In the first half of the twentieth century there were a number of geographical and musical changes afoot in African America. For instance, the first “Great Migration” of African Americans from the South to the North and Midwest took place between 1910 and 1930, and culminated with the Black Women’s Club Movement, New Negro Movement, Harlem Renaissance, and Chicago Renaissance, respectively, and new city-centered blues and jazz.[8] A second “Great Migration” took place between 1940 and 1970, with African Americans not only moving from the South to the North and Midwest, but also to the West, and specifically California.[9] The soundtracks of the second “Great Migration” of African Americans include developments in the blues and jazz genres (e.g., the creation of jump blues and bebop), as well as wholly new forms of black popular music such as rhythm & blues, rock & roll, soul, and funk. Since its emergence at the turn of the twentieth century, much like jazz, gospel has openly incorporated elements of other black popular musics into its aesthetic. As Mellonee Burnim (2015) noted: “The use of musical instruments, most of which previously had been associated with secular musics and denied entry into the worship of the mainline Baptist and Methodist congregations, was a compelling marker of this new form of religious music expression” (192).
However, in spite of all of the innovations and experimentations of the gospel tradition, as Floyd emphasized above, the “characteristic vocal sound of the gospel voice remained the same.” Often described as “pushing the vocal register to the extreme,” “hoarse,” “raspy,” “gruff,” “gravelly,” or “throaty,” during the Golden Age of Gospel the soundscape changed much like the landscape changed for many African Americans, but the “characteristic vocal sound of the gospel voice” went unchanged. The irony is apparent. The more polished and pedestrian (i.e., “pop-sounding”) the gospel productions became, the more gospel artists sought to contrast the sound of their voices with the softness, if not ultimately the blandness, of the musical accompaniment.
Gospel is about more than merely lyrics and musical accompaniment. Although, truth be told, lyrics and musical accompaniment are both an integral part of the overarching gospel aesthetic. At its core, to put it plainly, gospel is also about delivery, embellishment, non-verbal communication, the creation of a signature vocal sound (distinct vocalizations), and, above all else, soul. What does it say about gospel, if not the African American experience more generally speaking, that in the period between the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the Civil Rights Act—a period roughly covering a century (circa 1863 through 1964)—the black sacred song tradition carried over and continued most of, if not all, of the major themes of the “Sorrow Songs” of enslavement? How truly “free” were African Americans in the century immediately following the Emancipation Proclamation (not to mention Juneteenth) if, indeed, countless song after song continued to express black pain and pathos, black suffering and social misery during the post-enslavement period? What does gospel, and golden age gospel in particular, tell us about African Americans’ ongoing struggle for freedom and human dignity, even after the Emancipation Proclamation? Is it a coincidence that even after “emancipation,” even in “freedom,” the black sacred song tradition continues to sound, as I mentioned above, “hoarse,” “raspy,” “gruff,” “gravelly,” or “throaty”? Is it possible that golden age gospel artists were non-verbally saying with their artistry what they could not verbally say in any other way for fear of the anti-black racist reprisals that ultimately ignited the Civil Rights Movement? And, lastly and corollarily, is it also possible that golden age gospel artists’ non-verbal communication deeply inspired non-violent civil rights soldiers—as we witnessed with the freedom singer-songwriters above—and was one of the key sources that gave them the strength to continue the struggle?
As can be easily ascertained from gospel artist autobiographies and biographies, whether we turn to Mahalia Jackson’s Movin’ On Up (1966) or Michael Harris’s The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (1992), or Nick Salvatore’s Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America (2006) or Greg Kot’s I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the Music That Shaped the Civil Rights Era (2014), golden age gospel artists faced a great deal of anti-black racism traveling along the “gospel highway.” The same extra-musical, inconducive post-war social conditions that gave rise to new developments in blues and jazz, gave rise to new developments in gospel. In other words, it was not simply by historical happenstance that jump blues, bebop, and “a music that began to challenge the Negro spiritual as the favored sacred music in the African American community”—that is to say, gospel music—simultaneously emerged.
