Gospel Harmony: American Popular Sacred Music, 1871-1969 (original) (raw)
GOSPEL HARMONY:
AMERICAN POPULAR SACRED MUSIC, 1871-1969
How mass evangelism and the Jubilee choral tradition inaugurated a revolution in gospel music across ecclesiastical and racial lines.
Allergy alert: Parts of this paper have the smell of sawdust.
David Clyde Jones
Professor of systematic theology and ethics, emeritus
Covenant Theological Seminary
September 2016
I never shall forget that day,
Coming for to carry me home,
When Jesus washed my sins away,
Coming for to carry me home.
-“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”
As sung by the Fisk Jubilee Quartet, 190911909{ }^{1}
Oh happy day, oh happy day,
When Jesus washed, oh when He washed,
When Jesus washed, He washed my sins away-
Oh happy day.
-“Oh Happy Day”
As sung by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, 196921969{ }^{2}
- 1{ }^{1} From the album Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: Fisk Jubilee Singers in Chronological Order, vol. 1 (1909-1911). The couplet in the original collection of Fisk Jubilee songs is: “The brightest day that ever I saw / When Jesus washed my sins away” (Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, collected by Theo. F. Steward [New York & Chicago: Biglow & Main, 1872], No. 2, p. 160). The Fisk Jubilee Quartet in 1909 inserted the more singable rhyming phrase that shows up in other spirituals (e.g. Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro as Sung at Hampton Institute, ed. R. Nathaniel Dett [Hampton, Va.: Hampton Institute Press, 1927], pp. 49, 195, 207, 232). It is to be regretted that subsequent publications did not follow their lead but either print the non-rhyming version or, more often, omit the couplet altogether. To their credit, the original couplet is reproduced in Lift Every Voice and Sing: An African American Hymnal (New York: Church Hymnal Corp., 1993) and the African American Heritage Hymnal (Chicago: GIA Publications, 2001).
2{ }^{2} From the album Let Us Go into the House of the Lord (1968). In the spring of 1969 the track of “O Happy Day” as a single became a runaway R&B and pop music hit, eventually winning a Grammy and selling upwards of seven million copies. It is regularly cited as marking a new epoch in the history of gospel music, e.g., Horace Clarence Boyer, How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel (Washington, D.C.: Elliott & Clark, 1995), 5. ↩︎
A. Moody-Sankey and the Fisk Jubilee Singers
I begin this essay with the year 1871 because of the coincidence of two events that are the backdrop for the appeal of popular sacred music over the course of the next century. Ira D. Sankey joined D. L. Moody early in 1871 as the evangelist’s song-leader in Chicago and the Fisk Jubilee Singers began their first national fundraising tour on October 6 of that same year, setting the stage for a revolution in congregational singing and public listening to gospel music through the marvels of the phonograph and later the radio.
The Moody-Sankey evangelistic team was famous for making the preacher and the song-leader equal in their mission of urban evangelism. Moody preached the gospel; Sankey sang the gospel and got the crowd to sing it along with him. Endowed with a powerful baritone voice, Sankey led the music facing the audience seated in a high chair that towered above a reed pump-organ positioned on the stage next to the pulpit. The arrangement was entirely innovative and highly effective in its day. Since the harmonium, as the instrument was called, was relatively inexpensive and not affected by temperature or humidity, it was ideal for their year-round campaigns.
Sankey tells the story of how he was recruited by Moody in his autobiography. 3{ }^{3} As a delegate to the International Convention of the YMCA meeting in Indianapolis in 1870, Sankey was asked to breathe life into a meeting that had dragged on far too long by singing something. At the first opportune moment he
- 3{ }^{3} Ira D. Sankey, My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns: And of Sacred Songs and Solos (New York: Harper, 1928; c.1906, 1907). Preface: Brooklyn, NY, January, 1906. Sankey died in 1908. ↩︎
stood up and launched solo into a familiar gospel hymn, which the assembly lustily joined in evident relief. Moody was in the audience and afterward insisted that Sankey leave his current business and join him in Chicago because, he told him, “I have been looking for you for the last eight years.” Sankey was politely noncommittal so the next day Moody arranged an impromptu street meeting in the late afternoon. He set up a large store-box and asked Sankey to mount it and sing something. Here’s how the scene played out:
“Am I a soldier of the cross?” soon gathered a considerable crowd. After the song, Mr. Moody climbed up on the box and began to talk. The workingmen were just going home from the mills and the factories, and in a short time a very large crowd had gathered. When he had spoken for some twenty-five minutes he announced that the meeting should be continued at the Opera House, and invited the people to accompany us there. He asked me to lead the way and with my friends singing some familiar hymn. This we did, singing as we marched down the street, “Shall we gather at the river.” 4{ }^{4}
Moody’s purpose in concocting the surprise event was to illustrate the decisive contribution Sankey’s singing could make to urban evangelism. After a long period of deliberation and a visit to Chicago, Sankey finally accepted the invitation and moved to Chicago early in 1871 where he served alongside Moody until his church burned to the ground in the Chicago fire October 8-9, which happens to have been the Sunday and Monday on which the Fisk Jubilee Singers gave their first concerts on tour in Cincinnati. The Monday concert was their first paid event. “Out of money and in debt as they were, they donated the entire proceeds, which amounted to something less than 5050\50 50, to the Chicago relief fund.” 5{ }^{5} Who could have predicted that the two groups, after this “baptism by fire,” would both shortly begin
- 4{ }^{4} Sankey, 23.
