Nichols and Holiner for Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1934. In the song, there is a reference to Jules — “You don’t have to sing like Bledsoe. You can tell the world I said so.”

Black preaching/Black music

One of the threads that created the fabric of gospel music is black preaching. The “hard gospel” quartets — the Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Blind Boys of Mississippi and many others — all featured a hoarse-sounding lead singer who testified while he sang. You can hear that voice in Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding … both came from “the church.”

Now, hold that thought …

I’ve been reading “Birmingham Revolutionaries: The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights,” edited by Marjorie L. White and Andrew M. Manis. Shuttlesworth, of course, was one of the true heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, someone who fearlessly endured the repeated bombings of his home and church, attacks on himself and his family, and the daily indignities of being a proud black man in Birmingham in the 1950s and ’60s. “Birmingham Revolutionaries” is a collection of essays from a symposium in his honor a few years ago.

These are the closing paragraphs of the essay by Manis, himself a black preacher …

“So as I close, if you will indulge the preacher in me, I would say that America still needs to listen to Birmingham’s revolutionaries, but also to their ancestors in the slave quarters and the brush arbors. There, in what was called the ring shout, the slaves sang and danced in the Spirit, rhythmically moving in a circular direction — a holy song and dance that bore the marks of their free and African past. Every day the long, sad shadows moving clockwise around the sundial reminded them of their present world of enslavement. But in their ring shout they found the prophetic courage to move counter-clockwise, against the movement of the sun, against time as their masters defined it. And in their circle of faith, they symbolically sang and danced their resistance to the life of slavery around them.

“Today, as we remember Birmingham’s heroes, let us also learn something from the ways of their ancestors. Let us follow them, and like Fred Shuttlesworth, dance out that joyful, fiery African-American spirit against the grain of still-race-conscious culture. Let us also dance against the grain of earlier consensus, focusing primarily on King and the national movement, to give historic credit where it is also due.

“So circle up. Circle up with Brother Frederick Douglass … and line up with Sister Sojourner Turth … and fall in behind Fred Shuttlesworth and these Birmingham revolutionaries … and get in that circle behind Addie Mae and Carole and Denise and Cynthia — those four little saints blown by hatred from this church into the very arms of God. Circle up with them all. Circle up and emulate their courage and, if you are so inclined, pray for the day when we can sing as truly as did they:

“Slav’ry chain done broke at last — Gon’ praise God ’til I die!”

This helped me in my research …

“The Black Church maintains a clear prophetic tradition as part of a priestly function throughout its history. ” — William B. McClain

“Our songs and our prayers, our music and our meditations, our liturgical stance and our new theology must present the prophetic face of divine anger born of dignity and determination, undergirded by the Holy Spirit, to bring the sword in pursuit of the positive peace without which no man can experience salvation.” — Jefferson P. Rogers

I’m not always sure where “Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on Civil Rights Movement” is going … but words like these make me think I’m at least searching for the right path.