Commercial success could indicate a special kind of relevancy to African Americans, similar to what less mediated blues and gospel might have offered in earlier decades. Furthermore, African American music has long been in a mutually engaging relationship with other musical influences around it. Reducing it to a “pure” style (or an inborn essence, sometimes critiqued as racial essentialism) can devalue the breadth of vision and syncretic nature of African American culture.
Until the late 1960s many blacks may have believed, as Ward notes, that white interest in R&B would lead to increased racial understanding. But admiration for black music did not necessarily challenge white stereotypes about blacks, and indeed it could also serve to reinforce them. Characterizations such as physical, passionate, ecstatic, emotional, and sexually liberated could serve both to praise and to stereotype black music. While white audiences with little real-world exposure to African American culture might take these as defining characteristics of African American music and culture, blacks would be less susceptible to consider these as the sum total of a much more rich and diverse existence (e.g., jazz may contain all of this and more: restraint, understatement, technical sophistication, intellectual experiment, and exploration). In general, through the early 1960s black entrepreneurs and performers (with the exception of some in the jazz world) were reluctant to get publicly involved in civil rights causes or to address such issues in their music for fear of limiting their commercial acceptance and opportunities. That would soon change.8
GOSPEL
African American gospel music has provided a pervasive influence on R&B, and consequently on rock and roll, primarily in the form of vocal and bodily expression. This is in contrast to blues, which has additionally influenced musical forms, guitar-playing styles, and lyric content (as well as vocal styles). As part of a more racially segregated religious experience, and one that became increasingly vital in the 1930s–1950s, gospel had a strong and direct impact on African Americans growing up in those decades, right when country and classic blues were falling out of favor. Compared to the more publicly visible secular blues, gospel remained relatively hidden from the view of whites.
It is the rule rather than exception for black vocalists to credit the formative impact of early church and gospel music experience on their later careers. B. B. King sang with a gospel quartet about 1946, before moving on to become one of the great blues electric guitarists and vocalists. Soul pioneer Ray Charles sang spirituals since he was three, sang with gospel quartets later in school, and eventually took gospel lines and turned them into secular songs: “Nothing was more familiar to me, nothing more natural [than spirituals and gospel]” (Charles and Ritz 1978: 149). Little Richard sang with the Penniman singers and toured churches; his grandfather and uncle were preachers, and he went to Baptist, AME, and Holiness churches. James Brown went to a lot of churches as a child, taking note of charismatic preachers: “I’m sure a lot of my stage show came out of the church” (1986: 18). Ruth Brown’s formative vocal experiences were in the church, and Clyde McPhatter adapted the style of women gospel singers for the Dominoes and his later solo career. Sam Cooke was a gospel star with the Soul Stirrers before leaving them to help establish the genre that came to be called soul in the late 1950s. And perhaps most famously, Aretha Franklin’s father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, was a nationally known Baptist minister, due in part to his sermons released on disc; gospel greats James Cleveland and Clara Ward were important influences on Aretha, and she toured early on with gospel choirs. She boldly went back to her roots in her acclaimed double-LP Amazing Grace, recorded in 1972 with Rev. James Cleveland and his gospel choir at the height of her initial reign as Queen of Soul. Perhaps one key to Elvis Presley’s success in adapting African American musical styles was that he grew up going to a Pentecostal church.
Gospel music in black communities developed in urban areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries out of slave-era spirituals, which were communal religious songs. In the 1890s alternatives to Baptist and Methodist churches arose, with denominations such as Holiness, Pentecostal, Church of God in Christ, and Sanctified. Pentecostal churches arose in the first decade of the twentieth century from the interracial Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, led by an African American preacher. The following decade whites had formed their own Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God (the church that Elvis belonged to). They all featured ecstatic singing and dancing, where congregants often became possessed by the Holy Spirit. They were the first black churches to encourage the use of musical instruments in church, following Psalm 150: “Praise him with the sound of the trumpet … psaltery and harp … timbrel [tambourine] and dance … stringed instruments and organs … loud cymbals.”9
The gospel music world is marked by composers, vocal soloists (both men and women), and vocal groups. Methodist minister Charles Albert Tindley (1851–1933) was the first major black gospel composer, with classics such as “I’ll Overcome Some Day” (1901) and “Stand by Me” (1905). Thomas A. Dorsey (1899–1993), son of a Baptist minister, initially played blues piano (as “Georgia Tom”) with Ma Rainey in the 1910s and 1920s, and he was a prolific blues composer: “In the early 1920s I coined the words ‘gospel songs’ after listening to a group of five people one Sunday morning on the far south side of Chicago. This was the first I heard of a gospel choir. There were no gospel songs then, we called them evangelistic songs” (qtd. in Heilbut 2002: 27). From 1929 on he committed himself solely to gospel music, and his music began to flourish. In 1932 he and Sallie Martin (1895–1988), the first of the great women gospel singers, founded the Gospel Singers Convention. Throughout the 1930s she and Dorsey set up the first gospel choruses in many of the major black communities of the South and Midwest. In 1932 Dorsey was appointed choral director of Pilgrim Baptist Church (with three thousand seats) in Chicago, where he stayed for forty years. That same year he composed “Precious Lord,” moved by the death of his wife and child. His music was also popular with white southerners, and by 1939 his music was published in anthologies by white publishers of gospel music. His adaptation of the spiritual “We Shall Walk through the Valley in Peace” later became a hit when Elvis Presley recorded it.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–73) was a pioneering guitarist and singer in the gospel field (G. Wald 2007; Csaky 2011-v). Born in Arkansas, she grew up in the sanctified Church of God in Christ with her mother, who was a singer and mandolin player. Her family moved to Chicago in the mid-1920s, where her career as a gospel performer and guitarist took off. She signed with Decca Records in 1938 and her recording “Rock Me” that year had a major impact on the rise of the gospel-record industry as well as on the first generation of rock and rollers. Little Richard, who performed with her once when he was a boy, has credited her with inspiring him, as have many others. She performed in the groundbreaking 1938 “Spirituals to Swing” concert in Carnegie Hall and became known for bringing gospel music to secular audiences. She reached the Harlem Hit Parade Top 10 chart with “Strange Things Happening Every Day” (#2) in 1945. Filmed performances from folk and blues festivals in the 1960s of her playing electric guitar and fronting choirs (“Down by the Riverside,” “Didn’t It Rain,” “Up above my Head”) give some sense of her power and excitement. A U.S. Postal Service stamp was issued in her honor in 1998.
Mahalia Jackson (1911–72), the most beloved of all gospel singers, was born and raised in New Orleans into a devout Baptist family. Her early influences were the classic hymns composed by Isaac Watts in eighteenth-century England, Bessie Smith, jazz, and the Sanctified Church (but she remained Baptist). She moved to Chicago in 1927, made her first records in 1937 with Decca, and joined Thomas Dorsey in the early 1940s. In 1946 she signed a contract with Apollo Records and her third record with them, “Move on Up a Little Higher” (1948), sold over a million copies. In 1954 she signed with Columbia Records, for whom she recorded another version of the song (her piano accompanist was Mildred Falls). The high profile of black gospel music can be seen in the career of Mahalia Jackson, who sang the national anthem at the 1961 Kennedy inaugural celebration and “Precious Lord” at the funeral of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who loved her music. Aretha Franklin sang “Precious Lord” at Jackson’s funeral in Chicago in 1972.10
COUNTRY
The prehistory
