EVERY VOICE AND SING!
EPISODE FOUR: “A Different Drummer”
(00:00:01) “THIS PROGRAM IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING, AND THE FORD FOUNDATION.” (00:00:06)
HOST Opening:
(00:00:07) Hello, I’m Michele Norris, and this is EVERY VOICE AND SING!” a look at the Choral Music Legacy of the HBCUs-- the Historically Black Colleges and Universities of the United States of America…
(“Morgan State Choir...”Precious Lord”…Up...under…)
M. NORRIS:
In this Episode—A Different Drummer—we will look at the birth and rise of what’s now known as Gospel Music, primarily through the life and determined efforts of Thomas A. Dorsey...
( “Morgan State Choir...Precious Lord”…Up...under…)
DR. HORACE BOYER:
Thomas Andrew Dorsey is considered the father of gospel music, and we always celebrate the great trials and tribulations that he went through to get the world to recognize this music. But what most people don’t realize is that by the time that Mr. Dorsey came into gospel, a kind of gospel had been in existence for almost 20 years.
M. NORRIS:
Dr. Horace Boyer is author of “How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel” and he is Professor Emeritus of African American music and music theory at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
(“Swan Silvertones,Thank You Jesus”…Up...under…)
DR. HORACE BOYER:
The gospel quartets and gospel in the black community has a very . interesting birth. Because in 1905, there are so many black college jubilee singers out in the world that they’re taking money from each other. And by 1905, Fisk University says listen, we’ve got to bring our Jubilee Singers off the road, 9, 12, 15 people are charging us too much money. So they got the idea of sending out a quartet. The Fisk Jubilee Quartet. Then Hampton got a Quartet...
(Morehouse Quartet …Up Full…and back under…)
DR. CEDRIC DENT:
College campuses is where quartets naturally formed, coming out of the choir tradition. And so I think that to this day, Take 6 owes a lot to the quartet tradition from which we grew.
M. NORRIS:
Cedric Dent’s PhD is on the harmonic development of black religious quartet singing. He and Mark Kibble do most of the arrangements for their Jazz-influenced Gospel Group Take-6.
(TAKE 6”You Can Make It-Go On”…Up/under…)
SOT DR. CEDRIC DENT:
The first gospel music that really sort of began to take the country by storm, started with quartets. Which again, of course we trace back to the college choirs.
M. NORRIS:
Dr. Boyer...
DR. BOYER:
In 1915, in Bessemer, Alabama, we get the beginning of black gospel quartets. What had happened was these boys who had been to college came back home. However, they were not singing before college audiences. They were not singing before white audiences. They were singing before black church audiences, and in the black church, we say Amen, Hallelujah, Sing it, so that they began to change their singing to elicit and to generate this kind of singing.
(KSU “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep”Up Full/Under…)
DR. DENT:
It was for years, from, I’d say about the 1920s to the 1940s that it was the gospel quartet, the male quartet, that was the most prominent style of gospel music. Now Mark can tell you about who a lot of these groups were...
(Swan Silvertones “Only Believe” Up Full ...back Under…)
MR. KIBBLE:
Wow. The Swan Silvertones come to mind.
(Swan Silvertones “Only Believe” Up Full ...back Under …)
M. NORRIS:
But there was also another equally powerful source for the early Black Gospel Music...Dr. Boyer...
SOT BOYER:
We go back to April 9th, 1906. In the 300 block of Azuza Street in Los Angeles, California when the Holy Ghost fell with William Joseph Seymore and his band of Pentecostal Holiness People, and from that kind of setting, we get the beginning of gospel music. We get a return to the kind of music that the slaves were singing. Stuff like [sings] I’m a soldier, in the Army in the Lord, Soldier, in the Army.
Well, the Baptists weren’t singing that at that point.
(SOT: OAG SUSPENSE THEME-2 IN/ under…)
The Methodists weren’t singing it. It was the Sanctified People, it was the Holiness Church, it was the Apostolic Church, that was singing it.
M. NORRIS:
This other side of the two-pronged Gospel Root would later be very significant. But, between the 1890s and the 1920s, few people had time to notice how one genre of black music was developing...
DR. LENA McLIN:
Because everything that we were programmed in was Yassir, No sir, Yassir Boss...
M. NORRIS:
Dr. Lena McLin is the author of the music textbook, Pulse, the History of Music, She is also a classical music composer. She has written about 9 Gospel Songs, and is the niece of Thomas A. Dorsey.