5{ }^{5} J. B. T. Marsh. The Jubilee Singers and Their Songs: Supplement by F. J. Loudin (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003; reprint of 1892 edition), 17. ↩︎
their first tours of Great Britain and collaborate in singing the gospel in Scotland, of all places, where hymn singing was frowned upon and Sankey’s beloved harmonium was dismissed as a “kist of whistles.”
The Jubilee Singers arrived in London in early May of 1873 and gave their first concert to an audience gathered by invitation of the Earl of Shaftesbury, president of the Freedmen’s Mission Aid Society, the English auxiliary of the American Missionary Association. A great deal of credit goes to the AMA, which was founded in 1846 to protest slavery and to educate the slaves when most of the other mission agencies had acquiesced in the institution. They persevered in that endeavor in the face of severe persecution and eventually succeeded in planting seventeen academies and normal schools in the South and seven institutions for collegiate and theological education, including Fisk University in Nashville and Hampton Institute in Virginia. 6{ }^{6} In the Reconstruction era, the well-trained Jubilee Singers of Fisk and Hampton succeeded in "the emancipation of Negro music from the chains of false and often low ideals set upon it by popular minstrelsy, and in the establishment of it as a wonderful thing, a gift, and art, a glorious contribution to this nation and the world."7
- 6{ }^{6} The other five institutions of higher education founded by the AMA were Berea College in Kentucky, Atlanta University in Georgia, Talladega College in Alabama, Tougaloo University in Mississippi, and Straight University in New Orleans. For a full account of the work of the AMA in the 19th century, see Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890 (Athens: U of Ga Press, 1986).
7{ }^{7} R. Nathaniel Dett, “The Emancipation of Negro Music,” The Southern Workman, 47 (1918), 176. Dett was a classically trained concert pianist and composer who served as Director of the Music Department at Hampton Institute, 1926-1936. He published Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro as Sung at Hampton Institute (1927) and in 1930 led the Hampton Singers (40 voices) on a six-week European tour. ↩︎
The initial program was a huge success, and the Duke and Duchess of Argyll arranged a visit to their lodge the next day, to which Queen Victoria had also been invited.
Soon after her Majesty’s arrival the Duke informed them that she would be pleased to see them in an adjoining room. At his request they sang first, “Steal away to Jesus;” then chanted the Lord’s Prayer, and sang "Go down, Moses."8
The Queen was duly impressed and communicated her satisfaction and gratitude through the Duke. Later she commissioned a floor-to-ceiling portrait of the original nine singers in commemoration of the tour as a gift of England to the University. Their interaction with Prime Minister Gladstone and his wife were equally productive for the University. But the capstone of the London tour was the concert in Spurgeon’s Tabernacle. The singers visited the morning service there on the Sunday of the week that the concert was to be given on Wednesday. As they waited to meet the great preacher in his receiving room, some present asked them to sing something. They responded with the hymn “O brothers, don’t stay away.”
Spurgeon was so moved by it that he called them into his room and requested that they sing it again in the evening service, at the beginning of which he announced:
After the morning service I heard the Jubilee Singers sing a piece, “O brothers, don’t stay away, for my Lord says there’s room enough in the heavens for you.” I found tears coming in my eyes; and looking at my deacons I found theirs very moist too. That song suggested my text and my sermon to-night. Now as a part of the sermon, I am going to ask them to sing it, for they preach in the singing; and may the Spirit of God send home this word to some to-night-some who may remember their singing if they forget my preaching. 9{ }^{9}
The Jubilees sang their invitational hymn and Spurgeon preached on the text
“It is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room.” In giving notice of the
- 8{ }^{8} Marsh, 50.
9{ }^{9} Marsh, 60. ↩︎
Wednesday concert, Spurgeon with typical humor used the catch-phrase of the evening as an exhortation: “O brothers, don’t stay away.” An estimated crowd of seven thousand showed up early hoping there was still room.
