Heilbut - The gospel sound : good news and bad times

Heilbut, Anthony

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GOSPELSOIJ9ID

Good News and Bad Times

by Anthony Heilbut

"The definitive popular history of the mostoverlooked American music."

Jon Landau, Rolling Stone

OURPBiCE

Revisedand Updated

THE GOSPEL SOUND

CONTENTS

Preface vii

Introduction: The Gospel Moment ix

Part One: Building the Gospel Highway

1 "Sallie Martin's Outta Sight" 3

2 "I Get These Special Vibrations": Thomas A.

Dorsey 21

3 The Head of the House: Ira Tucker 37

4 Mahalia the Queen 57

5 "The Women Had Fits": The Soul Stirrers 75

Part Two: The Gospel Pioneers

6 Reverend Brewster and the Ward Singers 97

7 Reverend Julius Cheeks and Reverend Claude

Jeter: The Fathers of Soul 115

8 "Bessie Can Moan and Move a Mountain" 131

9 Professor Alex Bradford: "The Singing Rage" 145

10 "I Won't Let Go of My Faith": Dorothy Love

Coates 159

Part Three: The Holiness Church

11 The Holiness Church 173

12 The Traveling Saints 187

Vi CONTENTS

13 The Crown Prince of Gospel: James Cleveland 205

14 "I've Been Way Out on the Stormy Raging

Sea": Marion Williams 221

15 The Young Smgers 237

Part Four: The Gospel Life

16 "You May Never Go to Prison" 255

17 "Turn Your Radio On", 1969 265

18 A Weekend with the Campbells 283Epilogue: "Lx)oked Down the Line and I

Wondered" (1971) 295

Postscript 301

Acknowledgments 333

DiSCOGRAPHY 335

Index of Names 355

Index of Song Titles 365

PREFACE

This book first appeared in 1971. At that time, the asser-tion that gospel singing supplied the roots for much of con-temporary music was not widely accepted; today it seemsa received truth. But, paradoxically, though the gospelsound is now universal, the culture that produced it ap-pears increasingly a thing of the past. At its best, theblack gospel church provided the richest form of Americanfolklore. Its language combined the stately periods ofeighteenth-century prose with the richness of southerncountry talk and ghetto slang. More than this, the gospelculture with its rituals, images, and psychological assump-tions allowed generations of untutored artists to expressthemselves in a maimer as free and improvisatory as theycared to make it. Virtually alone among popular forms offolklore, it recognized the importance and creative ca-pacity of women. A cynic may scoff at the gospel churchas matriarchalthough some of gospel's greatest exponentsare malebut the indisputable fact is that in church sing-ing women could be peerless artists, not by denying theirsocial situation, but by drawing upon all its elements as re-sources.

It is to these great folk artists that this book is dedicated,especially the older singers, "the ones who didn't sell out"but stuck with their music despite the encroachments andtemptations of the world. Their "gospel bird" may be anendangered species but it still keeps flying.

Anthony Heilbut1975

The Gospel Moment

In January 1969, 50,000 black Chicagoans troopedthrough Mount Pisgah Baptist Church on the newly namedDr. Martin Luther King Drive. They were viewing the bodyof Roberta Martin, a gospel singer whose obituary did notappear in The New York Times and whose funeral noteven Jet reported. Roberta Martin had grown rich fromher gospel group and publishing studio. But she beganher career in store-front churches, singing for nickels anddimes, and the poor who supported her then gathered nowto pay their final respects. Roberta Martin belonged tothem, to all the impoverished singers who tell you, "We'renot here for form and fashion. We're here to be our-selves." She'd helped give them a way to be themselvesthrough a musical style that could lure the most depressed.While she reigned they rejoiced; now they honored heras someone who'd "stuck with her own." Miss Martin'sorigins and struggles meant a lot more that week than aUher worldly success. And all over America, gospel fans whohad shared vicariously in her route, who could all testify,"My soul looks back and wonders how I got over," cele-brated her for, as they said, opening doors and movingmountains. They mourned as they'd supported, without

benefit of any mass media but their own: radio broadcastsand word of mouth.

Church people like to say, "There's none so blind as hewho will not see." For forty years America has nurturedunacknowledged a cultural form as imposing as jazz, and alife style as peculiarly native as the hippie's. Yet while themass media devour anything new, subverting the avant-garde simply by making it available, an area of Americanlife crucial to millions of people is never gobbled up asnews.

The gospel sound Roberta Martin helped inaugurate iseverywhere. All rock's most resilient features, the beat, thedrama, the group vibrations derive from gospel. From rocksymphonies to detergent commercials, from Aretha Frank-lin's pyrotechnique to the Jacksons' harmonics, gospel hassimply reformed all our listening expectations. The verytension between beats, the climax we anticipate almostsubliminally, is straight out of the church. The dance stepsthat ushered in a new physical freedom were copied fromthe shout, the holy dance of "victory." The sit-ins soothedby hymns, the freedom marches powered by shouts, the"brother and sister" fraternity of revolution: the gospelchurch gave us all these. But if gospel music is obliquelymiportant to Middle America, it's central to any study ofthe black ghetto. The huge turnout for Roberta Martin'sfuneralreportedly the largest ever held in Chicagois asmall sign of gospel's hold on its followers. Consider theghetto store windows cluttered with gospel placards, thecity stadiums packed with gospel fans. One would thinkthese signs alone would clue America that a formidableunderground identifies itself with a unique musical style,especially now that rock has done something similar foran entire generation. But gospel singers and their audi-ences remain the best-kept secret of ghetto culture.

**The world never did love us," they say, "but we're go-ing on anyhow." Along the way they have constructed aworld complete unto itself. Obviously gospel lovers have