Gospel music's joyful noise flows into the mainstream

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 15, 1995 | by Toni Marshall

Edwin Hawkins popularized "Oh Happy Day" in the sixties. Folk singer Judy Collins did it with "Amazing Grace" in the seventies. Contemporary vocalist Amy Grants silky, positive pop tunes are rooted in gospel music, and pop artist Lionel Ritchie's "Jesus Is Love" is a favorite of leading disc jockey Donnie Simpson.

Whether by human design or divine intervention, religious music, especially gospel music, is solidly mainstream. "Gospel music has been crossing over for decades onto secular stations," says Wardell Payne, director of the Research Center on the Black Church at Howard University's School of Divinity.

Kirk Franklin and the Family's CD Why We Sing is No. 1 on Billboard's gospel chart and No. 13 on the rhythmand-blues chart. "We've played a handful of gospel songs outside of the Sunday Morning Gospel Show," says Barbara Prieto, program director at Washington radio station WKYS, but the interesting thing about [the CD] is that it is being played during drive time."

Several popular singers over the years, including folksy Bob Dylan and diva Stephanie Mills, have returned to religious music. The hottest music last Christmas season was the Benedictine monks' The Best of Gregorian Chants. Add to that the apocalyptic songs of Vision: The Music of Hildegard von Bingen, a chart-climbing CD that combines the chants and music of the 12th century with the contemporary "world-music" sounds of American composer Richard Souther.

Spiritual music has had a profound effect across America's social landscape - from labor unrest in the 1940s to the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, from the sexual revolution of the 1970s to the crime-plagued 1980s and 1990s. While America has changed, so has religious music.

"We Shall Overcome" originally was a hymn titled "I'll Be All Right." The change was made on the picket lines of South Carolina during a bitter six-month strike by tobacco workers in the mid-1940s. As an expression of solidarity, strikers changed I in the line "I will overcome" to we. More than a decade later, folk singer Pete Seeger's version rang through the call for civil rights, and since the 1963 March on Washington "We Shall Overcome" has been the anthem for freedom and equality.

According to the Library of Congress, "Amazing Grace," written more than two centuries ago, has been recorded by more performers than any other hymn. But gospel music has a long history. Its origins are in European Christian music and African culture. combination spawned a style that worked on plantations and in churches. Those who perform it best can be heard joyously stretching and bending notes, breaking syllables and bouncing phrases back and forth. In the words of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism: "Sing lustily and with a good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half-dead, or half-asleep; but lift up your voice with strength. Do not bawl; above all, sing spiritually."

Wesley's brother, Charles, wrote more than 6,000 hymns. From those hymns sprang the soulful stirring and poignant pining of the black spiritual, routinely used to guide slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad. The simple melodies were easily learned and applied.

"Our music in general was just functional," says ethnomusicologist Evelyn Simpson Currenton, choir director of the Women and Men of Gospel. "If we were working, it became a work song. In some instances, the slaves were forced to sing to keep [overseers abreast of] where they were."

By the turn of the century, choral singing in the black church had become highly organized. Groups began to glean ideas from other types of music, such as ragtime, which was more syncopated and up-tempo. Pianist Thomas Dorsey, considered the father of gospel music, combined these styles when composing.

In the 1930s, Clara Ward, Mahalia Jackson and Roberta Martin gained renown for their renditions of gospel songs. In the late 1940s, Clara Ward and the Ward Singers sold more than 1 million copies of "Surely God Is Able" - a first for a gospel song. Gospel arrangers began poring through hymnals in search of material for revivals and other programs.

The music itself had two camps: the gospel and the quartet. Both employed soloists, but the quartets were mostly male: They, and to a lesser degree the female soloists, had a significant impact on R&B and rock n' roll. James Brown's gospel roots branched out to the fervor and excitement of his hits, while Aretha Franklin - who grew up in her father's Detroit church - still records both gospel and secular music.

More recent gospel songs are mixed to appeal to a younger audience. Some Christians, however, believe church music should stay in the church and off the airwaves. "When I was younger, [the criticism] bothered me " says BeBe Winans, whose family's gospel music has been mainstream since the 1980s. "But now that I am older, it doesn't, because I think the Christian world understands our music a lot better now. I love the success that's happening with Kirk Franklin and the Family... I've always believed if you confine gospel music, it's only going to go so far, but if you take the limits off of it, you'll be surprised at what it win do and who wants to hear it."