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Category: gospel

2010

Sunday, 1/10/10

Who would’ve wanted to follow these guys onstage?

The Dixie Hummingbirds, live, 1966

“Christian’s Automobile”

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“I’ve Got So Much To Shout About”

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[The Dixie Hummingbirds were] the original spiritual pioneers of song. They set the standard for all to follow by spreading the message of God’s love through quartet singing.—Stevie Wonder

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[The Dixie Hummingbirds] are true American heroes. They are what singers and show people and entertainers wish they could be. They’re not just legends. They are heavenly stars.—Solomon Burke

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Few singers have held a job longer, or been more revered by audiences and their fellow singers [than the Dixie Hummingbirds’ Ira Tucker, above left].

‘The virtuoso of quartet,’ gospel historian Anthony Heilbut called Tucker.

Blues singers like Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland said they learned at his feet. The Temptations were Tucker disciples, as were hundreds of rhythm and blues vocal groups of the 1950s and 1960s.

James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Al Green and Brook Benton were among the artists who took lessons in lyrical phrasing and stage showmanship from Tucker.

Most famously to pop music fans, Paul Simon used the Hummingbirds on his recording of “Love Me Like A Rock” in 1973. They later recorded it themselves, with Tucker on lead of course, and it won them a Grammy.—David Hinckley

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2010

Sunday, 1/3/10

The well of Chicago gospel runs so deep it sometimes seems bottomless.

DeLois Barrett Campbell and The Barrett Sisters, “The Storm Is Passing Over,” live, 1982 (featured in the documentary Say Amen, Somebody)

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[DeLois Barrett Campbell and the Barrett Sisters’] harmony is special, probably the best in female gospel.—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1975 ed.)

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DeLois Barrett Campbell & The Barrett Sisters

The O’Neal Twins

The Clark Sisters

The Louvin Brothers

The Delmore Brothers

The Stanley Brothers

The Everly Brothers

The Beach Boys

The Bee Gees

Kate & Anna McGarrigle

The Jackson Five

The Isley Brothers

The Neville Brothers

The list goes on, and on, and . . .

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“Thanks very much for that—a really nice blog!”—Tristan Murail (12/26/09 [in response to an email letting him know that his music was being featured here])

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2009

Sunday, 12/27/09

Chicago’s not only the blues capital of the world; it’s the birthplace of gospel. Both could be found on Maxwell Street. The other day we went there to hear some blues (12/22/09). Here’s some gospel.

Carrie Robinson (AKA Carrie Robbins, Mary Washington), “Power To Live Right,” Chicago’s Maxwell Street, circa 1964

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Wow! [Lou Rawls and the Pilgrim Travelers, 12/20/09]

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OK, so I’m a meathead, but I much prefer John Lee Hooker [12/25/09, to Tristan Murail, 12/26/09].

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2009

Sunday, 12/20/09

Here’s another well-known artist who started out singing gospel.

The Pilgrim Travelers (with Lou Rawls [singing lead on the refrain]), “Daniel Saw the Stone” (late 1950s)

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2009

Sunday, 12/13/09

Rev. Utah Smith, Vernard Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, et al.: to those who have “ears to hear,” has any church given more than the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)?

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

“Didn’t It Rain,” live, England (Manchester), 1964

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“Up Above My Head,” live (TV broadcast)

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“Strange Things Happening Everyday” (1944)

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One of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s many fans was Johnny Cash. She was, according to daughter Rosanne, his favorite singer.

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Other [black] churches were modeling themselves after mainline white Protestant institutions. They had a piano and an organ, and that was it. They had prepared literatures and other things. But the Church of God in Christ came out of African tradition, its call-and-response mode. . . . There is a definite COGIC style, and it has influenced the whole of gospel music. . . . Rosetta Tharpe and all of those personalities, they all sang in the Church of God in Christ. Utah Smith with “Two Wings”? COGIC. The Church of God in Christ has always been in the vanguard of expressing music.

One thing the Church of God in Christ understood very early on was that if you want to hold children in church, let ’em sing. If they’re not saved, let ’em sing. They’ll get saved. Let ’em hang around the church long enough, let ’em fall in love with singing. I don’t know anybody that’s a preacher in this church, a missionary in this church, that did not start off singing in the choir. If you were a child in this church, you sang. Even if you couldn’t carry a note in a bucket. The choir is where I began. I blew saxophone—and every now and again I still do. I’ve blown alto, soprano, and tenor. But basically I did my blowing and my music in the church. And so I have my musical part that I played in the church. My brother was the organist for the church. My other brother, Nathan, is the organist here [at Temple Church of God in Christ in Memphis]. He’s minister of music for this church. And we have an adult choir, and a youth choir, and our Sunshine Band, little children. So singing plays a part from the cradle to the grave.—Rev. Dr. David Hall (in Alan Young, Woke Me Up This Morning: Black Singers and the Gospel Life [1997])

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Today MCOTD celebrates its 100th post! (Hmmm . . . if this is where we are now, where would we be without music?)

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2009

Sunday, 12/6/09

I first heard this guy back in the mid-1970s, after reading a review in the New York Times, by the late Robert Palmer, of his first album, The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson—and I’ve been listening to him ever since.

