Gospel

Black sacred music came into the decade in two shapes. The Fisk Jubilee Singers had been touring the spirituals in concert arrangements since 1871, and Paul Robeson, with pianist Lawrence Brown, gave the first full recital of spirituals in New York in April 1925 and made them concert music for a mixed audience. The other shape lived in the Pentecostal storefront church, where the Church of God in Christ sang with tambourines, hand claps and a piano played like a barrelhouse.

Arizona Dranes carried that second sound into an Okeh studio in Chicago on June 17, 1926. Blind, classically trained, and the first star of her denomination, she made the first gospel records with piano, and the piano is doing boogie-woogie ten years early. Blind Willie Johnson, a street evangelist from Texas, recorded "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" in December 1927 with a slide guitar and no words, and it is on the Voyager spacecraft now. Preachers sold records too. Rev. J. M. Gates of Atlanta cut a sermon called "Death's Black Train Is Coming" in 1926 and it outsold most blues singers.

White Southern gospel got its own record in 1927 when the Stamps Quartet recorded "Give the World a Smile" for Victor, the sound of the shape-note singing schools and songbook companies that were about to boom. And in Chicago a blues pianist called Georgia Tom, who had been writing sacred songs on the side since 1921, was about to change his name back to Thomas A. Dorsey. Gospel as we know it starts with him, in the next chapter.

Spirituals were centuries old and jubilee quartets had been on record since the 1900s. What the 1930s added was gospel as a modern, composed, commercial music with its own circuit. The man who did it was Thomas A. Dorsey, a Chicago pianist who had made his living as Georgia Tom, the hokum blues partner of Tampa Red. In August 1932 his wife Nettie died in childbirth and the baby followed her. Within days Dorsey wrote "Take My Hand, Precious Lord." He spent the rest of the decade organizing choirs, founding a convention for them, and printing sheet music that he sold out of his own storefront, because the established church publishers would not touch songs that sounded like the blues.

Dorsey's chosen singer was a New Orleans transplant named Mahalia Jackson, who demonstrated his songs from church to church and made her first records for Decca in May 1937. They did not sell. That did not matter yet; the audience was in the pews, not the record shop. On the quartet side, the Golden Gate Quartet from Norfolk, Virginia, recorded fourteen songs in two hours in a Charlotte hotel room in August 1937 and turned jubilee singing into something close to swing, with a bass singer imitating a locomotive.

Then there is Sister Rosetta Tharpe. In the fall of 1938 she walked out of the Pentecostal church and onto the stage of the Cotton Club, and on October 31 she recorded "Rock Me" for Decca with nothing behind her but her own guitar. Church people were scandalized. Everyone else heard the future. Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry all named her, and the title is not a coincidence.

Gospel was the emotional powerhouse of the decade. In storefront churches and Baptist conventions, singers were taught to soar, shout, moan and shake in ways secular music had not yet dared. Thomas A. Dorsey, a former blues pianist who had written "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", had spent the 1930s building the gospel song into an industry out of Chicago. The 1940s were when its singers became stars, and when their style crossed over.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe is the blueprint. An Arkansas-born guitarist who played electric in church and in nightclubs, she recorded "Strange Things Happening Every Day" for Decca in September 1944 with pianist Sammy Price, and in the spring of 1945 it reached number two on the race chart, the first gospel record to climb that high. Listen to the guitar breaks: the bends, the drive, the swagger. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Johnny Cash and Elvis all heard this, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally inducted her in 2018 as an early influence. Her 1947 duets with Marie Knight, "Up Above My Head" among them, are just as electric.

Mahalia Jackson is the voice. Born poor in New Orleans, she followed the railroad to Chicago and sang Dorsey's songs on the church circuit for a decade before a last-chance session for the tiny Apollo label in 1947. "Move On Up a Little Higher" sold in the millions and made her the first gospel singer white America knew by name. Aretha Franklin grew up with her in the house.

And the quartets: the Golden Gate Quartet's jubilee harmonies, the Dixie Hummingbirds' hard-driving lead swapping, and the Soul Stirrers, whose R. H. Harris invented the ad-lib lead over a repeating chorus. In 1950 the Soul Stirrers would hire a nineteen-year-old named Sam Cooke. Soul music is what happens when this decade's gospel singers walk out of the church door. Ray Charles was already trying it by 1949.

