Hip deep in gospel

American Visions, Dec-Jan, 1995 by James Earl Hardy

"Give God the glory," sings Kirk Franklin, a sex symbol who, with his 17-member backup crew known as "the family," has touched listeners many believed unreachable. While Franklin's style is a bit much for many (he has a penchant for wearing hip-hop fashions, as well as dancing and even sometimes rapping to his audiences), his success suggests to some gospel music purists that an artist doesn't need to disguise the true purpose of gospel music--spreading the good news about Jesus--in order to "cross over."

Released over two years ago, Kirk Franklin and the Family (Gospocentric Records) has almost reached 1 million copies sold--and is still going strong. Billboard's No. 1 gospel album for a year, it peaked at No. 6 on the rhythm and blues chart and even dented the pop chart-something gospel albums almost never do. And Franklin's "Why We Sing" is "the most requested song" on urban contemporary and rhythm and blues Stations, according to Tom Joyner, whose daily radio Program is broadcast on 60 stations nationwide. "We've played a lot of inspirational music before," Joyner says "but this is one of the first times we have a song on our playlist young people and older folks want to hear that actually says the name Jesus. Most gospel songs we play don't do that. "

So Franklin has managed to bridge generations and musical categories. But has he also brought the contemporary" and the "traditional" camps in the gospel music field together? Not a chance. His popularity has only intensified the dispute over the definition of gospel music. some observers, like the Rev. Charlotte Lee Oates, pastor of the Colony Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., argue that more gospel groups should follow Franklin's lead by taking the old and dressing it up, without compromising the genre's intent. "I could do without the rap," says Oates, "and I may not approve of the way the Rev. Franklin dresses when representing the gospel, but his music speaks for itself. It reminds me of that old-time gospel, what people like Mahalia [Jackson] used to do. It has that Pentecostal feel. it is so simplistic and straightforward. It's music I'd feel comfortable having sung in our church." But others, like Mark Kibble, a member of the a cappella jazz-gospel sextet Take 6, believe it is a mistake--not to mention unfair--to expect all gospel to sound the same. "We are fooling ourselves if we think having one formula will work and that it is going to touch everyone," contends Kibble. "It seems we've forgotten that the gospel music Mom and Pop listened to was not exactly accepted by their parents. The message has always been the same, but the style hasn't. So this debate is nothing new."

It certainly isn't. The "father of modem gospel music," Thomas Andrew Dorsey, a musician who made a name for himself in the early 1900s traveling with the great Ma Rainey, was himself tormented by the idea of fusing the secular with the sacred. Until he merged biblical phrases with blues rhythms and called the results "gospel songs," he ventured in and out of the blues and religious musical worlds, trying to find his place.

But like the African ancestors who did not make the distinction between the spiritual and the natural, he realized the two didn't have to be separated. It was after his wife, Nettie, and their son, Thomas, died during childbirth in 1932, that he wrote "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" to cope with his grief. It remains one of the most popular gospel songs ever, having been recorded in more than 20 languages and more than 200 different versions.

Dorsey and his business partner and vocal accompanist, Sallie Martin, were run out of churches for playing what many saw as "the devil's music." "When some folks heard it," explains Greg Taft Gettys, who has written a musical that chronicles Dorsey's life, "all they could think of was the music non-Christians sinned to on a Saturday night at juke joints and brothels. To them, it was blasphemous. So the music was never as holy in its origins as some would have us believe."

But gospel prospered, producing such stars as Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Gospel Caravans, the Soul Stirrers, the Dixie Hummingbirds, and the Five Blind Boys. The joyful noise wasn't just being sung in the church, however; to the dismay of some gospel gatekeepers, artists like Della Reese and Clara Ward and the Ward Singers took it to nightclubs and jazz festivals, to Las Vegas and Disneyland!

Then Mahalia Jackson arrived. She broke all the records--and the rules. In the 1950s, she became gospel's first performer to have her own radio program. And not only did she sing in nonreligious venues, both in America and across Europe; she even went to Hollywood, appearing in the 1959 film Imitation of Life. Her celebrity status made it clear that gospel would be another African-American musical genre (like rhythm and blues) co-opted and repackaged for the masses by the mainstream.

In the late 1960s and '70s, Edwin Hawkins, Rance Allen and Andrad Crouch created a slicker, funkier gospel sound by using more than the traditional organ, drums and piano to lay down a rhythm track--hence, the first "contemporary" gospel recordings. In 1969, Hawkins' "Oh Happy Day" became the first (and to date the only) gospel song to ever reach Billboard's pop top 10. The revolutionary work of these gentlemen caused an uproar in many gospel circles, but the major record labels, such as A&M, knew a good thing when they heard it, and they created their own gospel music divisions to tap this large, lucrative market.