by Ann Powers
The music that answered this question came from within Christianity, but only after believers who had dared to encounter the profane found a way to balance and honor both key elements. Gospel music’s songwriters and performers wanted their music to touch people where they lived—in their hearts and guts, and, though they might not admit it, their genitals—but to also reveal that “something within.” In the 1930s, holy people and their highly interactive congregants ushered in the Golden Age of Gospel, which extended into the 1950s, when its central elements were secularized within the prime erotic musical movements of our time: rock, funk, and soul.
SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING
In the predawn light of this historical moment, Ma Rainey, a tent-show lifer at forty-four, was still on the road. She befriended Thomas Fulbright, a young white actor from Arkansas playing in a touring production of Charley’s Aunt, when both were traveling the oil towns of East Texas. Fulbright recalled gaining entrance to one of Rainey’s “Midnight Rambles”—a raunchy show designed, as Rainey told Fulbright, to “make the old men young and the young men have ideas they shouldn’t have in the first place.”
Fulbright stood in the back, a delicate theatrical flower retreating from the crowd of drunken oil-field workers spoiling for a fight. “Now one would think these rough looking men would enjoy the risqué performance and scant costumes of the chorus girls, but not this bunch,” he later wrote. “They wanted a special song from Ma and kept yelling for it.
“It was a production number with the entire company on stage,” Fulbright explained. “The music was that old number ‘It’s Tight Like That’ and each member of the company would sing a chorus and then dance a fast-time step or two. Of course, Ma was the last to sing her part and the words of the chorus she did went like this: ‘See that spider crawling up the wall; He’s going up there to get his ashes hauled; Oh, It’s tight like that.’ Then she danced. Now take my word for it, Ma could dance. She would pull her skirt up and step to. The crowd went wild.”2
While Ma Rainey was lifting her skirts above her worn, intrepid knees, the man who’d given her “It’s Tight Like That”—her former bandleader and the song’s cowriter, a Georgia-born African American composer named Thomas A. Dorsey—sat home in Chicago, in the midst of a spiritual crisis. It wasn’t his first. The son of a failed preacher, Dorsey discovered musical gifts playing his mother’s portable organ at home, then found another world as a footloose twelve-year-old in downtown Atlanta, where his family had moved to escape the sharecropping life. He first saw Rainey there, along with Bessie Smith and her partner Wayne “Buzzin’” Burton, who could tap dance so fast he became known as “the boy with the insane feet.”3 Soon young Dorsey was selling popcorn behind a theater’s concession counter and wandering into nearby bordellos to tickle the ivories on their parlor pianos. He acquired the less-than-flattering name “Barrel House Tom,” which he took with him to Chicago in 1916.4 There he played ragtime for couples dancing the slow drag at the women-owned funhouses called “buffet flats” because of the smorgasbord of sexual indulgence offered. Dorsey was popular in the flats, because as a Southern-bred musician, he knew how to simmer down a rhythm and burn the blues. But he never left behind his father’s church. Torn, he found a special balance in the metaphorical hour when Saturday drifted into Sunday.
At twenty-two, after a nervous breakdown brought on by the kind of performance schedule that killed Florence Mills, Dorsey was persuaded to leave the blues world for a moment and attend the 1921 National Baptist Convention. The fussily dressed proper ladies who thronged the hall put him off, but he stayed to hear a singing preacher named Nix, who’d been hired to promote a new songbook called Gospel Pearls. (There’s dispute whether this was A. W. Nix, whose fiery sermons full of pop-culture references later made him a recording star, or his brother W. M. Nix.)5 Nix blew the wavering bluesman into another stratosphere. Dorsey would describe the encounter as a glimpse of “divine rapture” that made him reconsider his low-down ways.6 But Dorsey also saw in Nix exactly what the blues offered. “I heard a man sing [the popular hymn] ‘I Do, Don’t You?’” he recounted in an interview fifty years later. “Named Nix: Great, big, healthy stout fellow, handsome fellow. I said, ‘That’s what I’d like to do.’ It looked like he was havin’ such a good time with it, and when they passed the collection plate, they took up hundreds of dollars, I said, ‘That’s where I oughta be!’”7
Dorsey realized the power in Nix’s blend of appetite and grace, but couldn’t find the money in it, so he continued working in the blues world, which was exploding after the recording success of Bessie Smith. In 1924, his old Atlanta pal Rainey came calling, asking Dorsey to become her pianist on the road and hiring his young wife Nettie as her wardrobe mistress. Something kept pulling at Dorsey, though: Sunday morning coming down. In 1926 he found himself getting dizzy after leaving a Chicago club show. It was the onset of a second breakdown that left him incapacitated for two years. Another religious conversion revitalized him, but he kept getting tempted by secular pleasures, like Adam in the garden. He was invited to play with a band called the Whispering Syncopators; he became a go-to guy as cowriter of songs that would sell at the buffet flats.
