Abstract
Thomas Dorsey’s 1932 gospel song Take My Hand, Precious Lord is one of modern gospel music’s most canonical works. Although its composition by Dorsey in the wake of his wife’s sudden death in childbirth is a widely known oral history, the cultural implications of a wider history of health care disparities in the US leading to higher rates of black maternal and infant mortality have not been seriously considered. This article studies the history of black maternal and infant mortality in Chicago during the Great Migration as it bears on the mournful sounds of the gospel blues and its gender-inflected beginnings. The history of early gospel, I argue, was profoundly influenced by black women’s sympathetic identification with the experiences of migration and mother-loss Nettie Dorsey’s death represents. While Thomas Dorsey is distinguished as “the father of gospel music,” Nettie Dorsey might be fruitfully imagined as the spectral “mother” of gospel in its mournful expressions of black women’s spiritual consciousness. As such, she stands in for an alternate history of modern gospel musicality, one helping African American religious and musical history see and hear better what Emily Lordi calls “black feminist resonance” in black musical production in the golden age of gospel.
Highlights
Thomas Dorsey’s 1932 gospel song Take My Hand, Precious Lord is one of modern gospel music’s most enduring works
While Thomas Dorsey is distinguished as “the father of gospel music,” Nettie Dorsey might be fruitfully imagined as the spectral “mother” of gospel in its mournful expressions of black women’s spiritual consciousness
No less an icon than Beyoncé Knowles did her part at the 2015’s 57th Annual Grammy Awards to extend Precious Lord’s own iconic status into the hip hop age, performing it live on stage
Summary
Thomas Dorsey’s 1932 gospel song Take My Hand, Precious Lord is one of modern gospel music’s most enduring works. Emblematic of the overlay of sacred text and poetics upon the sound of blues music that would come to be called ‘gospel blues’ years before gospel was its own genre, commercially speaking, Take My Hand, Precious Lord, perhaps gospel music’s most widely published song, was born of the unique marriage between Dorsey’s unremitting despair, traditional Christian hymnody In Say Amen, Somebody, an certain incoherence pertains to Dorsey’s recollection of the immaculate conception of Precious Lord out of “nothing,” it is surely owed to a searching nothingness performed in (between) speech and silence as Dorsey “makes [his] little talk” to Nierenberg on camera, calling up again what he cannot forget It rings with rejection as well, with the indignities of everyday denials, ritualized by law, heaped upon black citizen-subjects turned away from, and forced out of, hotels, restaurants, retail establishments, public schools, white churches, movie houses, libraries, and—as Dorsey would be reminded, painfully—public hospitals
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