Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  A description of the performance style of one of Thomas A. Dorsey’s early musical companions, Willie Mae Ford Smith, captures the feeling of these electric church mothers. “Mother Smith was dramatic and . . . Holy Ghost–filled . . . When she said she felt like flying away, in your mind’s eye, you could visualize this,” the gospel radio personality Zella Jackson Price said years after Smith's early heyday. “Folks is just shoutin’ everywhere, hats flyin’ and carryin’ on, just somethin’ terrible. She’d come in and just wreck all them buildings. That was Mother Smith, and she loved it.” Smith was known for flapping her arms while singing, sweating out her sorrow and prancing her joy.16 Her loud wildness resembled Ma Rainey’s, but her earthiness served the Lord.

  One thing Willie Mae was not, however, was conventionally sexy. A big-boned woman, known in her later years for outsized eyeglasses, she was a mother figure from the beginning. She embodied a gospel ideal that balanced sexuality with other feminine attributes, like humor and huggable warmth. Mothers are sexual beings, of course; but in popular culture they’re rarely eroticized bait. Gospel mothers exhibited the fervor of desire while not always worrying whether they fit others’ standards of being desirable. Gospel mothers never portrayed themselves as virgins; that luxury of perceived purity didn’t present itself within communities where women married young and often multiple times. But they explored what it might feel like to be touched by the Divine, in physical performances that expressed (and often realized) erotic excitement as it flowed from within the body outward, not for show, but in the highest, deepest realization of love.

  The vision of black worshipers collapsed upon church floors can quickly become another stereotype, like the ones Florence Mills grappled with playing in musicals about plantations and the jungle. The black church moved into modernity with the rest of American history, adjusting its forms of worship to suit changing times. As romance and sexuality became more openly discussed in the first three decades of the twentieth century, gospel mothers forged a link between everyday interpersonal intimacy and spiritual union. In gospel music of the golden era, the God connection isn’t some scary, eyes-rolling-back loss of control; it’s intensely satisfying and pleasurable, like sex.

  One lesser-known singer working in the spirit-queen tradition described this thrill in no uncertain terms when interviewed in the 1990s. “I knew that it was the Lord. ’Cause I’ve never felt nothing like it! The joy! The fulfillment! The explosion! The everything—was there! And I had longed for that,” she said. Her interviewer, the ethnomusicologist Glenn Hinson, mapped this euphoria in his own description of the gospel singing style: “Start low; rise high; return to low. The worshipful act—be it prayer or preaching, welcome or song—seems to mirror the whole in which it is embedded. Both act and service follow the same trajectory. Turn up the fire; let it sizzle; then turn it down. But never turn it down all the way. Never fully return to the last point of rest. Instead, keep raising the bottom, ever boosting the ambient energy, ever bringing the sustaining lows closer to the fiery peaks.”17

  This approach to singing mirrors the female orgasm. It’s what Dorsey needed his hot holy mamas to embody. Women took the holy impulse inward and dwelled upon it as it ebbed and flowed. Their sense of eroticism’s pleasure and need as multiple and elusive, needing to be stroked and stoked, translated into a new, shockingly immediate and current framework for sanctified joy. In rock and soul, the secular outgrowths of gospel music, intense privileging of sensual realities became the dynamo that broke down both musical forms and any remaining sense of propriety within performance. This orgasmic authenticity turns what the music historian Craig Werner has called “the gospel impulse”—a striving for connectedness among people seeing themselves “in relation to rather than on their own”—into something erotic.18 In that moment, when gospel made the erotic divine, popular music’s room was wrecked and made ready for the nonsectarian ecstatic innovations of rock and soul.

  The women’s world of gospel was not a separate sphere; it could complement or overcome male domination as necessary. It was a family realm—sisters often sang together—and its maternal feeling was expansive and erotically charged. Women made waves in a gospel music industry that by the mid-twentieth century was as vital as the one about to host rock and roll’s coming-out party.19 The gospel scene was centered in Chicago, with outposts in Memphis, Harlem, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Some artists, like Roberta Martin and Gertrude Ward, became group leaders who flourished as businesswomen as well as musical innovators. The Roberta Martin Singers launched the careers of legends Alex Bradford and James Cleveland in the first major ensemble to include both men and women. Ward’s family group, centered on her dynamic youngest daughter Clara and, later, the incomparable soprano Marion Williams, dressed up gospel in sequins and beehives, showing how glitz could serve God.