One of those serpentine seductions led Dorsey to cowrite Rainey’s “It’s Tight Like That.” “One night a young man came to my home,” Dorsey told his biographer, Michael Harris. “He had some words written down and wanted me to write the music and arrange a melody to his words. My wife cleared the dishes from the supper table and I looked over the words; the title of the song was ‘It’s Tight Like That.’ I looked it over carefully and told him I did not do that kind of music anymore. I was now giving all of [my] time to gospel songs. But he prevailed with me to make a melody. After a long period of persuasion and much discussion, he said, ‘But there is big money in it if it clicks.’ I looked around at our poor furnishings and our limited wearing apparel. ‘Come on, once more won’t matter,’ he said quietly with a smile.”8
Dorsey and that young man, Hudson Whitaker, also known as Tampa Red, enjoyed irresistible success with “It’s Tight Like That.” They would go on to write and record more than sixty dirty blues songs, with titles like “Pat That Bread,” “Billie the Grinder,” and “Somebody’s Been Using That Thing.” Dorsey called himself “Georgia Tom” when he was plying this trade. These songs don’t sound like they were conjured by a crossroads devil; they’re lighthearted, even silly, with a ragtime flavor and lyrics that turn on puns and tall-tale imagery. It’s hard to imagine that Dorsey didn’t have a laugh writing them, and he definitely enjoyed the money they made. But on some deep level, they represented failure. Dorsey still hadn’t figured out how to manipulate the good feeling of his songs so that it served spiritual striving instead of the sweet lowdown.
When he’d heard the Reverend Nix in 1921, Dorsey had been struck by how personal the preacher’s interpretation of the sacred felt. As Harris points out, Nix’s emphasis on the “I,” on intimacy with Jesus, felt a lot like what Ma Rainey offered her audience.9 Dorsey tried that in his own work: his first true gospel blues, inspired by the sudden death of a neighbor close to his own age, was an ode to Christ as a best buddy called “If You See My Savior, Tell Him That You Saw Me.” But many old-line preachers resisted Dorsey’s hymns, judging them too infused with the night spirit that Christian morality sought to suppress.
Things were changing: the book that Nix was selling the day Dorsey heard him sing had opened a door. Gospel Pearls featured the stately Protestant hymns that urban African American congregations (mostly Baptists) knew well, but in a new style that made room for the wilder expressions heard in Holiness and Pentecostal churches. Gospel Pearls was the first church-distributed hymnal to label itself “gospel,” signaling a new hybrid style that was still somewhat subdued, but that allowed room for some improvisation between the melodic lines.10 But Dorsey wanted to take things further, to feed the fire of God within songs that also had the shimmying feel of the secular.
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He knew how this might work, because he’d seen it in the streets. The 1920s abounded with “jack leg preachers,” self-ordained messengers who played on street corners. Some made recordings, and we can hear how these early hybridizers combined blues, jazz, and religious forms in idiosyncratic but very influential ways. The blind pianist Arizona Dranes infused her hymnody with an unstoppable ragtime rhythm, becoming renowned in Pentecostal churches and recording for Okeh Records in Chicago. Reverend J. C. Burnett, whose sermons sound a lot like the bluesy 1960s testimonials of the Staple Singers, was a major star of the shellac-disc era. Slide guitarist Blind Willie Johnson wrote eerily emotional songs like “John the Revelator,” which later became favorites of countercultural rockers. Stars like Bessie Smith and Son House recorded songs with overtly spiritual themes, if not a purely spiritual feel. “Moan, You Moaners,” which Smith recorded with Alabama quartet the Dunham Jubilee Singers in 1930, contains a line that describes the centrifugal force that secular artists sought in the church: “Religion turns you inside out.”11
But in the houses of the officially religious, the blues was still a source of trouble. In 1930, around the same time Fulbright saw Rainey wowing crowds with the song that had put Dorsey on the other side of Eden’s garden wall, the backsliding songwriter received what had to feel like a bitter chastisement. The Reverend A. W. Nix recorded a sermon entitled “It Was Tight Like That.” Nix alters the meaning of the song’s title to describe the desperation of followers newly suffering in the Depression, throwing wrath toward the weak who give in to financial concerns. “The prodigal son had plenty money, but he lost it all when it was tight like that!” Nix shouts. Would Dorsey ever be able to reconcile his love of God and his need for material comfort? Could he find a form rich enough to contain the paradox of a Sunday morning that glowed with the power of Saturday night? Would this music allow for the eroticism of spiritual hunger, of the soul reaching out to God through the body, with arms and singing mouth wide open?
