Gospel Music History
2/9/22 Update: New Orleans Blues phenom Chris Thomas King has deftly set the record straight in his 2021 book: The Blues: The Authentic Narrative of My Music and Culture. We finally have the gaps filled in – at least in America from the turn of the century onward! King has also provided the thread which reaches back much further all the way to Egypt. The Blues – which was both what Anglos coopted and called “jazz” and “Dixieland jazz,” and which is the basis for what became Gospel, Rhythm & Blues, Rock, Soul, Hip Hop & Rap – all originated in at least the mid-1880s if not before in New Orleans with educated, highly trained, free Creole musicians playing what they called The Blues, inspired by the French exclamation “sacre bleu,” as a rebellious response to attempted Protestant Anglo constrictions after the U.S. bought Louisiana from Napoleon in 1803. Free Creoles of African descent had actually settled in the territory first named La Florida by the Spanish who claimed it as early as 1513 – 100 years before the 1619 landing of enslaved Africans in Jamestown. The first noted wafts of the bold, fierce, joyful, freeing Blues infecting the air of downtown were heard from Mamie Desdunes piano playing her 2:19 Blues (Mamie’s Blues)- the first known Blues composition – in the late 1880s, while trumpeter “The Black Rose” Buddy Bolden blasted The Blues from 1894-1907 so far forward – there was no going back. Pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who heard Mamie playing as a child, carried The Blues from there, along with trumpeters King Oliver (Louis Armstrong’s mentor), trombonist Kid Ory, guitarist Lonnie Johnson – and a free-spirited, cosmopolitan city and international port chock full of free Creole highly -trained musicians creating high art. It was Lonnie Johnson who carried The Blues on guitar to the Mississippi Delta, through touring and phonograph records. He was the inspiration for what came later out of Robert Johnson, (no relation – but whom Robert Johnson tried to claim to be, or at least related to, and definitely tried to imitate) and all of the other Mississippi Delta blues guitarists. As the New Orleans Blues musicians began to tour and record, The Blues (erroneously called “jazz”) infectiously became the 1920s soundtrack in a craze spread around America and the world. The Blues party that is still New Orleans was spread by speakeasies, flappers, and phonographs like fire around the globe. In fact, it is now known that W.C. Handy actually saw New Orleans musician Prince McCoy performing Jelly Roll Morton’s “Winin’ Boy Blues” in Mississippi, and appropriated this song calling it his and publishing it as “Memphis Blues.” He wasn’t the first one to co-opt New Orleans Blues – and he certainly wasn’t the last. Imitation may be the highest form of flattery – but I’m sure these New Orleans original Blues musicians would have rather gotten paid for their art and gotten credit where credit is due. It is never too late to give credit where credit belongs.
Source: Thomas King, C. (2021) The Blues: The Authentic Narrative of My Music and My Culture. Chicago Review Press Inc.
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Gospel Music History: On a Sunday designated as “Colored Night” in 1911 Georgia, a young black boy named Thomas Andrew Dorsey attended a revival meeting, singing in the hastily assembled choir around the campfire. That experience made a lasting impression on him and started him on a journey to becoming the Father of Gospel Music.
As a boy, he traveled with his father, an itinerant Baptist preacher and played the pump organ for the campfire revival meetings. After moving to Atlanta at age 11, he became acquainted with vaudeville, so that by the time he settled in Chicago in 1916 he was an experienced dance pianist. From 1923-26 he toured with Ma Rainey as a blues pianist — but was also writing religious music along the way, never forgetting the power and excitement he experienced in those campfire revival meetings as a child and when he attended a meeting of the National Baptist Convention in 1921 and heard Reverend A.W. Nix electrify the audience with the hymn “I Do, Don’t You?” Dorsey decided right then he would be a gospel singer and he wrote his first song, “If I Don’t Get There.” He is credited with being the first person to use the term “gospel song” speaking of the church songs created initially in black folk churches. He said, “If I could get into the gospel songs the feeling and the pathos and the moans and the blues, that [would get] me over.”
After Emancipation, revival meetings became fledgling black folk churches and then solid urban churches as hundreds of thousands moved North, where all black music — spiritual traditions, dance music and the blues — began flowing freely in and out, making a new concoction, with a few text changes, of course. Dorsey, with firsthand experience in all of it, was in the middle of brewing that perfect storm. His timing couldn’t be better.
Dorsey began “peddling” his songs from church to church in Chicago, through the Midwest and the South, hiring male singers to perform to his accompaniment. Using a piano was unique for this period. A few years later, Dorsey innovated further when he organized the first female gospel quartet in history to sing his songs.
The Great Depression caused Dorsey’s decision to move into religious music exclusively, and he became a minor celebrity in 1930 when one of his songs, “If You See My Saviour,” “took the audience by storm” at the National Baptist Convention in Chicago. In 1931, with Theodore Frye at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, he created the world’s first gospel chorus, also creating the Chicago Gospel Choral Union, Inc with Frye and Lewis Butts.
In 1932, he co-founded the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, Inc. with gospel singer Sallie Martin, and the same year opened the Dorsey House of Music, the first publishing company founded for the sole purpose of selling the music of black gospel composers.
He succeeded in encapsulating the power of the spirituals he experienced in the campfire revival
Gospel Black Church Stainglass
meetings as a boy, the excitement of secular dance music, and the depth of the blues into this new “gospel” music. Nothing was left out — the musical practices of the slave “invisible church”: hand clapping, foot stomping, call-and-response, rhythmic complexities, persistent beat, melodic improvisation, heterophonic textures, percussive accompaniments and ring shouts; the rhythmic intensity of secular dance music; and the sacred counterpart of the blues, distinguished only by religious rather than secular text with the bent-note scale, duple meters, syncopation and musical density — all of which you could find evolving in full force in black churches on any given Sunday.
He named this fresh river of music he was experiencing, and jumped in, writing nearly a thousand songs, publishing more than half of them. His best known songs are: Precious Lord, Take My Hand (which was translated into more than fifty languages), When I’ve Done My Best, Hide Me in Thy Bosom, Search Me, Lord, and There’ll Be Peace In The Valley.
Other Early Black Gospel Composers:
Lucie Campbell (1885-1963) first copyrighted song 1905; Something Within, I Need Thee Every Hour, The Lord is My Sheperd, He Understands, He’ll Say Well Done.
Martin (1896-1988) Just a Closer Walk with Thee
William Herbert Brewster, Sr (1897-1987) credited with being first to popularize the use of triplets in gospel songs – Surely God is Able; distinctive for melismatic cadenzas, vivid biblical images, and sharp tempo changes How I Got Over, Just Over the Hill, and Move on Up a Little Higher.
Roberta Martin (1907-1969) 1936 Roberta Martin Singers – integrating male and female singers; 1939 Roberta Martin Studio of Music
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Sources:
Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began. 1993.
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans A History. Third Edition. 1997.
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