As the acclaimed gospel musicologist Horace Clarence Boyer asserted in his classic How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel (1995), “[t]his new gospel music spoke in more immediate tones, both musically and textually, to the difficult life of being both black and Christian in the United States” during, between, and immediately after World War I and II (47). The black colloquialisms the “blues life,” the “jazz life,” and the “gospel life” all denote the great difficulty African American musicians faced traveling and performing along the segregated highways and byways in the first half of the twentieth century. Living the “gospel life” in the golden age meant not simply singing of heavenly salvation, but incessantly experiencing firsthand why the ongoing struggle for earthly liberation was of paramount importance. Just like blues and jazz artists in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, gospel artists were quarantined to the “colored” section. American apartheid—whether we would like to call it “Jim Crow laws,” “Black Codes,” or simply “racial segregation”—impacted gospel artists in much the same manner as it did African Americans more generally from the turn of the twentieth century through to the 1960s. Hence, in his eye-opening discussion of the “gospel life” along the “gospel highway” during the golden age, Boyer revealed, “most singers preferred automobile travel.” He importantly continued:
Riding buses or trains meant having to travel in the “colored” section. On trains only one porter (or none at all) was assigned to two or three cars. Seats in these cars were seldom in good repair, and luggage sat on passenger seats for lack of storage room above. Few food services were offered, and bathrooms were seldom cleaned. Many of the bus stops had no provisions for African Americans, requiring them to stand outside a side window of a restaurant for food service. . . . Except on visits to cities such as New York or Chicago, most singers had to stay in the one hotel or rooming house that would accommodate African Americans. If no rooms were available, friends or even strangers met on the street could direct singers to homes that took “overnight” boarders. Rather than endure this travail, singers would use their church network or family and friends to arrange accommodation. In many towns where singers were performing for two or more days, dinner invitations from church members or concerts attendees were eagerly accepted. Sometimes the sponsor of multiple concerts would arrange to have the singers dine at a different home each night. (55)
From the foregoing we can deduce that in many respects, touring gospel artists were exposed to higher levels and even more heinous forms of anti-black racism when compared with those African Americans who, for whatever reason, rarely left their respective cities or regions. During the golden age, then, it can be said that gospel artists wrestled against “flesh and blood” and “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,” as well as “against spiritual wickedness in high places” (This is obviously my admittedly very crude paraphrase of one of my favorite passages from The Holy Bible, Ephesians 6:12–13, which reads: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all,
to stand.”).
It would seem that the physical, psychological, and emotional toll that living the “gospel life” and traveling along the “gospel highway” had on golden age gospel artists may have registered, not so much in their song lyrics or the evolving musical accompaniment, but in the manner in which they sang their sacred songs. By continuing to “push [. . .] the vocal register to the extreme,” and by not altering the characteristic “hoarse,” “raspy,” “gruff,” “gravelly,” or “throaty” sound that had been handed down from the enslaved inventors of the “Sorrow Songs,” from their beloved genres genesis gospel artists made a distinctly emotional and expressive performance style a key, if not the key, defining aspect of anything that would pass itself off as authentic gospel. Far from being ahistorical, gospel—even prior to the golden age—was, as it remains, a counter-historical, sometimes surreptitiously insurgent art form where singers’ wrestling “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,” as well as “against spiritual wickedness in high places” manifested itself vocally—literally, in the much-revered “hoarse,” “raspy,” “gruff,” “gravelly,” or “throaty” sounds that the masters of this music seem capable of conjuring up anywhere, and at anytime.
Undoubtedly, golden age gospel artists, much like Civil Rights Movement leaders and civil rights soldiers in general, were preoccupied with both tradition and innovation: tradition, in the sense that they consciously adapted and updated the African American sacred song tradition, which went back to the “Sorrow Songs” that arose out of enslavement; and, innovation, in the sense that they consciously sought to modernize and urbanize the African American sacred song tradition, which ultimately meant opening it up and bring it into dialogue with subsequent genres of black popular music, such as blues and jazz, and later rhythm & blues and rock & roll. In essence, this chapter asserts that between 1945 and 1965 gospel simultaneously served as both a sonic symbol of the evolution of the African American sacred song tradition and one of the major forms of popular music that captured and conveyed the views and values, as well as the aspirations and frustrations, of the Civil Rights Movement.
During the Civil Rights Movement years, gospel (especially via its freedom songs subgenre) gave voice to African American culture, consciousness, and bleak social conditions. Simultaneously expressing a boundless faith in God and black Christians, and a sometimes subtle lack of faith in American democracy and white Christianity, golden age gospel reflected the culture, consciousness, and conditions from which the majority of gospel artists emerged: black working-class and black working-poor culture. It is in this sense that most golden age gospel artists can be said to have represented the black masses, who were between 1945 and 1965, as they remain at the dawn of the twenty-first century and surging into its second decade, disproportionately poor and working-class. Golden age gospel artists’ intimacy with the life-worlds and life-struggles of the black poor and downtrodden, not to mention their firsthand harrowing experiences of anti-black racism at seemingly every twist and turn, made them almost ideal mouthpieces for the aspirations and frustrations, if not the overarching ethos, of the Civil Rights Movement.
