Gospel's Crop of Souls
by Michelle Coppedge
Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age. By Jerma A. Jackson. The University of North Carolina Press, 208 pages, $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.
1938. New York's Cotton Club. A young black woman in an evening gown takes the stage. Her rhythmic guitar playing and bright voice captivate the mostly white audience, who has never heard anything quite like her. Almost overnight she is a national sensation.
Her nightclub listeners are used to swinging jazz bands stirring them up. But tonight something different is going down. Sister Rosetta Tharpe sings gospel — music that combines jazz and blues rhythms with lyrics that highlight religious themes. And Tharpe, an itinerant evangelist from a very young age, is bringing the work she has always done to a new crop of souls.
Jerma Jackson traces this spread of gospel music in Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age. She begins with worship services in rural black churches during the nineteenth century, then follows the music to city streets and to the nightclubs and recording studios of gospel's post-World War II golden age. Jackson, associate professor of history, uses Tharpe's life story, among others, to illustrate the experiences of black singers navigating the massive music industry of the mid-twentieth century. As they gained popularity and brought their music into the commercial arena, gospel singers struggled to keep their intentions spiritual — and to convince their peers that they were not out for material gain but were acting on deeply held religious convictions.
Jackson discovered Tharpe in the pages of Life magazine, which featured the singer in a 1939 essay. "I was intrigued by her because she was doing something to the boundaries that distinguish sacred and secular," Jackson says. "I loved that she was so controversial and so popular." Jackson combed newspapers and interviewed many people who had known Tharpe. But some, considering that she'd turned her back on her church roots, didn't want to talk about her. "So I started asking people about their religious experiences — 'When were you saved?' — so I could piece together the religious context in which she grew up," Jackson says.
In late nineteenth and early twentieth century African American churches, music, considered a pure expression of the Holy Spirit within, was an integral part of worship. Jackson says Tharpe probably saw her movement to nightclubs and recording studios as the natural progression of her evangelism. "Women like Sister Rosetta Tharpe go to city streets to meet the people where they are, and in the process, news of their skills reaches talent scouts," Jackson says. "Then they seize these new technologies [such as radio and recording] as a way of spreading the word." But church leaders and members who thought that gospel music should stay sacred didn't always see things this way.
Singing in My Soul also chronicles the work of other gospel pioneers, including Thomas A. Dorsey, whose work as a musician, composer, and national organizer earned him the title "Father of Gospel." Many solo gospel singers, like Tharpe, were women. Solo gospel provided an outlet for black women marginalized by racism and sexism, Jackson says. In most churches of the time, women weren't allowed to preach. And other forms of black music such as blues, jazz, and even gospel quartets were dominated by men.
"Gospel music comes to a provocative position to raise all kinds
of questions," Jackson says. "What is religion? What is faith?" Current
artists use hip hop in gospel music, Jackson points out. "The point
here is the fusing of musical styles — and when you fuse them,
does gospel remain sacred?"