The Moody-Sankey team began their campaign in Newcastle on August 25. The Jubilee Singers met up with them there and joined in their evangelistic endeavor. As Marsh reports, “Their songs were found to be especially adapted to promote the revival.” After they had been prayed for in one of the noonday prayer meetings, a bit of drama unfolded that Moody often recalled.
A moment’s, pause, and there went up in sweet, low notes a chorus as of angels. None could tell where the Singers were-on the floor, in the gallery, or in the air. The crowd was close, and the Singers-wherever they were-were sitting. Everyone was thrilled, for this was the song they sang: There are angels hovering round / To carry the tidings home. 10{ }^{10}
The services at Newcastle were filled to overflowing, and it was there that Sankey organized the first campaign choir. People were heard singing new songs such as “The Sweet By and By” and “Christ Arose” in the shipyards and other public places. Sankey notes, "It was the beginning of a revolution in Great Britain in the matter of popular sacred songs."11
The Moody-Sankey team opened in Edinburgh Sunday evening, November 23. After the invocation, Sankey asked the packed venue to join in singing “Old One Hundred,” which the psalm-singers did with a will. Sankey followed with a solo rendition of “Jesus of Nazareth Passeth By.” The intense silence during his singing of the gospel song indicated to him that it had been effective. This was confirmed in his mind when after the sermon he sang “Hold the Fort” and invited the crowd to join
- 10{ }^{10} Marsh, 67.
11{ }^{11} Sankey, 59. ↩︎
him on the chorus, "which they did with such heartiness and power that I was further convinced."12
Still there was room for doubt. In a later service in Barklay Free Church (with a borrowed reed organ), Sankey reports: “As I took my seat at the instrument on that, to me, most memorable evening, I discovered, to my great surprise, that Dr. Horatius Bonar was seated close by my organ, right in front of the pulpit.” Bonar was Sankey’s ideal hymn writer, yet he belonged to a church that practiced exclusive psalmnody and took exception to a “kist o’ whistles” in church. “With fear and trembling,” Sankey reports, “I announced as a solo the song, ‘Free from the law, oh, happy condition.’” At the close of the service, he was rewarded as "Dr. Bonar turned toward me with a smile on his venerable face, and reaching out his hand he said: ‘Well, Mr. Sankey, you sang the gospel tonight.’"13
As was the case in Newcastle, the Jubilee Singers enthusiastically participated in the evangelistic endeavor, sometimes assisting in as many as six meetings in a day and joining Sankey on the platform to sing “Steal Away to Jesus” and other spirituals from their repertoire. Steve Turner quotes from one contemporary account in his definitive history of the hymn Amazing Grace: "Mr. Moody pronounced the benediction, and Mr. Sankey and the sweet Jubilee Singers burst out from supercharged hearts into joyful, triumphant praise, the likes of which have never been heard."14 At least not in a church in Scotland!
- 12{ }^{12} Sankey, 65.
13{ }^{13} Sankey, 68.
14{ }^{14} Steve Turner, Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 151-52. ↩︎
B. Torrey-Alexander and the Bendigo Pianist
Moody was succeeded as preacher on the sawdust trail by his protégé R. A. Torrey, whose song leader was Charles Alexander, a dynamo of a musician who knew how to get a crowd singing. He used the whole stage as his podium, sometimes spontaneously dividing the voices into male and female or antiphonal sections, sometimes provoking them to greater volume in getting them fired up for the sermon, sometimes relaxing them by telling jokes. He was the ringmaster of the circus tent crowd, and he used the position to great advantage for the gospel.
Alexander much preferred the piano to the reed organ because of its percussive and tonal qualities. Torrey and Alexander arrived in Australia in 1902 for a series of meetings sponsored by a wide variety of denominations. They began in metropolitan Melbourne, then moved on to rural Bendigo where they scoured the music halls for a pianist to join them in their evangelistic endeavor. They found just who they were looking for in a talented young pianist named Robert Harkness, who signed on to accompany the singing that was a major attraction to their services.