SOT DR. McLIN:
...and we had our heads down and our spirits up. But you must remember that was a time when segregation was so prominent, and the Klu Klux Klan was so busy...
(SOT: OAG SUSPENSE THEME-2 UP/ under…)
M. NORRIS:
“Keeping your head down”-- being carefully vigilant, was mandatory. It was a very dangerous and violent period, especially for African Americans. There were riots across the country.
(NATSOT: RIOT NOISE...UP Full...back under)
Usually, it was a striving black community being destroyed; its economic and political power targeted by white mobs...
(NATSOT: RIOT NOISE/RIFLE, SMALL ARMS FIRE)
In places like Brownsville, Texas, Chicago, and other cities, armed blacks gave as good as they got—it was more like race warfare than race riots...
(NATSOT: RIOT NOISE/RIFLE, SMALL ARMS FIRE)
(SOT: OAG BATTLE THEME- UP/ under…)
Other areas—like Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Wilmington, North Carolina did not fare as well...
DR. HEATHER WILLIAMS:
Riots didn’t become associated with black people until the 1960s. Riots before that had been white people rioting...
M. NORRIS:
Dr. Heather Williams teaches 19th Century African American History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her latest book, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom recounts the black struggle for education during enslavement and the U.S. Reconstruction era of the 19th century...
DR. HEATHER WILLIAMS:
And so 1866, you’ve got a major riot in Memphis, Tennessee. You’ve got one also that same year in New Orleans.... Somehow black people still keep building and they start acquiring wealth....
I just saw a report about the Wilmington Riot in 1896... some people are now calling it a coup d état because there had been a government elected and some white men decided that that was not the right government and staged a riot and went into the state house and took control, and there had been a thriving black community in Wilmington,...
M. NORRIS:
Just as there had been in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921...
And yet, in that same period, despite the adversity, there was this amazing growth of black arts and culture. It blossomed into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
And the musical explosion lasted even longer....
Dr. Horace Boyer...
DR. BOYER:
In 1920, Mamie Smith records “Crazy Blues.” By 1930, Bess is at her peak, Bessie Smith. In the 1930s, Duke Ellington is out there, Count Basie is out there, Lionel Hampton is out there, Andy Kirk is out there. And then 1930, Dorsey is out there,...
(XFADE to Candi Staton “Precious Lord”)
M. NORRIS:
He’s “out there” but, still not fully locked into his new style of religious music. Mr. Dorsey’s niece, Dr. Lena McLin...
DR. McLIN:
Because Dorsey was a blues man. Dorsey was Ma Raney, the mother of the blues, he was Ma Raney’s musical director.... He was Georgia Tom and he wrote over 100 blues and he was really cooking, and he got his big hit called Tight Like That. And he was a rich man at
8-O’clock that morning, the stock market crashed, and that night, he was a poor man. [laughs] Mysterious ways. And my grandmother was happy ‘cause she didn’t want him in the blues field no way.... My grandmother used to stay on him so much about being a sinner. And he would play those ragtime, honky tonk blues you know, and play for Ma Raney. And he met a girl named Nettie there, and she was Ma Raney’s costume designer, and they got married, and he would play the blues...
M. NORRIS:
It was great personal tragedy that brought this son of a Preacher back to the church once and for all...
DR. McLIN:
He went to direct a gospel choir out of town, and his wife Nettie was at home. They were expecting a child, and he drove about 50 miles out, and came back. He had a fellow with him. The fellow said I don’t think I’ll go, I’m gonna stay. And he should have stayed, but she was asleep and he didn’t pay any attention. And the next night when he was conducting this choir, they came in and told him that she had died in childbirth, and he was just wiped out. And that’s how he wrote Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand....
(XFADE Lena into the Candi Staton Version UP FULL)
(XFADE to Morgan State U. Choir, PRECIOUS LORD...under)
DR. HORACE BOYER:
So in that regard, Dorsey, is considered the father of gospel music.... but what he did, he picked up and made Baptist? Mm? What the Sanctified Holiness Pentecostal people were already doing. He combined all of this raw refrain material into “Precious Lord, Take my Hand, lead me on, let me stand.” I mean now that’s the kind of poetry that you can’t get spontaneously, so you see that Dorsey does begin to refine, give it a certain amount of dignity, take it to the church, take it to the convention, write it out. I mean the notes. Get it printed. Published it, and then sells it, so he is the father.