At its core golden age gospel communicated emerging, simultaneously more modern and more urban African American socio-political views and cultural values. It was one of the major cultural tools African Americans used to deconstruct “Negro” identity (often nothing more than a figment of segregationist white folks’ anti-black racist imaginations) and reconstruct the inchoate “black” identity that blossomed into the major motif of the Black Power Movement. Those unfamiliar with the inner-workings of African American culture are probably woefully unaware of the fact that gospel directly contributed to the culture of socio-political consciousness-raising during the Civil Rights Movement that, by the mid-1960s, mutated and translated itself into the “black aesthetic” or “soul aesthetic” that unambiguously advocated “black pride” during the Black Power Movement. In The Gospel Sound (1997), Heilbut drove this point home:
Black pride and black power are easily assimilated in gospel, a music exclusively by and for blacks, to begin with. . . . [B]lack pride in gospel is as old as the hymn “I’m a Child of the King.” Reverend [W. Herbert] Brewster exhibited black gospel pride back in the thirties when he named Q. C. Anderson after Queen Candice of Ethiopia. In the forties, quartets sang “No Segregation in Heaven” and eulogized Roosevelt, “the poor man’s friend,” for helping black people. . . . That may seem like naïve social consciousness, but it complements the soul protest songs like “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “We’re a Winner,” “War, What Is It Good For?,” “Ball of Confusion,” or “Message From A Black Man.” (298)
Golden age gospel was part of a musical cultural continuum that extended from the spirituals to the blues, gospel blues to rhythm & blues, and freedom songs to soul. Indeed, as Heilbut emphasized above, “black gospel pride,” which predated the Black Power Movement’s preoccupation with “black pride,” has been one of the, however hidden, hallmarks of gospel since its inception, and gospel protest songs (once again, especially via the freedom songs subgenre) are undoubtedly a precursor to the more noted and much-revered “soul protest songs” of the Black Power Movement. However, if most academics and non-academics alike continue to conceive of gospel as an ahistorical, apolitical, other-worldly, and escapist musical art form more concerned with heavenly salvation than with earthly liberation, then the wide-range of extra-musical elements that gospel draws from, and contributes to African American history, culture, and struggle will be, at best, ignored or, at worst, erased altogether.
Long before the Civil Rights Movement African Americans turned to black church culture, and especially black church music, to express sadness, happiness, joy, “sacred blues,” faith, hope, courage, and determination, among many other emotions. They utilized the black sacred song as a means of communicating with other congregants not only in the church, but also in myriad socio-political movements outside of the context of the church when words were simply not enough or just couldn’t capture black life-struggles and lived-experiences. Hence, considering the centrality of the African American church in African American social and political movements, especially the Civil Rights Movement, the black sacred song tradition, as the central soundtrack of African American church culture, historically has been used to speak the unspeakable and explain the inexplicable both within and without the walls of the church. All that being said, in order for us to really and truly comprehend the origins and evolution of golden age gospel, we need to understand the origins and evolution of the African American church and the pivotal role music historically has played in African American religious culture and practices.
Implicitly Singing What They Cannot Explicitly Say: The Multi-Functionality of the Black Church and Black Church Music
The African American church has always served as a major site of, and source for African American music. All of the most distinctive features of black popular music—from the characteristic call-and-response, cry, scream, and shout sound that seems to be at the sonic center of the spirituals, classic blues, and jazz, to the amplified and electrified moans, groans, growls and howls that pulsate and permeate throughout rhythm & blues, rock & roll, soul, funk, and even rap and neo-soul—can be traced back to the black church and “[t]hey that walked in darkness [and] sang [sorrow] songs in the olden days.” A pioneer in the study of African American religion, Du Bois’s sociological treatment of black religion fundamentally centered on syncretism—that is to say, on how enslaved Africans, as Albert Raboteau observed in Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (1978), fused their traditional religious thought and practices with the Christian theology of their white enslavers:
In the New World slave control was based on the eradication of all forms of African culture because of their power to unify the slaves and thus enable them to resist or rebel. Nevertheless, African belie
fs and customs persisted and were transmitted by slaves to their descendants. Shaped and modified by a new environment, elements of African folklore, music, language, and religion were transplanted in the New World by the African diaspora. Influenced by colonial European and indigenous Native American cultures, aspects of the African heritage have contributed, in greater or lesser degree, to the formation of various Afro-American cultures in the New World. One of the most durable and adaptable constituents of the slave’s culture, linking the African past with the American present, was his religion. It is important to realize, however, that in the Americas the religions of Africa have not been merely preserved as static “Africanisms” or as archaic “retentions.” The fact is that they have continued to develop as living traditions putting down new roots in new soil, bearing new fruit as unique hybrids of American origin. African styles of worship, forms of ritual, systems of belief, and fundamental perspectives have remained vital on this side of the Atlantic, not because they were preserved in a “pure” orthodoxy but because they were transformed. Adaptability, based upon respect for spiritual power wherever it originated, accounted for the openness of African religions to syncretism with other religious traditions and for the continuity of a distinctively African religious consciousness. At least in some areas of the Americas, the gods of Africa continued to live—in exile. (4–5)
The gospel aesthetic, especially during the golden age, not only emphasized “[a]daptability” and a deep respect for “spiritual power” in keeping with the core values of the African American church but, above all else, its innovations and experimentations were emblematic of organic, “living traditions putting down new roots in new soil,” and “bearing new fruit as unique hybrids of American origin.” In other words, gospel, certainly by the golden age, registered as a kind of sonic syncretism that served as the soundtrack for the ongoing religious and cultural syncretism that African Americans experienced during the first century after enslavement. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was Du Bois’s African American religious studies and African American church studies that set the tone and timbre for virtually all subsequent African American religious studies, including Raboteau’s research (ix, 209, 266). Considering the emphasis that Du Bois placed on the black church, as well as his groundbreaking research that revealed the multi-functionality of the black church for recently emancipated black folk in a severely Jim Crow segregated society, our discussion here will greatly benefit from an engagement with Du Bois’s work, as it offers us insight into the African American church during the fertile period in which gospel emerged.
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