At the first meeting Harkness immediately regretted his decision. He had no sympathy with the mission and he hated the simplistic gospel songs he had to play. He began to contemplate how he could get out of his commitment. After Alexander called unwanted attention to him as the pianist, Harkness decided to get back at him a bit. As he explained in print a couple of years later,
Two thousand people were singing the Glory Song, 15{ }^{15} and after practicing the chorus a few times I decided to introduce a few chords and runs into the music which did not appear in the printed copy. I thought in this way Mr. Alexander would be rather disgusted with my efforts, and would perhaps give me a chance to get out of my
- 15{ }^{15} So called because the chorus begins, " 0 that will be glory for me." ↩︎
position. To my surprise, when he heard the additional chords, he turned round, and motioning with his hand, cried out: “That’s fine; keep it up.” I was determined, however, to test him further, and towards the end of that hymn I entered a more lavish series of improvisations. This only served to please him the more, for, as he explained to me afterwards, it was just what he wanted. 16{ }^{16}
Harkness later became a committed Christian, composed several gospel hymns—he is proudly remembered in Victoria as "the Bendigo hymnwriter"17—and produced a method for learning his piano style. It was first offered in 1939 as Home Correspondence Course in Gospel Song Piano Accompaniment (“Sixty lessons under the personal supervision of Robert Harkness”) for which correspondents were awarded a diploma upon completion. Two years later it was published as The Harkness Piano Method of Evangelistic Hymn Playing: A Home Study Course, reissued in a reprint edition by Lineas in 1962.
Harkness’s method was taken to the highest degree of perfection by Rudy
Atwood, the pianist for the choir and quartet of Charles E. Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour for over twenty years beginning with the initial “international” broadcast in 1937. The style is wonderfully illustrated by the quartet arrangements of “The Old Account was Settled Long Ago,” “The Lily of the Valley,” and “My Heavenly Father Watches Over Me.” Through the influence of Harkness the piano
- 16{ }^{16} Robert Harkness, With the Torrey Alexander Mission Round the World (London: Christian Age Office, 1904), 20-21. Cited in Cynthia Dawn Steeves, “The Origin of Gospel Piano: People, Events, and Circumstances that Contributed to the Development of the Style” (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Washington, 1987), 48.
17{ }^{17} Keith Cole, Robert Harkness: The Bendigo Hymnwriter (Bendigo, Victoria: Keith Cole Publications, 1988). The best-remembered composition by Harkness is “He Will Hold Me Fast,” No. 1 in Alexander’s Hymns No. 3 (1915). It is also included in Gospel Pearls (1921) along with “The Ninety and Nine” and “I Am Praying for You” by Ira D. Sankey. ↩︎
became the instrument of choice to accompany congregational singing in evangelical churches as well as tent meetings on the sawdust trail. 18{ }^{18}
C. African American Churches and the Chicago School of Gospel
The revolution in popular sacred music was taken to a new level by black composers and promoters in the early twentieth century. 19{ }^{19} This was especially true of the Baptist and Pentecostal (Holiness) churches in Chicago, though the movement actually began in a multiracial congregation of the Methodist Episcopal Church in South Philadelphia pastored by the Rev. Dr. Charles A. Tindley. The church, located on East Bainbridge when Tindley was installed as pastor in 1902, moved to a prime location on South Broad (purchased from Westminster Presbyterian) in 1904 and changed its name to East Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church. The online Hymnary has this biographical note:
Tindley was known for being a captivating preacher, and for also taking an active role in the betterment of the people in his community. His songs were an outgrowth of his preaching ministry, often introduced during his sermons. Tindley was able to draw people of multiple races to his church ministry; likewise, his songs have been adopted and proliferated by white and black churches alike. 20{ }^{20}
This is highly reminiscent of the model established by the Moody-Sankey and Alexander-Harkness evangelistic teams. To supplement the standard Methodist
- 18{ }^{18} Dr. Robert G. Rayburn, founding president of Covenant College and Seminary, began his calling in ministry as a revival pianist, a talent that remained with him throughout his career as a pastor, military chaplain, and theological educator.
19{ }^{19} See Robert Darden, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music (New York: Continuum, 2006), and Bernice Johnson Reagon, ed., We’ll Understand It Better By and By (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). Reagon was Director of the Smithsonian Institution Research Project that studied the pioneering composers of the movement.
20{ }^{20} Hymnary.org accessed August 30, 2016. The allusion is to such popular hymns as “Leave it There,” Nothing Between [My Soul and the Savior]," “Stand by Me,” and “We’ll Understand It Better By and By.” ↩︎
Episcopal hymnal, Tindley arranged for the AME Zion church to publish Soul Echoes: A Collection of Songs for Religious Meetings (Philadelphia: Soul Echoes Publishing Co., 1905, 1909) featuring his compositions along with some of the more popular hymns of the day. The Chicago-based National Baptist Convention followed its lead in 1921 with the publication of Gospel Pearls: Edited and Compiled for Special Use in the Sunday School, Church, Evangelistic Meetings, Conventions, and All Religious Services by the Music Committee of the Sunday School Publishing Board. The committee roster is quite illuminating. 21{ }^{21}
Heading the list is Willa A. Townsend, Director, a highly trained classical musician and music educator in Nashville, Tennessee. When her husband, A. M. Townsend, was appointed president of Roger Williams University, she undertook the directorship of the university chorale. As a hymnologist and songwriter in her own right, Townsend was the ideal choice to chair the NBC publications committee. Gospel Pearls included her arrangements of “Wade in the Water” and the old gospel shout, “[My Soul is a] Witness for my Lord.” They were republished six years later in Spirituals Triumphant: Old and New, which also published her arrangement of “Nobody Knows [the Trouble I’ve Seen].” It includes as a third stanza the call-andresponse couplet
The brightest day I ever saw, Oh, yes, Lord!
