Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age. By Jerma A. Jackson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004.193 pp. $ 49.95, cloth; 193pp. $18.95, paper.
“[Black acculturation] has been a dual process of creation and re-creation, of affirmation and reaffirmation, of looking both without and within the black community for the means of sustenance and identity and survival” (Levine p. 189).
At the turn of the twentieth-century, black gospel music developed within a larger body of black sacred music. The relationship of these musics to mass mediated culture, the entertainment industry, and racial and religious identity has been complex and often uneasy. Singing in My Soul examines the debates on race, faith, and identity that have surrounded the mutually constitutive relationship between gospel music and the music business.
Jackson’s historical study begins by positioning early gospel within the social, economic, and cultural landscape of early twentieth-century America. As “[i]mmigrants and native born, men and women, and rich and poor all tried to secure a footing in the new social and economic order,” Jackson argues that race became particularly salient (10). With the rise of Social Darwinism, negative racial stereotypes were used to justify social, political, and economic disparity. Concurrent to and partially in response to this oppressive climate, black institution building was taking place. African Americans were establishing “churches and religious institutions…schools, businesses, and mutual benefit societies” (11). These institutions were vehicles for teaching and promoting values that many believed would grant them access to American society.
Within religious institutions African Americans debated about acceptable modes of worship. Mainline black churches believed that reserved worship services and the incorporation of European musical genres and aesthetics would engender the respect of America at large. Their music included hymns, anthems, European classical selections, and concertized spirituals; these arranged spirituals had come to represent black sacred music internationally through the touring and recording of the world-renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers.
At the same time, within black communities throughout America, the Holiness-Pentecostal religious movement was gaining popularity. It was in these “sanctified” churches that a new gospel sound was developing. This highly expressive music was rooted in African American aesthetics, incorporating call and response, melismatic moans (worrying the line), melodic riffs, repetition and revision, the close integration of song and dance, foot stomping, and hand clapping. It was one very important component of a narrative religion that included verbal testimony, the “Holy” dance, and an embodied conversion experience evidenced by speaking in tongues. Both mainline and sanctified churches were couching debates on religious expression in terms of respectability. However, Holiness-Pentecostals maintained that adhering to a holy life, which included conservative dress, avoidance of secular pleasures, and highly expressive worship displayed respect for God, self, and the relationship between the two.
Women were the majority in sanctified congregations and it was because of their missionary work from the 1910s through the 1930s that churches proliferated. One of the primary methods of attracting new converts was street evangelism and music was a critical component. Jackson examines the itinerant evangelist career of Rosetta Tharpe and her mother Katie Nubin who were well known as powerful evangelists and highly skilled musicians. She insightfully argues that women utilized the realities of evangelical life in shaping gospel music. “When women took sacred music to the street, they put it to a new use. … Effective street evangelism depended on the power of a singer or musician to attract and hold an audience amid competition and distractions” (40). This was distinctly different from how music was used within church settings. “The experience of street evangelism seems to have been a particular source of [musical] innovation” (ibid.).
During this same period the technology of recording became a major force in creating and promoting popular culture and “when companies began making records that appealed to black consumers, women embraced recording technology as another vehicle for spreading religion” (ibid.). Jackson examines the brief, yet influential, recording career of blind pianist and singer, Arizona Dranes, whose recordings in the late 1920s “helped secure a foothold for the sounds and rhythms that would acquire the name gospel” (49). Dranes’ relationship with Okeh Records highlights the challenges built into merging sacred music with secular promotion strategies. Jackson maintains that promoters had a better understanding of the networks needed to distribute blues recordings. Once they entered the realm of sacred music, they had to rely on artists to identify and/or establish networks between congregations. Jackson further argues that, “[R]eligious singers encountered increasing difficulty fusing missionary work and commercial interests. To broaden the range of audiences they reached, recording companies encouraged sacred songsters to entertain as well as evangelize” (46). Here it would have been helpful for Jackson to explore the relationships between the marketing and promotion strategies for recorded sermons and gospel music. Columbia Records began recording black preacher men in 1925. Sermon recordings rivaled the popularity of blues recordings into the early 1930s (Harris p.155). What were the shape of conflicts between black recording preachers and their labels?
The increasing popularity of black religious recordings coupled with the presence of singing evangelists in the streets moved gospel music beyond Holiness-Pentecostal congregations, “posing a challenge for Baptist and Methodist ministers who sought to tamp down the teeming rhythms and emotional fervor dominating music in sanctified churches” (49). Gospel music became so popular that by the 1930s Baptist ministers, in particular, were facing these challenges within their own congregations. In chapter three of Singing in My Soul, Jackson examines “The Grassroots Campaign for Gospel” and the work of Sallie Martin and Thomas A. Dorsey.
Dorsey, who was raised Baptist, had spent some time in the blues music industry as a pianist, arranger, songwriter, and recording artist. Known as Georgia Tom, Dorsey worked with Ma Rainey and had a successful solo career with the hit “It’s Tight Like That.” For a time he moved between both the blues and religious music worlds, composing in both genres. By the early 1930s, however, Dorsey committed his life to gospel music, incorporating both sacred and secular musical sensibilities into his compositions. The Martin and Dorsey collaboration began after she joined his popular choir in Chicago’s Pilgrim Baptist Church. Martin’s business savvy became a critical component in turning Dorsey’s writings into a publishing enterprise. Moreover, Jackson maintains that Martin’s innovative cross-denominational gospel choruses were foundational in the development of national gospel choir organizations. Martin, who was raised in a sanctified church, “recruited members from mainline black churches to build a network of ‘gospel choruses’ designed to introduce the sounds and rhythms that marked sanctified music to a broad range of African American believers” (50).
Gospel music’s proliferation across denominations did not escape the notice of entertainment industry promoters as they “began…sizing up its potential to appeal across racial lines” (68). Here Jackson returns to Rosetta Tharpe and her professional career. Her popularity with both black and white audiences from the late 1930s through the late 1950s would set the stage for ongoing debates within black religious communities about the relationship between commercial culture and faith. “[B]etween 1945 and 1960 gospel encompassed two divergent and competing outlooks. One was grounded in a mass commercialized culture…the other revolved around the idea that gospel was a cultural resource. These divergent tracks, which offered a range of opportunities for gospel singers, also prompted a vigorous debate within the gospel community about the meaning of faith” (104-105).
Jackson presents a strong argument for examining the relationship between secular consumer culture and the sound, style, and modes of dissemination of black gospel music. Moreover, the analysis of the development of “gospel into a national commercial phenomenon…illuminates a range of African American perceptions on commercialism, racial identity, and the nature of religious faith” (6). However, this study is not without its weaknesses. As stated above Singing in My Soul would benefit from more in-depth treatment of early black sermon recordings, as well as, the role of radio and, eventually, television. With each technological landscape new considerations come into play, especially the introduction of the visual medium of television. Furthermore, specific numbers on gospel record sales in relationship to blues and rhythm and blues -- over time -- would help contextualize the extent to which gospel music was being engaged by the public. Jackson’s decision to focus on the careers of Tharpe and Dorsey glosses some of the nuanced debates on image, style, black identity, and black faith that emerged with artists such as Clara Ward and Mahalia Jackson. That being said, Singing in My Soul is a welcome addition to literature on black gospel music and will serve courses in religion, African American studies, music, popular culture, and gender.
Judith Casselberry, Yale University
Works Cited:
Harris, Michael W. 1992. The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. New York: Oxford University Press.
Levine, Lawrence. 1998. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thoughtfrom Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.