Gospel’s golden age ran straight through this decade. Mahalia Jackson, whose "Move On Up a Little Higher" had sold in the millions in the late 1940s, signed to Columbia in 1954, sang at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 and became the first gospel singer most white Americans had heard. The quartets were at their peak: the Soul Stirrers with a young Sam Cooke on lead, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi with Archie Brownlee screaming, the Swan Silvertones, the Dixie Hummingbirds. Clara Ward’s Ward Singers put on robes and drew crowds like a revival. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who had been playing electric guitar in church since the 1930s, toured Britain in 1957 and left a mark on every skiffle kid who saw her.

And gospel broke out. Every trick of the soul singer, the melisma, the shout, the call and response, the sermon in the middle of the song, was learned in church and carried across the street. Ray Charles did it first and most openly. Sam Cooke did it most successfully, leaving the Soul Stirrers in 1957. James Brown did it most violently. The Staple Singers, a Chicago family with Pops on a tremolo guitar and teenage Mavis on lead, made "Uncloudy Day" (1956) sound like the blues and got on the R&B chart with a hymn. Gospel did not lose these singers. It sent them.

Gospel was the sound of the civil rights movement before it was anything else. The freedom songs sung in Albany, Birmingham and Selma were church songs with the words changed. Mahalia Jackson sang "How I Got Over" at the March on Washington in 1963 and, by the accounts of people who were there, called out to King during his speech to tell them about the dream. The Staple Singers, Pops and his children out of Chicago, sang "Why (Am I Treated So Bad)" for the movement and by 1968 had signed to Stax.

And gospel kept sending its children into soul. Sam Cooke came out of the Soul Stirrers. Aretha Franklin grew up in her father's New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit and never really left it; the "sock it to me" on "Respect" is a church move. Every Motown and Stax singer had learned to phrase on a Sunday morning.

Then in 1968 a youth choir in Oakland recorded an old hymn to raise money for a trip. Edwin Hawkins rearranged "Oh Happy Day" on a two-track machine at the Ephesians Church of God in Christ, Dorothy Combs Morrison sang the lead, and a rock disc jockey at KSAN started playing it in early 1969. It went to number four on the pop chart. Contemporary gospel starts there, and George Harrison said "My Sweet Lord" was his attempt to write another one.

Gospel in the 1980s learned the same machines as everyone else. The Clark Sisters' "You Brought the Sunshine" (1981), Twinkie Clark's arrangement with a walking synth bass, crossed from church to disco to Black radio. Tramaine Hawkins' "Fall Down (Spirit of Love)" (1985) was a gospel record produced like a house record, and dance floors treated it as one. Andraé Crouch, who had modernised the form in the 1970s, arranged the choir on Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" and Madonna's "Like a Prayer".

The Winans, four brothers from Detroit, and then BeBe and CeCe Winans, brought Quincy Jones-grade production to gospel and put it on the R&B chart. Commissioned did the same from the same city. Al Green, by now the Reverend Al Green, spent the decade recording gospel for Myrrh and A&M and won eight Grammys doing it. Shirley Caesar remained the standard for traditional gospel and kept touring.

Then six students from Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, an Adventist school, made an a cappella record. Take 6's self-titled debut (1988) on Reprise put jazz harmony on gospel texts with no instruments at all, reached the jazz and Christian charts and won two Grammys. Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones called. Gospel had not sounded that modern since the Edwin Hawkins Singers, and the church quartet tradition of the 1940s was suddenly on MTV.

Gospel had been feeding pop for a century and in the 1990s it took some of it back. Kirk Franklin, a choir director from Fort Worth, made "Kirk Franklin and the Family" in 1993 and it became the first gospel debut to go platinum. Then, in 1997, "Stomp" with God's Property put a Funkadelic sample and a Salt-N-Pepa rap under a church choir, went into rotation on MTV and to number one on the R&B airplay chart, and then won Best Gospel Choir or Chorus Album at the 1998 Grammys. Purists hated it. The kids in the choir loved it. Franklin's "Nu Nation Project" the next year put Bono, Mary J. Blige and R. Kelly on the same gospel track. The fusion of hip-hop and church was now a market.