When Jesus washed my sins away, Oh, yes, Lord! 22{ }^{22}
- 21{ }^{21} Mrs. Willa A. Townsend, Director; Dr. J. D. Bushell, Prof. R. A. Austin, Prof. J. H. Smiley, Prof. J. W. Work, Prof. F. J. Work, Prof. W. M. Nix, Prof. E.W.D. Isaac, Jr., Mrs. Carrie Gooker Person, Miss Lucie E. Campbell, Mrs. Geneva Bender Williams.
22{ }^{22} Spirituals Triumphant: Old and New, ed. Edward Boatner and Willa A. Townsend (Nashville: Sunday School Publishing Board, National Baptist Convention, 1927), No. 44. ↩︎
Also listed is Lucie E. Campbell, a Memphis public school teacher who served as music director of the Sunday School and BYPU Congress of the NBC from 1916 until her death in 1963-just short of half a century. She was a major promoter of gospel songs at the annual meeting of the NBC in Chicago, typically introducing one of her own compositions. Gospel Pearls includes “The Lord is My Shepherd,” her musical setting of the 23rd 23^{\text {rd }} Psalm. Though Campbell preferred classical forms for her compositions, she endorsed the blues and jazz innovations of Dorsey and even composed a classic in the genre, “Jesus Gave Me Water” (1946) that became a hit record by Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers. 23{ }^{23}
The committee responsible for Gospel Pearls presents its selections under three headings: Worship and devotion ( 75 hymns), Revival (68 hymns), and Spirituals (20 hymns). Apart from the Spirituals and about a dozen hymns by contemporary black composers, 24{ }^{24} Gospel Pearls shares a common canon with the other popular evangelical songbooks of the day. It includes, for example, E. O.
Excell’s arrangement of “Amazing Grace” first published in Make His Name Glorious (1900) and adopted in all 20th 20^{\text {th }} century hymnals. 25{ }^{25}
- 23{ }^{23} Campbell’s other best-known compositions are “Something Within” (1919) and “He Understands; He’ll Say, ‘Well Done’” (1933).
24{ }^{24} Charles A. Tindley, “Leave it there,” “Nothing between,” “Sweet bye and bye,” “What are they doing in heaven,” “A better home,” and “Stand by me”; Lucie E. Campbell, “The Lord is my shepherd”; Thomas a Dorsey, “If I don’t get there”; Charles Price Jones, “I’m happy in Jesus alone”; Carrie Booker Person, “Ring it out with a shout” and “Someone is hitting the home trail tonight.”
25{ }^{25} Edwin Othello Excell was a prolific writer of gospel songs—he had been song leader and choir director for evangelist Sam Jones-one of which, “I Do, Don’t You,” was included in Gospel Pearls and was instrumental in Thomas A. Dorsey’s conversion back to gospel music as his vocation. ↩︎
Most of the hymns in the Spirituals section of Gospel Pearls were arranged by the Work Brothers, John Wesley Work Jr. and Jerome Frederick Work. Both were Fisk University graduates with continuing involvement in its choral tradition. John Wesley. Jr. returned to the University to become professor of Latin and History and eventually founded the Fisk Jubilee Quartet, a step that took the choral tradition in a new direction. The Work brothers were avid preservers of African American sacred folk music and published two collections of their arrangements: New Jubilee Songs as Sung by Fisk Jubilee Singers (1901) and Folk Songs of the American Negro (1907). In addition, John Work II (as he is sometimes referenced to distinguish him from his son, John Wesley Work III) published a treatise on The Folk Song of the American Negro (1915), “one of the earliest studies of African-American music undertaken by a descendant of an ex-slave” (Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology). After running into some opposition at Fisk over his positive views of slave music, Work accepted the presidency of Rogers Williams University, which position he held until his death in 1925. He was replaced by A. M. Townsend, the husband of Willa A. Townsend whose arrangements of “Wade in the Water” and “[My Soul is a] Witness for My Lord” are included in the Spirituals section of Gospel Pearls. The inclusion of African American sacred folk songs from the slave era alongside hymns handed down in the Protestant evangelical tradition signaled that they too were “gospel pearls” that belonged in the church’s canon of songs of authentic religious experience, particularly experience borne of the trouble that nobody knows but Jesus. 26{ }^{26}
- 26{ }^{26} The Spirituals section, comprised almost exclusively of African American folk hymns, is headed by Tindley’s “Stand by Me.” ↩︎
Easily the most recognizable name in the Chicago School of Gospel is Thomas