  The most important practitioner of gospel glamour is someone who, later in her life, became such an American institution that we forget how fierce and funky she was when she emerged as the genre’s biggest crossover star. Born in New Orleans, raised a Baptist but with a rollicking Holiness congregation right next door, Mahalia Jackson was to gospel what Bessie Smith, the idol of her youth, was to blues. Her 1947 recording of Memphis minister W. Herbert Brewster’s “Move On Up a Little Higher” was gospel’s breakthrough hit, selling more than two million slices of 78 RPM shellac. Jackson claimed Smith’s blues title for herself, calling herself the “Empress of Gospel” after Dorsey, who partnered with her early on in her career, dubbed her that at a 1940 service at the Morning Star Baptist Church.20

  The bold seventeen-year-old started her Chicago career by standing up in her aunt’s proper Baptist church and singing an impromptu Holiness-style solo. She found a marketable balance between the Southern Holiness style of whooping and groaning and the more ordered Northern Baptist approach. Approaching fervor with refinement, Jackson employed just enough theatrical distance within her performances to make gospel translatable to listeners beyond the faithful. She did have rivals as gospel’s Golden Age wore on: an accurate retelling of the roots of rock and soul would name Inez Andrews as the originator of the heavy metal wail; Clara Ward as the first glam rocker, in wild wigs and David Bowie–worthy satin and tat; and Marion Williams as the flirtatious force behind the squalling vocal climaxes that Little Richard employed. Richard openly acknowledged that debt.21

  A revisionist history would also include the men who worked alongside and learned from these women, in what was, in spirit and often in hidden fact, a sexually adventurous world. Many were queer, as Anthony Heilbut has elucidated in his groundbreaking essay “The Children and Their Secret Closet.” Sexuality became even more fluid in gospel performance because it wasn’t an open focal point. As virile as the women could be, gospel’s male soloists embraced femininity. Singers like Brother Joe May—“The Thunderbolt of the Midwest”—and the flamboyant Alex Bradford would run through church aisles, their rotund bodies glistening. As Heilbut puts it, they were in dialogue with the spirit queens, “answering one kind of musical androgyny with another.”22

  All expressed gospel’s most important concept when it comes to popular music’s erotics: whatever arouses people gains meaning not through outwardly conceived theatrical gestures but by being found and freed from within. In the world of gospel, performance is not merely an act. It is an action, an excavation of that kernel within that Audre Lorde named the erotic: that sex organ known as the soul.

  THE TIME BOMB

  One gospel mother embodied the fundamental shift from pop showing and telling to rock and soul being with unrivaled force and subtlety. Dorothy Love Coates never really crossed over to the mainstream the way Mahalia Jackson did. She didn’t experiment with jazz or blues; her offstage personality wasn’t flamboyant like that of Rosetta Tharpe (who played to huge crowds and helped popularize the electric guitar) or Clara Ward. Nor is she viewed as a direct link between gospel and pop as readily as is Sam Cooke. Yet Coates directly influe
nced Cooke, and in her sanctified style, we can see the visceral intensity that figures including James Brown, Janis Joplin, and Bruce Springsteen turned into the very essence of future music.

  Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1928, Coates became known in the 1960s as an active player in the civil rights movement; her home church was the Sixteenth Street Baptist, where Martin Luther King Jr. centered his Southern activism and where four little girls were murdered in a racist bombing in 1963. Perhaps because of her political nature, or because of the undiagnosed depression that troubled her as it had Dorsey, Coates never moved from the Deep South, though she journeyed with her group, the Gospel Harmonettes, all along the gospel highway. Her most talked-about performances were never captured on film or video.

