$18.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5530-8

Published: Spring 2004

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Copyright (c) 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction

At the dawn of the twentieth century when W. E. B. Du Bois sat down to consider the future of African Americans in the United States, the music of his enslaved ancestors was ringing in his ears. Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk has become a legendary text for understanding the ensuing century. Much of this stature stems from Du Bois's success at foreshadowing many of the challenges that the new century would pose. For Du Bois the greatest of these was race. "The problem of the twentieth century," he predicted, "is the problem of the color line." Du Bois invoked spirituals at the beginning of each chapter by creating epigraphs using musical notation taken from the songs. He then devoted the last chapter to a discussion of the songs, which African Americans had forged as slaves. A native of New England born in 1868, Du Bois himself never experienced slavery. Nevertheless, the songs provided a language that captured the emotional dimensions not only of slavery, but also of the racism that would plague the post-Emancipation world. Du Bois, who regarded the songs as the "rhythmic cry of the slave," described the wellspring of emotion the songs stirred in him. "They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one," he wrote, "and yet at once I knew them as of me and mine."[1]

Spirituals so moved Du Bois because he saw them not only as heartfelt expressions of human emotion, but also as a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit under hostile circumstances. Slavery, a dehumanizing institution, reduced individuals to chattel, subjected them to harsh working conditions, and separated families at will. Enslaved African Americans used spirituals to transcend the physical world, forging a spiritual universe distinct from the material world. In the process they used music to lend meaning to their circumstances. As slaves, African Americans were regarded as abject inferiors. Yet in the songs they cast themselves as God's chosen people.[2]

In the twentieth century, music would continue to serve as an arena where African Americans forged their hopes and dreams, even as they contended with the racial oppression that remained an integral part of American society. A vital part of the fabric of daily life, music helped solidify community in rural districts as well as the urban enclaves to which so many African Americans migrated in the decades following Emancipation. Music percolated virtually everywhere African Americans congregated: in community institutions such as barbershops, schools, and churches; at private parties and barbecues; in spaces of commercial amusement; and on city streets.[3]

Over the course of the twentieth century, as African Americans worked to build new communities and as they moved about the country seeking economic and educational opportunities, they produced a rich variety of musical styles that reflected the range of experiences they encountered. In jazz compositions, blues songs, classically arranged spirituals, gospel anthems, and many other forms of musical expression, musicians gave voice to community aspirations and invoked the extremes of feeling and experience that were part of modern black life. Blues singers articulated the despair of daily life, but the community context in which they plied their craft helped create the possibilities for conquering that pain. Gospel singers laced their songs with upbeat rhythms, but the wails and cries used to punctuate the melodies made the pain of daily living an integral component of the good news supplied by religious faith.

Even as music comprised an important part of black community culture, it was also drawn into an expanding commercial economy by individual entrepreneurs and corporate entities eager to mass-produce forms of local musical culture and distribute them across the nation. As a growing entertainment industry came to wield increasing influence in American life, the popular appeal of African American music elevated a small corps of black singers and musicians to national stardom, making them some of the most recognized figures in black America. Studies of twentieth-century black experiences frequently point out that African Americans remained on the margins of industrial development until the advent of World War II. But the gospel music industry opens a window into a corner of the industrial economy where African Americans played a significant role, as well as into the ways that the expansion of material values and the development of technologies of mass production and communication influenced African American life. Considering gospel musicians, the communities of which they were a part, and the audiences who embraced them makes it possible to examine some of the ways in which African Americans contended with a society marked not simply by racial discrimination, but by the growing influence commerce wielded over daily affairs.[4]

Most studies of twentieth-century black music have focused on secular music, particularly blues and jazz. Asserting that secular values comprise a cornerstone of modern life, scholars often argue that the worldly outlook of these styles together with the cultural authority they exerted rendered blues and jazz quintessential symbols of the modern age—an era marked by expanding industrialization, the growing power wielded by large, impersonal corporate entities, and the spread of consumer and material values. As scholars rightly point out, these styles became arenas where men and women celebrated pleasure, fame, fortune, and the material aspects of living. This emphasis on pleasure and materialism would in fact come to comprise an important component of the expanding consumer values that became a cornerstone of twentieth-century commerce. As the twentieth century advanced, the pressures of material concerns would make increasing inroads into every corner of black American life.[5]

An exclusive focus on secular values, however, overlooks the enormous significance religion continued to hold for African Americans. Over the course of the twentieth century, black men and women forged a rich array of religious institutions that became an integral part of daily affairs, a powerful source of individual and community identity, and an important component of social and political struggles. The forms of sacred music that took shape within these religious arenas provide an especially rich lens for witnessing the ways African Americans made sense of modern life.

Solo gospel, a style of sacred singing marked by an upbeat tempo and by intense rhythms generated through percussive instrumental accompaniment, holds particular resonance for this endeavor. In the first half of the twentieth century this music emerged from a group of small churches on the margins of black religious life to became the most popular form of sacred music in the country as well as a huge commercial success. With these developments came new burdens and new possibilities. As a black religious music that enjoyed great commercial acclaim, gospel came to inhabit multiple worlds, serving as a meeting point for sacred and secular concerns and for local black communities and mainstream popular culture. As a result gospel became a critical arena in which African Americans contended with questions about the nature of faith, as well as the shape and meaning of racial identity.