A. Dorsey, often referred to as the Father of Gospel Music, a title he earned for the bluesy elements of his compositions and his dedicated promotion of black church choirs in the soloist-chorus form descended from the Jubilee tradition. 27{ }^{27} Dorsey had migrated to Chicago from his home in Atlanta—his father was a Baptist preacher accompanied by his mother on organ and piano-to pursue a career as a professional blues and jazz pianist. At the suggestion of a concerned uncle, he attended the 1921 National Baptist Convention where he was so impressed by the response to evangelist W. M. Nix’s forceful rendition of “I Do, Don’t You” that at age 22 he determined to pursue a career in gospel music instead. 28{ }^{28}
That didn’t happen, however, until after Dorsey had achieved notable success over the next decade as a blues pianist. The decisive turning point came in 1930 when a woman sang Dorsey’s “If You See My Savior” (“Standing at the Bedside of a Neighbor”) at the National Baptist Convention. Lucie Campbell provided him with a booth on site where he sold over four thousand copies of the sheet music. The next year Dorsey accepted a call to organize a “junior” chorus at Ebenezer Baptist Church in addition to their established choir. This turned out to be Dorsey’s strong suit in partnership with Theodore Frye. In January of 1932 a chorus of over 100 members recruited and trained by Dorsey debuted at Ebenezer directed by Frye with Dorsey accompanying on piano. Dorsey then accepted the position of music director at
- 27{ }^{27} The definitive Dorsey biography is Michael W. Harris The Rise of the Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: OUP, 1992). Sources include the Dorsey Papers and extensive interviews with Dorsey in Chicago (1976-1977) and his family, friends, and associates. See also Harris’ essay, “Conflict and Resolution in the Life of Thomas Andrew Dorsey” in Reagon, We’ll Understand It Better By and By, 165-82.
28{ }^{28} First line: “I know a great Savior, I do, don’t you?” Set to music by E. O. Excell. ↩︎
Pilgrim Baptist Church, a position he held until his retirement in 1983. Frye remained at Ebenezer and the pair continued their collaboration in promoting the new choral group music.
In August of 1932 the team set out to organize a chorus in Greenville, S.C. Frye had to return to Chicago en route to fulfill a prior engagement. When Dorsey arrived in Greenville, a telegram was waiting for him with the news that his wife had gone into labor. He rushed back to be with her, but she died giving birth to a son before he could get there. To make matters worse, the child also died. The tragic double loss left Dorsey emotionally devastated and incapacitated to such an extent that he believed his musical career was over and that he would never play the piano again. His supportive friends, especially Frye, eventually persuaded him to sit down at the piano in the hope that it would bring him out of his catatonic state. As he ran his hands over the keys he began to experiment with an old hymn tune by an unknown composer that had become the setting for G. N. Allen’s hymn, “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone.” 29{ }^{29} As he improvised on the tune, words began to come to him to match the music. “Take my hand,” he began. That evocative phrase echoes a powerful biblical image in Isaiah where the Lord says, “I will take you by the hand and keep you” (Isa 42:6). Dorsey originally had “blessed Lord” but gratefully changed it to “precious Lord” at Frye’s suggestion. Dorsey went on to write over a thousand gospel songs, but none more beloved than this one whose message of help in despair has resonated with so many. When Frye and Dorsey introduced the hymn
- 29{ }^{29} The anonymous hymn tune called Western Melody was first published in the Plymouth Collection of Hymns and Tunes for the Use of Christian Congregations compiled by Henry Ward Beecher (New York, 1855). ↩︎
the next day at Ebenezer Baptist, the response was sensational. Dorsey had created a hit that fulfilled his vocational dream beyond all expectations. 30{ }^{30}
1932 was also the year that Dorsey and blues singer Sallie Martin formed the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses. The Chicago School of Gospel included composers, arrangers, and publishers as well as performers. Sallie Martin toured with Dorsey and assisted him with his publishing business until they had a falling out and she teamed up with Kenneth Morris to found one of the most successful and comprehensive ventures of the school.