  In her day, though, anyone in gospel understood that Coates commanded the music’s spiritualized eroticism. “If you have ever heard Dorothy Love Coates sing, right away you can tell she is looking for this connection on the inside which matches words that she is singing,” the gospel artist and historian Horace Clarence Boyer told the filmmaker Dwight Cammeron, whose 2000 documentary about Coates is a definitive account of the singer’s impact.23 “She is delivering an experience, she is sharing this experience with you. And when she begins to sing, all of a sudden she makes that connection, and she is in the sanctified church, she is in the spirit, she is under the wings of God, and her eyes will pop wide open, and her body begins to show what she is singing, she becomes a preacher who is under the Holy Spirit. And when it hits her, it hits you, too.”

  In her 1950s heyday, Coates and the other four original Harmonettes all drove in one car to California to record for Art Rupe’s Specialty Records. Their Specialty sides were nearly instant hits; one, “Get Away Jordan,” became a centerpiece of the group’s shows. When the Harmonettes played in front of nearly seven thousand people at the Shrine Auditorium in 1955, on a bill that reads like a 1950s gospel pantheon—the Soul Stirrers with Sam Cooke, the Caravans with James Cleveland and Albertina Walker, Brother Joe May, the beloved quartet the Pilgrim Travelers—“Get Away Jordan” was the climax of the show. “Get Away Jordan” was originally a spiritual, heavy with weariness, describing the river of death that finishes a hard life. Coates’s version, included in the live recording of that 1955 show, places the afterlife’s heavenly tomorrow right smack in gospel’s physical now. As the group’s road pianist Herbert “Pee Wee” Pickard sets a frantic rhythm, Coates begins with a sermonette. She’s already put the river, the afterlife fantasy, behind her. She’s describing the moment of death. But then she’s scolding death—“Get away, Jordan, now!”—and putting her arms around her Savior for a dance. The recording is only audio, so we can’t see Coates doing her famous “quickening”—running and falling to her knees, calling for a chair, in a routine that James Brown would later modify in his own cape-shedding finales.

  Born three decades later than Willie Mae Ford Smith, Coates didn’t have to invent the gospel impulse. She liked secular music as a child, when her name was Dorothy McGriff. She started playing piano in church at age ten and never left after that. Anthony Heilbut has written that Coates didn’t need to study the blues because her own life provided enough sadness—her minister father left the family when she was in grade school, and her own firstborn daughter, whom she delivered at age sixteen, suffered from cerebral palsy. Married twice—both times to gospel singers, first Willie Love of the Fairfield Four and then Carl Coates of the Sensational Nightingales—she was no angel. But she loved to demonstrate what heaven on earth felt like.

  Even in youth, Coates was a musical tinkerer, an iconoclast disassembling and reassembling sacred texts. “I had a habit of changing the melody sometimes,” she told Cammeron. “I would take the song and change the melody that was involved. And once the melody was changed to a little more up-tempo sort of thing, the old people would just knock themselves out over the same song.” She’d change the lyrics, too—in one case, she said, a song that included Jesus’s words, “Be lifted up to earth, I’ll draw all men unto me,” became in her hands, “I wonder who will help me lift Jesus.” This is the same shove into the present moment Dorsey delivered in “Precious Lord.” Coates made what was dry and boring immediate and interactive.

  Her passion scared people. Art Rupe worried that she might have a heart attack during the Harmonettes’ Specialty recording sessions. “Dorothy’s first personal appearances around the country left most gospel audiences in a state of shock!” her sister, Lillian Caffey, wrote in a self-published tribute from the early 1970s. “Her audiences and other artists are still left in awe when this slow-walking, slow-talking, very innocent-looking female explodes like a well-set time bomb.”24

  In the same years when Ray Charles and Etta James were explicitly engaging the gospel impulse in their secular hits, Coates’s ability to be both rough and masterful made her music a particularly strong bridge to rock and soul. She herself stuck with gospel all her life, long after the original Harmonettes had left her to form families and get respectable jobs, and she’d reformed the group, and then that one fell apart, too. Coates rarely performed in her later years—her voice, some said, was all shouted out, and because she stayed in Birmingham, she became isolated from her old gospel-highway friends. However, she did have a strange Hollywood moment in the 1990s. Her voice was resurrected as some kind of archetype of suffering in films including The Long Walk Home and Beloved; she even appeared in those two, leading choruses of grieving or defiant women.

