Gospel Music Research

Abstract

Students of gospel music are in agreement that it was during the decade of the 1920's that the tradition of gospel music started its steady climb to respectability and widespread popularity among black people in the United States. In the year 1921, Thomas Dorsey wrote his first gospel song; hardly ten years later, in 1930, Dorsey had completely renounced his career as an accomplished blues and jazz pianist-composer and devoted himself entirely to the development and advancement of gospel music (Duckett, 1974, p. 13; Boyer, 1974, p. 21). There is no single source to which one can refer to learn of the early history of gospel music, whose foundation was actually laid prior to Dorsey in the storefront churches of the North and South during the first two decades of this century. The most informative overview of this period is written by a musician but by historian Lawrence Levine. Though only one small section of Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977) is devoted to the gospel music tradition, this contribution is particularly valuable as an attempt to present and understand the thought of the people who, though quite articulate in their own lifetimes, have been rendered historically inarticulate by scholars who have devoted their attention to other groups and problems ( p. ix). Because Levine recognizes the carriers of black culture not as objects who were continually acted upon by forces over which they had no control, but rather as actors in their own right who only responded to their situation but often affected it in crucial ways, (p. xi), his work provides a very solid framework for the development of an understanding of gospel music from a black perspective. For example, Levine brings together the writings of poet-author Langston Hughes, blues singer T-Bone Walker, jazz bassist Pops Foster, and folklorist Zora Neal Hurston to affirm the pre-Dorsey roots of gospel music and to point out the superficiality of common distinctions between black sacred and secular music. He quotes Langston Hughes' observations of a service in a Holiness church in Chicago around the time of World War I: I was entranced by their stepped-up rhythms, tambourines, hand clapping, and uninhibited dynamics, rivaled only by Ma Rainey singing the blues at the old Monogram Theater ... The music of these less formal Negro churches early took hold of me, moved and thrilled me (Levine, 1977, p. 180). This comment by Hughes, and the