Kenneth Morris was born in the New York City borough of Queens. He studied classical piano from grade school through high school, though he preferred playing jazz with his Jamaica neighborhood peers. After high school he attended both CUNY and the Manhattan Conservatory of Music. While a student at the latter, Morris organized an impressive jazz ensemble that landed a gig at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1934. Remaining in Chicago after the gig for health reasons, Morris sat in with local jazz musicians and came to the attention of Lillian Bowles, owner of Bowles Music House. Hired by Bowles as a scribe to put music in written form for composers without technical training, he actually arranged the music for them, including the first song recorded by Mahalia Jackson, “God’s Goin’ to Separate the Wheat from the Tares” (1937).
Morris worked for Bowles from 1937 to 1940 and then he teamed up with Sallie Martin to form the Martin and Morris Music Studio: Arrangers, Publishers,
- 30{ }^{30} It is well known that it was the favorite hymn of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was sung at a church rally in Memphis the night before his assassination and later at his funeral by Mahalia Jackson as he had requested in advance for her to do. ↩︎
Distributors-Everything in Religious Music. In his 1987 autobiographical retrospective, “I’ll Be a Servant of the Lord,” Morris told how he came to arrange and publish the gospel classic “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”
It was an arrangement that I made on an old spiritual. … I went to Kansas City to a conference of some kind, and one of the choirs there sang it. I asked them where they heard it, and they asked their choir director … where they had gotten it from. He didn’t know; he had heard it all of his life. I had never heard it before. I am the one who made the arrangement; the first one that was put in print was mine. I took it to the National Baptist Convention in 1944 and presented it with my group, the Martin and Morris Singers, and it simply clicked. After we left there, everybody was using it.
As musicologist Robert Marovich notes, "‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’ went on to became a jazz band favorite as well as a staple for black and white church congregations, singers, groups, and quartets."31 The first known recording of Morris’ arrangement is a slow version by the Selah Jubilee Singers (more about them later) in October of 1941. It was followed in December by an uptempo rendition by jazz guitarist and gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. A half century later, the black female ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock recreated the original Martin & Morris quartet sound (with Sallie Martin on bass!) for the Smithsonian/Folkways & National Public Radio album Wade in the Water.
Recruited as choir director by the Rev. Clarence H. Cobb, founder and pastor of the First Church of Deliverance in Chicago, Morris inaugurated a new era in gospel music by having Cobb purchase a Hammond organ for the church in 1939, starting a revolution in the black church as piano and electronic organ quickly became the standard instruments of public worship. A prime example of the sound
- 31{ }^{31} Robert M. Marovich, A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 177. “Dig a Little Deeper” was also famously recorded by the Fairfield Four in 1947. ↩︎
is one of Morris’ later hits, “Dig a Little Deeper in God’s Love,” recorded in 1947 by Mahalia Jackson and the Jordanaires with piano and Hammond organ.
D. Thermon Ruth’s Caravan of Gospel Quartets
The revolution in African American gospel music was not confined to the Chicago School. Likely the greatest 20th 20^{\text {th }} century promoter of black gospel quartets (one-on-a-part harmonizing groups, sometimes with two lead singers, one singing falsetto) was Thermon Ruth whose base was New York and Philadelphia. 32{ }^{32} Not only did he organize the Selah Jubilee Singers at age 13, he worked closely with the Dixie Hummingbirds, another quartet organized by a juvenile church choir member in Greenville, S.C. The Hummingbirds were a regular feature of Thermon’s “Gospel Caravan” at the Apollo Theater, often billed with the Sensational Nightengales or the Soul Stirrers on the famous Harlem marquee. 33{ }^{33} American poet laureate Billy Collins captures the essence of the genre in his “Sunday Morning with the Sensational Nightengales.”
I have always loved this harmony, like four, sometimes five trains running side by side over a contoured landscapemake that a shimmering, red-dirt landscape … Sunday morning in a perfect Georgia. 34{ }^{34}
- 32{ }^{32} Thermon T. Ruth, with Linda Saylor-Marchant, From the Church to the Apollo Theater (Brooklyn, N.Y.: T. Ruth Publications, [1995]). Part third-person autobiography by Ruth, part interview by Saylor-Marchant.
33{ }^{33} Jerry Zolten, Great God A’Mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds: Celebrating the Rise of Soul Gospel Music (New York: OUP, 2003).
34{ }^{34} From The Art of Drowning (U of Pittsburg P, 1995). The Sensational Nightengales were organized as a gospel quartet in 1942. Over the years they have remained remarkably true to their evangelical mission, so much so as to be included in Tony Heilbut’s dedication of The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1971) to “All the gospel singers who didn’t sell out.” ↩︎
Thurmon T. Ruth (1914-2002) was born in Pomaria, S.C., a really small town in the county of Newberry. It was his boyhood home for the first eight years of his life. Following the death of both of his parents in 1922, Thermon moved to Brooklyn to live with his older sister, Beulah, who made sure he had a church connection for his spiritual development. Five years later the musically talented Thurmon organized a gospel quartet drawn from the choir of St. Mark’s Church (Holiness). For the next ten years, the quartet sang every Sunday night at St. Mark’s. The services were broadcast live, and soon the quartet was singing regularly on four area radio stations, including WOR ( 710 am ) in New York City where Thurmon held sway as a disc jockey. In 1937, Thermon took his quartet to Houston where they met, and were deeply affected by, the Soul Stirrers, whose name signaled that they were about something more than entertainment.