  Coates must have enjoyed being acknowledged, but her influence remains hugely underestimated. The spiritualized eroticism she perfected would be similarly engaged by early soul artists like Brown, Charles, and Wilson Pickett, who borrowed directly from her work, and in the voice of Darlene Love, the ubiquitous girl group–era singer whose stage name was a tribute to Coates. And to this day, Coates’s shout of “Get Away Jordan”—her embrace of earthy eternal life—can be heard every time a regular person discovers how to be a rock star, quickening under a spark both libidinal and divine.

  COCKS IN THE HENHOUSE

  Gospel gave rock and soul many musical innovations, but its deepest contribution was the conviction that the soul’s erotic fulfillment is a matter of life and death. The same could be said of the blues; but in gospel, there’s more movement and more hope. There’s also a greater commitment to camaraderie. The mothers and queens who demonstrated longing and satisfaction through their performances found a counterpart in the vocal quartets who showed how yearning and devotion could become even stronger when shared. These mostly male groups established a way for men to be together erotically that was both inherently queer in its passionate fluidity and reassuringly recognizable to heterosexual men and women not ready to live within a sexually fluid space.

  To say it more plainly, gospel quartets were like rock bands. They ran on the shared, sensual, blessed charisma of men who might have otherwise never let loose in the same way. Their antics nearly resembled what the Beatles did ten years later in movies like Help! That’s the thing about the gospel quartets—they were sex symbols. In their intimacy and competitiveness, their blend of skill and force and bravado, these “cocks in the henhouse,” as the Sam Cooke biographer Daniel Wolff once described them, were presenting the world with the prototype of rock-band charisma.25

  Quartets proliferated throughout the Golden Age of Gospel. Some, like the Golden Gate Quartet and the Soul Stirrers, became nationally famous; others remained beloved in their region, playing the church and revival circuit down home. The tale of the Famous Blue Jay Singers is grounded in a love story, platonic but intense, connecting an older singer with his protégé. In 1926, Silas Steele, a thirteen-year-old country kid who’d recently moved with his family to Birmingham’s Jefferson County, met the mentor who would soon turn him into the area’s first bona fide gospel star. Clarence Dennis “Tooter” Parnell sang bass in Woodward’s Big Four, a group that like many in the area had been formed as a show team playing for visitors to a loc
al factory, in this case the Woodward Ironworks. He recognized that young Steele’s big lungs could save the boy from such hard labor and formed the Famous Blue Jays around him.26

  The fond bond shared by Parnell, Steele, and the other Blue Jays was grounded in machismo. From the beginning, they liked to battle. Sacred song contests took place in the Birmingham area as early as 1929; groups would gather and try to blow each other away with harmonic genius, rhythmic oomph, and showmanship. Facing off against equally ambitious quartets such as the Kings of Harmony and the Birmingham Jubilee Singers, Steele and his mates learned how to cajole a roomful of believers. Steele shouted in a baritone that grew mightier with every passing year, and could hit a grit-tinged falsetto at opportune moments. Small and thin, he’d strut the stage. And at the right moment, he’d stage-dive right into the arms of the women seated up front.

  “They Sing with Their Heads, Hearts, Hands and Feet!” reads a 1934 handbill for the Blue Jays that shows the group looking like Hollywood crooners in tuxedoes, white flowers in their boutonnieres. “Hear Them. They Will Make You Laugh and Cry.”27 Steele, particularly, was known for his emotional power—a quality that can only be called soulfulness, though he perfected his style decades before anyone called music “soul.” First with the Famous Blue Jays, and later as the lead voice in the regionally dominant Spirit of Memphis Quartet during that Tennessee group’s peak years, Steele was an exemplary quartet king. The Blue Jays recorded for Paramount Records and became one of the first gospel groups to conduct “barnstorming” tours throughout the South. Steele himself never gained great fame, partly because his career ended in 1953, when he left Memphis for California, never to sing again. But within the steamily devotional exchanges Steele shared with his musical companions, he embodied the gospel flourishes that would later help define the dares taken by early rockers and soul men.