Solo gospel also illuminates some of the many roles African American women took on in black religious life. While men dominated most forms of African American music, including the evolving tradition of the gospel quartet, women become important innovators in solo gospel. The female-dominated arena of the church made it a supportive training ground where women could secure critical music skills. Barred from the pulpit, women used musical forms that became the rudiments of gospel to testify to their religious convictions, sustain fellowship, and pursue missionary work. In the process they helped shape the contours of gospel's solo tradition. Their influence was not confined to the church. The proscriptions against female preaching that initially inspired women to pursue gospel also gave them an incentive to push the music beyond church doors, as they ventured first onto city streets and then into the commercial arena. Historians studying black churchwomen have tended to focus on the social reform efforts pursued by the middle class. The musical evangelism of sanctified women offers an important counterpoint to these portraits.[6]

Not until the 1920s did African Americans actually begin to apply the term "gospel" to a body of sacred music. Yet the impetus for the solo gospel tradition came in the 1890s with the emergence of a small religious movement that would eventually coalesce into a set of independent black congregations and denominations known as the sanctified church. In contrast to many mainline churches where leaders privileged restraint over emotional expression, sanctified churches regarded exuberant worship as an expression of the Holy Spirit's presence in believers' souls and bodies—a moment of religious communion that formed the central doctrine of sanctified belief. The belief that music flowed out of a holy encounter, and the emphasis placed on personal testimonies to the power of the Spirit within individuals, fostered a mode of worship that nurtured solo expression and instrumental accompaniment that ranged from washtubs to trumpets to guitars. Chapter 1 traces the development of the religious convictions that helped shape this musical expression, and sets it in counterpoint to the emphasis on education and restraint encouraged in many mainline churches—an emphasis that took musical form in the classical arrangements of slave spirituals that became staples at mainline services and in black colleges.

In the 1910s and 1920s the sanctified movement flourished across the country as African Americans migrated to urban centers. Women, who made up the bulk of church members, assumed particularly prominent roles in building churches, spreading the faith, and further shaping their distinctive musical style. As female missionaries embarked on city streets to reach the unregenerate, they took their music with them, transforming it from a mode of worship into an evangelical tool that they shaped to catch and hold the attention of passersby. When mass communication technology became available in the form of sound recordings, some of these women entered the recording studio, seeking to turn the new technology to their evangelical ends. In the process they took a first step in moving gospel beyond the realm of the church and into the commercial arena. Chapter 2 follows these women on their journeys, examining the religious zeal that nurtured a range of female talents and considering the musical and evangelical paths with which they pursued their missionary ends.

The 1930s saw the exuberant religious movement expand from the margins of black religious communities toward the center of black religious life. This shift began with the efforts of Thomas Andrew Dorsey, a blues musician who turned his skills to writing upbeat, blues-influenced religious songs, which he called gospel music. Facing the opposition of mainline ministers who remained committed to ideals of restrained worship, Dorsey and his associates, most notably former sanctified singer Sallie Martin, launched a range of efforts to build support for the music through other channels. As well as organizing a series of independent gospel choirs and distributing Dorsey's songs through the sale of sheet music, gospel's advocates cast upbeat rhythms as a key component of black heritage. With these efforts, they helped build a popular groundswell of enthusiasm for gospel that eventually won the music a place within mainline churches as well as in popular African American culture. In Chapter 3 I examine these efforts, looking at the songs Dorsey wrote, the faith he developed in black capitalism as a means for distributing his music, and the degree to which gospel's growing popular diffusion created an arena for religious conviction that lay outside the church.

By the 1940s, even as gospel gained new acclaim in African American circles, it also secured a foothold in mainstream popular culture, thanks to the popularity of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who had emerged onto the national scene in the 1930s. Tharpe, a remarkable artist who had been nurtured in the tradition of sanctified evangelicalism, caught the eye of musical promoters eager to capitalize on the interest in black music generated by the popularity of swing. Tharpe's decision to perform gospel music in nightclubs and theaters outraged many believers, but the power of her artistry secured a large following among both blacks and whites. Chapter 4 looks at the many challenges Tharpe faced as a religious singer in a commercial, profit-centered world and the changes her experiences worked on her music and her faith.

Gospel entered what many consider its "golden era" in the years after World War II, when it became immensely popular among African Americans and the leading form of sacred music in mass commercial culture. An array of gospel groups and singers became national stars, acquiring the conventional trappings of fame and fortune. Such successes, however, caused consternation among many African Americans, who worried that the profit-centered entertainment industry robbed gospel of its sacred significance, desecrating not only a form of sacred expression but also a music that had gained wide acceptance as a cornerstone of black cultural heritage. Chapter 5 begins by considering the process by which musicians and promoters helped build gospel into a national commercial phenomenon. It then looks at commercial gospel's critics, laying out both their critique and the strategies they fashioned to keep gospel within the protective embrace of the church. In the process it illuminates a range of African American perceptions on commercialism, racial identity, and the nature of religious faith.

As Du Bois clearly recognized, the twentieth century would bring its own set of unique challenges. With the rise of legal segregation, the color line he insisted would define the century became a wall separating blacks from mainstream American political and economic life. Race, however, would play out differently in the realm of commerce, culture, and religion. In the case of gospel, the boundaries of the color line would blur as men and women wrestled with not only a variety of racial issues, but also the meaning of religion, the seductions and elusiveness of fame and fortune, and the degree of control individuals and local communities could exert over cultural traditions. The communities and institutions that took shape around gospel, along with the joys and sorrows the music so vividly expressed, would be influenced by race but never wholly defined by it.