By 1939 Thermon’s quartet was called the Selah Jubilee Singers and had landed a recording contract with Decca Records. Among their early releases was “I’ll Fly Away” in 1941, apparently the earliest recording of that gospel classic popularized by the Chuck Wagon Gang with their unprecedented hit gospel record in 1949. The Selahs included a piano for this recording, which was fast becoming the norm for Southern white gospel quartets. The Selahs made this piece their own by speeding up the tempo, introducing creative chord progressions, using two lead singers, and incorporating ad libs to fill out the expression.
During the war, the Selahs were very popular on the USO circuit and at veterans’ hospitals. Thermon contracted with the USO for performances in every state but Nevada, which they fulfilled through an 18-month national tour in 1945-
- They then settled in Raleigh, N.C. where they broadcast a morning program five days a week on WPTF ( 680 am ) with performance dates at night. Ruth left the group for another in New York, best remembered as the Larks. In mid-December of 1955 they were featured on Thermon’s breakthrough “Gospel Caravan” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, which they took as an opportunity to sing the gospel to a wider audience. The Selahs existed as a group until 1955 when Ruth joined them for a recording session for Savoy. They were reunited for the final time in 1968 when they recorded for Veep-Gospel Records as the Jubilators.
Another five-member group promoted by Ruth in his Caravan was the Dixie Hummingbirds, organized as a gospel quartet in 1928 by twelve-year-old James Davis for the Bethel Church of God Holiness in Greenville, S.C. When they were a few years older, the “Junior Boys” became the “Sterling High School Quartet” and were much in demand as representative of the black high school founded by the Rev. Daniel Minus, a former slave, and named for anti-slavery activist Emeline Sterling. After graduation they began to travel in the South as the Dixie Hummingbirds (Davis joked that they were named for “the only bird that could fly both backwards and forwards”-just like their career) and to broadcast Sunday mornings on WFBC in Greenville. As the acclaimed author of their history remarks, "When they took to the radio, the Dixie Hummingbirds were connecting to a diverse audience and winning fans across racial lines."35
- 35{ }^{35} Jerry Zolten, Great God A’Mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds: Celebrating the Rise of Soul Gospel Music (New York: OUP, 2003), 39. ↩︎
In 1938 the Birds traveled to New York City for a recording session with
Decca, after which Davis recruited Ira Tucker of Spartanburg, S.C. as a second lead singer. The group migrated to Philadelphia in the 1940s to be nearer to the recording industry in New York City. They had remarkable success with Apollo Records but after a few years broke with them in order to preserve their independence as a Gospel musical group whose goal was to minister to the soul through popular sacred entertainment. Sometimes the line was finely drawn as when in 1973 they provided backup for Paul Simon’s “Loves Me Like a Rock.” The next year the Birds released their own rendition that received a Grammy for “Best Soul Gospel Performance.” More typical of their vocation would be “Rasslin’ Jacob,” a highly effective retelling of Genesis 32:24-26 in the Jubilee tradition, and two Gospel songs by Thomas A. Dorsey, “If You See My Savior” and “Hide Me in Thy Bosom.”
Perhaps the best measure of the fulfillment of their purpose is the
testimonial of the Rev. Gadson Graham, who was pastor of a church in Lake City, S.C. in the 1950s and remembers well the effects of the Birds ministry of gospel music in the black community.
They would come to our town, the Dixie Hummingbirds, they would come, and they would sing … And this would give us inspiration. Whenever they came around, it was a tremendous uplift that helped us cope and deal with all the negative things that was going on at that time. Racism, social injustice, economic injustice. The Birds would sing and it would just seem that heaven came open and God had come down. We just felt like we could deal more with what we had to deal with, after hearing them. … Their singing was like a salve on a wound. Whatever hurt you had experienced, when you put that hurt up against the singing of the Dixie Hummingbirds, it was like a soothing situation that made it possible for you to deal with whatever you had to deal with. They would sing that, and that’s how they would send us home rejoicing in what we were (cited in Zolten, 259).
Say amen, somebody.
St. Louis, Mo.
Posted 9/15/16
Corrected & lightly edited 9/23/16
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