Category Archives: Black Gospel Music

Black Gospel Music

God’s economy

1 Comment

Now in my third year of systematically reading the literature of the Civil Rights Movement, I’m down to the lesser known diaries, smaller incidents, obscure documents, and half-forgotten tales of local heroes — and even local villains. It is rarely less than fascinating. I’m making lots of connections … which, I suppose, is the point of information gathering and story-telling.

Probably most people already knew that the roots of both the women’s rights movement and anti-war movement are to be found in the turbulence created by the civil rights movement. Not that both didn’t exist independently before — they did — but they gathered impetus and power and (sometimes just as importantly) media savvy from the mistakes and successes of the civil rights movement.

Reflecting Mona’s post on women, I’m convinced yet again that all movements concerned with justice never really end…

Which brings me to something that bothers me about the otherwise generally wonderful students here at Baylor, something that I think reveals a deeper, unresolved societal issue. My students insist on calling women professors “Miz.” Sometimes “Miss” and sometimes “Mrs.” — but usually “Miz.” Nearly every female professor I know has a Ph.D., and yet the default address is “Miz.”

Not so for their male colleagues. I’m invariably “Doctor Darden.” I don’t have a Ph.D. Men are “Doctor,” women are “Miz.”

One of my colleages thinks it has to do with the fact that virtually all of their elementary, junior high and high school teachers were female (save for the coaches, who are usually male and therefore “Coach So-and-So”).

That may be true. But somewhere, perhaps this is a Southern thing, I don’t know, students are subtly pressured to make this kind of distinction. It’s darn near automatic. It’s a respect thing … and we, as male educators, need to do a LOT more to reinforce this simple courtesy   — female professors deserve to be called “DOCTOR.” Students — call your female professors “DOCTOR” until specifically told otherwise.

Now, don’t get me started on the glaring lack of female administrators at Baylor (and too many other colleges in the South) …

Black Gospel Music

Chapter heading

2 Comments

I love putting great quotes at the beginning of each chapter of a book… something to set the mood or illuminate a certain theme. It is something I started many years ago and I’m always on the look-out for something special that relates to the current project. I found this in Robert Browning’s poem “Parleyings with Charles Avison”:

“There is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music.”

I don’t know where it’ll go in Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement, but it’ll go somewhere!

Black Gospel Music

Something I found when I was looking for something else …

Leave a comment

This a quote from the desert fathers that opens a Mary Oliver book of poetry called “Thirst”:

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can, I stay my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?”

Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”

Black Gospel Music

W.E.B. Du Bois: We Return Fighting

1 Comment

I try to go through a couple of books each evening as part of my research, putting a sticky note on anything interesting, then copying those pages and returning the books the next day. (Thank God for Inter Library Loan!)

Last night I read John Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi.  While much has been written on the better-known Freedom Fighters in the Delta, it was the local tenet farmers who suffered most of the violence and endured most of the terror. Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s bore little resemblence to a democracy — for poor black OR poor white.

And yet W.E.B. Du Bois was fighting for Civil Rights decades before Birmingham and Selma and Danbury and Albany — without the slightest protection from the federal government (which, admittedly, wasn’t much in the ’50s or ’60s, either!).

That’s why when Dittmer includes this quote by Du Bois it is so startling:

“We return from the slavery of the uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civilian garb … We sing:  This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land. It lynches … It disfranchises its own citizens … It encourages ignorance … It steals from us … It insults us … We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.” — W.E.B. Du Bois, Crisis, 19 (May 1919), 13-14.

Thank you, John Dittmer, for reminding me that this war is not yet won.

Black Gospel Music

Nothing But Love in God’s Water

Leave a comment

My past few years have been consumed with research on another book (currently titled “Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement”). I’m not sure yet, but it may be my final non-fiction book. Twenty-five books is enough any idiot.

I don’t know when I’ll be finished. But then, I never really know on each new book. All of my spare time — weekends, nights, “vacations” — have been spent, for the most part, in pursuit of knowledge related to this project. I’ve read literally hundreds of books and magazine and newspaper articles. I’ve so far interviewed more than 60 gospel artists, Freedom Riders, pastors, announcers, marchers from the height of the Civil Rights era. Mary and I have traveled to Birmingham (twice) and Chicago for research and in-person interviews, and we have more travels yet ahead.

We’ve made a lot of new friends. I’ve also come to have a new appreciation for some new heroes: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., of course, but also the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Dorothy Love Coates, and Rep. John Lewis (who graciously agreed to an interview).

I’ve also immersed myself in the heroes of the past — W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Nina Simone and so many others. I want to talk about DuBois in particular in the days ahead.

New friends, old friends who come alive, friends we haven’t yet met. “Nothing But Love in God’s Water” has already been invaluable to me, regardless if the book sells modestly or not at all.

Black Gospel Music

Black Gospel Music Restoration Project

3 Comments

Thank you, thank you, thank you for taking the time and effort to track us down. If you’ve got questions about this project, or if you think you might have black gospel 78s, LPs, 45s, or cassettes to loan or donate, I’d love to hear from you. BTW, if it is something you can use, we will happily cover all of your mailing, handling and insurance expenses!

Please e-mail me at Robert_Darden@baylor.edu.