The answer came in 1932, when Dorsey wrote the song that ushered in the Golden Age of Gospel. But it came at a terrible price. Until that year, there was an emotional gap between the blues that Dorsey effortlessly wrote and the gospels he labored to perfect. The blues allowed Dorsey to be frank about life in the flesh. His gospel compositions, though more personal than many, still floated toward the heavens. The singers in storefront churches and on city streets were pouring urgency into gospel music, but the songs, even Dorsey’s, avoided the gut. Dorsey was still working with Tampa Red, making cash from dirty ditties. He poured his investments into the sanctified side. Partnerships with the singing preacher Theodore Frye and the foot-patting singer Sallie Martin, a stern and shrewd businesswoman who oversaw his publishing efforts, had revved up his career within Chicago’s church community. After making a decent-sized splash at the 1930 National Baptist Convention, he became a traveling song salesman with connections throughout the Midwest. He’d also found his church home, first at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he played piano with Frye’s choir, and then at Pilgrim Baptist Church, where he organized the chorus himself.
Nettie Dorsey was nearly due to deliver the couple’s first child when Thomas decided to jump over to St. Louis to promote his songs among the local choirs. In a postcard depicting the New Hotel Jefferson and dated August 24, 1932, Dorsey wrote: “Dear Nettie, old dear, I’m having a pretty good time and success. I’ll be home about the last of the week. Take care of yourself, bee [sic] sweet.”12 Two days later, Nettie died in childbirth. Dorsey rushed home in horror and grief and was able to hold his son before the infant perished the next morning. Dorsey, already prone to depression, fell into a tailspin. “I became so lonely I did not feel that I could go on alone,” he later told Harris.13
Yet bereft as he was, Dorsey wasn’t alone. His church community sent him a steady stream of condolence letters, which survive as the material evidence of what must have been countless visits to the Dorsey home, covered supper dishes, and Sunday prayers sent out to envelop the young sacred songwriter in healing love. And Dorsey also still had his muse, the blues, though it was dragging him into dark places.
On one of those letters from a congregant, Dorsey scrawled the lyrics of a song, “I Am Thinking of a City,” which would be recorded in 1937 by Alabama’s Ravizee Family Singers. The song is a dream of escape through death. “I am thinking of a city in a beautiful land where there’s joy and pleasure untold,” the draft begins. That place offers peace and “riches I’ll share”—not the afflictions of the earth or the fickleness of friends who leave. “Some of joy, some of sorrow, all together have gone,” the songwriter waxes grimly. He may be next on the program to go, he concludes; “maybe today, maybe tomorrow, I don’t know.” But he’s ready for the Lord to get him out of this uncertain earthly realm. “I Am Thinking of a City” is a nihilistic daydream couched in the language of transcendence. In that way, it’s like many old hymns and spirituals, focusing on a land somewhere else—beyond Jordan, beyond Southern clay farmlands or dirty Northern slums, beyond the everyday realities of physical life. This was a crucial survival tool. But it lacked earthiness, literal earthiness, the acknowledgment that we don’t live “over there,” even when we want to.14
Dorsey’s church community, especially the women, exemplified that earthiness. The condolence letters they sent after Nettie’s death implored him to surrender his grief while in Jesus’s arms. These letters did point “beyond the shining shore where better years begin,” as one reads. But they also advised Dorsey to take emotional action right away. “The Great Ruler of the Universe doeth all things for the best, and we therefore commend you to Him,” reads another letter. “Lean thou upon Him for He will strengthen you for the ordeal—Remember the words—‘O Lord, I’m in Your Care.’ Nothing can be more consoling.”15 Lean on Him. Resign yourself to his will. Bow your head and admit you’re vulnerable. The gentle admonishments in these letters foreshadowed what Dorsey would eventually do, writing the song that became his signature and the founding text of the Golden Age of Gospel. One church sister, Mrs. V. Underwood of the Morning Star Baptist Church, went so far as to write a poem. It begins, A precious one from you have gone / a voice you love is still, turns on the poignant image of Nettie’s empty chair in the Dorsey home, and concludes with yet another call to give in: Her soul is safe in heaven. So we’ll bow our head in humble submission to our Creator.
