The interaction between tune and sermon — and the significance of each in Black church buildings — is the main target of a brand new docuseries created by scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Gospel premieres on PBS stations on Monday and Tuesday (Feb. 12 and 13) and was preceded by a associated live performance that premiered Feb. 9 on public tv.
“Gospel and preaching go hand in hand, flip sides of the manner in which we sound the word of God through these two sublimely majestic art forms,” Gates stated in remarks at a late January preview occasion that showcased clips from two of the 4 episodes that may air over the 2 days.
Gates, a Harvard professor identified for his Discovering Your Roots program and creator of the e-book and docuseries The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Music, famous that gospel emanates from quite a lot of types of music — such because the blues, R&B and soul — however as an general style has stood the take a look at of time.
“Gospel is the resonant, living repository of our people’s rich spiritual past,” he instructed an interracial crowd that gathered at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church to listen to him converse, view the clips and take heed to musicians carry out hits recorded by Walter Hawkins, Richard Smallwood and The Clark Sisters.
“Musical styles come and go. But one style has remained a constant source of strength, courage and wisdom for over a century: gospel music.”
Friday’s hourlong live performance program was filmed at Los Angeles’ Oasis Church, the place Gates and gospel artist Erica Campbell host artists who carry out gospel songs of yesteryear. Mali Music sings “He’s So Wonderful,” initially recorded by Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, and John Legend sings Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Precious Lord,” initially recorded by Mahalia Jackson.
The sequence itself dwells on each ministers and the ministry of music, with Gates, different students and musicians tracing the historical past of gospel music from the Nice Migration, when African People carried the sounds of their house church buildings with them as they left the segregated South in quest of higher lives up north.
A type of who moved northward was Dorsey, a Georgia native who settled in Chicago and was identified for his blues music. Returning again to church circles, he turned such a prolific author, creating conventional Black gospel with a bluesy type, that he was often known as the “father of gospel music.”
Gates’ sequence notes how a number of the music was created in occasions of private and nationwide mourning. Certainly one of Dorsey’s most well-known songs was “Precious Lord,” written in 1932 as he mourned the deaths of his spouse and toddler son. James Cleveland recorded “Peace Be Still” within the weeks after the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Road Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Each songs additionally demonstrated gospel music’s attain past the pews of church buildings and onto top-selling data. Preachers, too, unfold the spoken gospel through data, together with the Rev. C.L. Franklin — a Detroit pastor and the daddy of Aretha Franklin — whose 1953 recording of the sermon “The Eagle Stirreth the Nest” led him to be dubbed “the man with the million-dollar voice.”
Aretha Franklin first sang within the choir after which as a soloist on the New Bethel Baptist Church the place her father’s well-known sermon was recorded — and later returned to a church setting to document Superb Grace, an album that continues to be the best-selling stay gospel album.
The union of preaching and tune is obvious throughout a second in Gates’ sequence depicting the change in expression on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s face — from somber to smiling — as Mahalia Jackson sings “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” earlier than he addresses a rally at a Chicago church.
“A voice like this comes only once in a millennium,” King says within the video, concerning the girl who additionally sang shortly earlier than he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Although the sequence notes how ladies — usually barred from the pulpit — preached via their music, it highlights how Shirley Caesar ultimately did each, first via sermonettes at her concert events and later main a church in North Carolina the place she remains to be a pastor.
“I would take my experiences and I would put it to music because I knew that, just as sure as we’re sitting here, that somebody else was experiencing some of the things that I was or either things that I’d gone through with,” she instructed Gates. “That’s my kind of gospel.”
Gates stated that’s what he loves concerning the musical style rooted in Black church buildings.
“In the end, we all love gospel music, because it is the sound of hope against hope,” he stated at Metropolitan AME. “It is the sound of the triumph of the human spirit over tremendously daunting odds. It is the sound of the gloriously rhythmic harmony of a people making a way out of no way.”
“Well bless their hearts.”