Around him the tradition stayed strong and got louder. Yolanda Adams's "Mountain High... Valley Low" in 1999 was a gospel record produced like R&B and it crossed over. Fred Hammond and Radical for Christ, Donnie McClurkin, whose "Stand" became a standard, Richard Smallwood's "Total Praise" and the Clark Sisters kept the choir sound alive. Take 6 sang six-part a cappella that won Grammys in both gospel and jazz. BeBe and CeCe Winans, with Mavis Staples on "I'll Take You There", topped the R&B chart. Mary Mary's "Shackles" was months away. Gospel taught the 1990s R&B singers how to sing; in the 1990s it took the beats back in return.

Mary Mary's Shackles (Praise You), released in February 2000, was a gospel record on pop radio in Britain and Australia and on MTV in America, two sisters from Inglewood singing praise over a Warryn Campbell beat that could have been a Destiny's Child track. It opened a door that Kirk Franklin walked through for the rest of the decade: Hero, in October 2005, went platinum and won two Grammys, and The Fight of My Life followed in 2007. Yolanda Adams, Donnie McClurkin's We Fall Down, Smokie Norful, Fred Hammond, Israel Houghton and New Breed, Tye Tribbett and Kierra Sheard made urban contemporary gospel a genre with its own charts, tours and awards. Marvin Sapp's Never Would Have Made It, in 2007, was a sermon that became a radio hit. The Clark Sisters came back, CeCe Winans stayed, and Take 6 kept the a cappella tradition alive.

The older tradition had its own revival. The Blind Boys of Alabama, founded in 1939, won four straight Grammys from 2002 with records that mixed Tom Waits and Ben Harper into Southern quartet gospel. Mavis Staples' We'll Never Turn Back, produced by Ry Cooder in 2007, sang the freedom songs of the civil rights movement to the Bush years. Aretha Franklin's So Damn Happy won her another Grammy in 2004. And the church was inside hip-hop and R&B more openly than ever: Kanye West's Jesus Walks, in 2004, built on the ARC Choir, and every Beyoncé record ended on a run she learned at St. John's in Houston.

Contemporary Christian music had its own mainstream moment. MercyMe's I Can Only Imagine, from 2001, crossed to pop radio; Switchfoot, Relient K and Underoath sold to kids who did not know they were Christian bands; and Hillsong's worship songs from Sydney, Shout to the Lord and the ones that followed, became the music most American churches sang on Sunday, which is the largest audience any genre in this chapter has.

Gospel had one of its most visible decades since the 1970s, largely because hip-hop kept walking through the church door. Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book in 2016 is a gospel record with rappers on it, full of choirs and thank-yous, and it won Best Rap Album at the Grammys as the first streaming-only release ever to win one. Kanye West's Ultralight Beam opened The Life of Pablo the same year with Kirk Franklin, Chance and a four-year-old preaching, and by 2019 West was running weekly Sunday Service gatherings and released Jesus Is King.

In gospel proper, Kirk Franklin remained the genre's most reliable hitmaker, winning Best Gospel Album at both ends of the decade. Tamela Mann's Take Me to the King in 2012 and Tasha Cobbs' Break Every Chain in 2013 became standards in Black churches nationwide. Tye Tribbett, Travis Greene, Jonathan McReynolds and Koryn Hawthorne carried it forward, and Tori Kelly, a pop singer, made a full gospel album and won a Grammy for it in 2019.

Contemporary Christian music got its biggest crossover in years with Lauren Daigle's Look Up Child in 2018 and the single You Say, which sat on the pop chart for years. Hillsong United's Oceans became the most-sung worship song of the decade. Lecrae put a Christian hip-hop album at number one on the Billboard 200 in 2014. And in November 2018 the long-shelved film of Aretha Franklin's 1972 Amazing Grace sessions was finally released, three months after she died, which sent people back to the greatest gospel recording ever made.

Contemporary worship became one of the most-streamed genres in America without most of the music press noticing. Maverick City Music, a deliberately multiracial collective out of Atlanta, put out "Jireh" with Elevation Worship in 2021: eight minutes long, one repeated line about being enough, and hundreds of millions of plays. They took home Grammys in 2022 and again after. CeCe Winans, who has been doing this since the 1980s, made "Believe for It" and won for it too. Kirk Franklin kept producing everyone.

The strangest gospel story of the decade belongs to Kanye West, who spent 2019 and 2020 running Sunday Service, a travelling choir performance, and then made "Donda" in 2021, a gospel-adjacent album launched with stadium listening events. What he did afterward is a different and much uglier story, and it does not undo the fact that a generation of choir arrangers got work out of it.