Precious Nettie would never return. Therefore, Dorsey’s church sisters told him, he needed to turn to his Precious Lord. That’s exactly what Dorsey did in the midst of this avalanche of condolence. The composer would tell the story many times of how he took a walk with Theodore Frye and happened into the community room of a beauty school in his neighborhood (a women’s space, it’s worth noticing), where he found a piano. From memory, he began to play an old hymn, “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone,” a nineteenth-century update of the eighteenth-century favorite “Amazing Grace.” Tweaking the melody a bit to focus on the slow climb of its first few phrases, Dorsey started coming up with new words. He found himself speaking directly to that God the letters told him to seek out, pleading, “Blessed Lord, take my hand!” According to Dorsey, Frye suggested a crucial change—though it’s one the songwriter might have already noticed in Underwood’s note. Not “blessed,” Frye allegedly said. “Precious.” The same word Mrs. Underwood used in her poem.
In a song lyric, as in a whispered seduction, one word can make all the difference. “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” would go on to be recorded by virtually every major gospel star and countless secular ones, celebrated as the gospel text that made room for all of the moaning Mahalia Jacksons and crooning Sam Cookes to follow. Within its legend, that one word means everything. Just as he’d heard Reverend Nix make hymns more human by talking about Jesus in the intimate terms of the first person, Dorsey used the possessive, glittering “precious” to step away from transcendence and to live, in pain and the desire to stop that pain, in the here and now. Instead
of dreaming beyond the body, “Precious Lord” requires a singer to stay within her body, utterly aware of its demands, calling to God as a bereft blueswoman calls to a straying lover. Spirituals and hymns are meant to soothe need, promising experiences beyond it. “Precious Lord” comes alive within need, showing it as, in fact, desire: yearning for a union so deep it might dissolve you.
In the quickly codifying realm of popular music, the sacred and the profane were at least categorically divided during Dorsey’s time. Blues touched the spirit, but in dwelling on the flesh it drew a limit around itself; it couldn’t transcend. Sacred music lifted the body, but also questioned the worth of the physical and focused on the hope for a life beyond it. “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” showed how a song could become a passageway reconciling these separate arenas, which, in the experiences of most people, were not so distant anyway.
“Take My Hand, Precious Lord” stands at a crossroads more crucial than any that hosted a devil out to take a bluesman’s soul. This song, so seemingly simple, created a space where the beauty and poeticism of desire was revealed, and where the physicality of spiritual longing could be manifest. For Dorsey, it was yet another new beginning. He would achieve legendary status as the “Father of Gospel” on the strength of “Precious Lord” and the songs he wrote in its mold after 1932. But for all of popular music, the song became a landmark hidden in plain sight.
MAGICAL MOTHERS
“Precious Lord” gave modern gospel a template. Singers made it come alive. Dorsey and his fellow hymn writers needed these envoys, mostly women, to carry the music forward within churches and throughout the secular world. Some of their names are familiar: Mahalia Jackson, Rosetta Tharpe, Clara Ward, Marion Williams. Others, like Inez Andrews and Roberta Martin, mostly gained renown within the walls of the sanctuaries where they stomped and squalled, inventing new ways to articulate need and shower listeners with love. Still others, like Clara Hudman (the Georgia Peach) and Queen C. Anderson, are nearly forgotten. But their voices, ripe with that improvisatory ripple that would come to be called melisma and the rich tone of what Williams called “the moan that keeps homes together,” gave popular music a new kind of mobility. Their singing overrode the mind-body split that kept the sacred from the profane. Basically, these women invented rock and roll performance.