M. NORRIS:
But it was no easy walk-in-the-park for Thomas A. Dorsey and the Gospel Music tradition he started at the Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago in 1932. It was a long, hard, uphill battle...
DR. J. A. WILLIAMS:
Now when we look at the gospel music, we all know that many of originators of this music started in blues. And jazz.
M. NORRIS:
Dr. James Arthur Williams prefers to be called a teacher. He was a Choral Conductor for a total of 33 years combined at Stillman College and Wilberforce University...
DR. J. A. WILLIAMS:
...and so the folk in the church got nervous that we were bringing the devil’s music in the church , it sort of made them nervous. Dr. Horace Boyer really talks about this.
DR. HORACE BOYER:
Dorsey does one thing that upsets the whole area of black church music. Dorsey adds piano to gospel music, see. The a cappella, if we had just had a cappella gospel, nobody would be talking about the blues. Nobody would be talking about jazz. But when you bring that honky tonk piano in here, the Lord goes to California and leaves Chicago out there by itself and the people just go bonkers...
M. NORRIS:
Dorsey’s niece, Dr. Lena McLin...
DR. McLIN:
He went all over America and organized gospel choirs in churches. First he was kicked out of most of them.
[xfade to OAG: “AMAZING GRACE” UNDER]
DR. GARCIA:
During that time, late 19th Century or early 20th Century, the use of the banjo and the guitar and the percussion instruments, even the piano, were considered to be instruments of the world because they were associated with the secular black music, ah. what I mean by that is the blues...
M. NORRIS:
Ethnomusicologist Dr. William B. Garcia has a PhD in Choral Music Literature and Conducting. He is the Director of the Lincoln University Concert Choir in Pennsylvania...
DR. GARCIA:
But initially the gospel music was not accepted in the African American church... because these churches patterned their worship after the white congregations that they sprang from.... And then afterwards, that music was really kind of frowned upon. As the spiritual was, initially.
M. NORRIS:
Dr. Horace Boyer....
DR. HORACE BOYER:
All of our music is much more accepted now than it was, but there are still congregations that I don’t care what kind of gospel it is, it can be smooth gospel, or it can be raucous. It’s not going to get into some churches, so that, Dorsey had the problem of finding an audience, finding singers, finding places where this music could be produced, and that he actually did. It took him 30 years.
M. NORRIS:
It took him 30 plus years because the struggle for
acceptance was being waged on more than one front,
more than one level...Dr. William Garcia...
DR. GARCIA:
And they considered the gospel music to be from the holiness Pentecostal group, and at that time, the Holiness Pentecostal Group were the so-called “lower class” of African Americans, because the ones that were middle class and above were attending the United Methodist and the AME church and the Baptist and they didn’t sing that kind of music.
(5 BLIND BOYS OF ALABAMA“By and By”...UP/Under)
M. NORRIS:
This is Every Voice And Sing! I’m Michele Norris...
00:19:45.............FIRST SHOW BREAK............00:19:45
(00:20:15)(5 BLIND BOYS --“By and By”... Under)
M. NORRIS:
(00:20:15) For many in the different church denominations from the late 19th century on, the “style” of worship was obviously tightly connected to the “class” of those engaged in the worship service.
And due primarily to what became known as the “great migration,” “class” was becoming quite significant.
The mass movement north had begun to put poorer, so called “lower class” newly arrived Blacks in much closer contact with the already well-established members in the Northern Black Churches.... It would soon cause problems... Again, some necessary background:
(SOT: OAG UPDATED SUSPENSE THEME)
From 1915 through the 1930s, assaults on black political rights, property, even their lives continued non-stop, especially in the South...
DR. HEATHER WILLIAMS:
Ida B. Wells started to realize that white men were lynching black men and they were making a claim that black men were raping white women. And Ida B. Wells started investigating and realizing wait, there’s some economic issues here, this isn’t about rape.
M. NORRIS:
Author Heather Williams, on the early days of crusading journalist Ida B. Wells and her campaign against Southern whites who attempted to terrorize black men...
DR. HEATHER WILLIAMS:
To actually kill men who were doing well economically and again, as in slavery, you beat people in public, here you hang people in public, or you shoot them to say to other people, stop this striving. There’s a place for you.—slavery’s over, but this is a society that we have in the South. It’s Jim Crow and we’ve put that in place,