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Vernard Johnson

Live, Texas (Roanoke)

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“What Is This?”

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“I’ve Decided To Make Jesus My Choice” (The Gospel Saxophone of  Vernard Johnson [Glori, 1974])

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Like Rev. Utah Smith and many other gospel greats (Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Arizona Dranes, et al.), Vernard Johnson belongs to the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), a denomination that, as Robert Palmer put it, “has never believed in letting the devil have all the good tunes, or the good instruments.”

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The saxophone is a resolutely secular icon in our culture, its gleaming curves and often voice-like sound firmly associated with both sultry, sophisticated jazz and bumptious rock-and-roll, with high-flying fancies and the red-dirt realities of the blues. But the saxophone has also been a vehicle of imagination and spirit. And although it isn’t widely known, the spirituality of storefront churches and ecstatic religion has shaped the work of some of American music’s most indelible saxophone stylists, including King Curtis, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.

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King Curtis, whose solos on 50’s hits like the Coasters’ ‘Charlie Brown’ and ‘Baby That Is Rock-and-Roll’ virtually defined rock-and-roll saxophone as a distinct idiom, grew up playing the saxophone in Texas churches. Ornette Coleman, who played rocking Southern rhythm-and-blues saxophone before he revolutionized jazz in the 60’s, considers playing in Deacon Frank Lastie’s ”spirit church” in New Orleans in the 1940’s a key experience in terms of his later evolution. There was a great deal of the black church in the burning, visionary saxophone stylings of 60’s iconoclasts such as Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders.—Robert Palmer, The New York Times (3/6/87)

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2009

Sunday, 11/29/09

Few performances, in any genre, pack this much punch.

Brother Joe May & Jackie [AKA Jacqui] Verdell, “You’re Gonna Need Him After A While,” live (TV broadcast)

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[Brother Joe May was] the most powerful male soloist in a day when gospel singers had the greatest voices in America.

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. . . Aretha Franklin’s delivery has Jacqui [Verdell] stamped all over it . . .

—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1975 ed.)

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I considered . . . Jackie Verdell . . . one of the best and most underrrated soul singers of all time. It was through Jackie that I learned the expression, ‘Girl, you peed tonight,’ meaning you were dynamite. Several nights Jackie sang so hard she literally had a spot or two on her robe from peeing. Singing far too hard, I also peed here and there in the early days; I quickly realized no one should sing that hard.—Aretha Franklin (in Aretha Franklin & David Ritz, Aretha: From These Roots [1999])

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This clip, I just learned, is included in a recent Sam & Dave DVD, The Original Soul Men, in a part called “The Roots of Sam & Dave.” (As one review notes: “Sam Moore was supposed to be Sam Cooke’s replacement in the Soul Stirrers, after Cooke made his historic decision to pursue pop music. But then Moore saw Jackie Wilson, and everything changed.”)

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2009

Sunday, 11/15/09

This music, like Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello and music for unaccompanied violin, I first heard nearly forty years ago, when I was in college—and like Bach’s music, I’ve been listening to it ever since.

classic, n. 1. An artist, author, or work generally considered to be of the highest rank or excellence, especially one of enduring significance. E.g., Johann Sebastian Bach, Blind Willie Johnson.

Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945)

“God Don’t Never Change” (1929, New Orleans)

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“John the Revelator” (1929, Atlanta)

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“Trouble Will Soon Be Over” (1929, Atlanta; video from “The Soul of a Man,” part 4 of Martin Scorsese’s PBS series “The Blues”)

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“Dark Was The Night – Cold Was The Ground” (1927, Dallas)

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[Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was The Night – Cold Was The Ground’] is the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music.—Ry Cooder
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2009

Sunday, 11/8/09

After three Sundays of Aretha, let’s listen to her father.

Reverend C. L. Franklin (1915-1984; Pastor, New Bethel Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan, 1946-1979), “The Old Ship Of Zion”

Want more? Here.

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[Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, C. L. Franklin] listened to all sorts of music. Even though his family was very poor, they owned a stand up Victrola. He loved listening to Roosevelt Sykes, and he listened to other blues singers. He also listened to a preacher out of Atlanta, J. M. Gates, who ultimately recorded an enormous number of three minute sermons in the twenties and thirties. . . .

The social pattern surrounding the use of the Victrola was very interesting. It was not unusual for the people who didn’t own a Victrola to buy the records and bring them to the home of a friend who did. It became another way of socializing. Even in very strict religious households, children were allowed to listen to music as long as they didn’t dance or cross their legs. They listened to the blues as well as recorded hymns and sermons. B.B. King tells the story about how, as a child, there was no distinction between Saturday night and Sunday morning—that the same people who were at the juke joints were in church pews on Sunday morning. . . .

King said that whenever he was in Detroit, no matter how late he was up on Saturday night playing a gig, he was in the first row at New Bethel Baptist—C. L. Franklin’s church—at 10:45 Sunday morning. He called Reverend Franklin ‘my main preacher.’—Nick Salvatore (author of Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America [2005])

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The “Chicago” issue of Granta arrived in the mail this week, and it looks awfully promising. Let’s see: Don DeLillo (on Nelson Algren), Aleksander Hemon (on [I think] playing soccer in the city’s parks), Thom Jones (on working at a General Mills factory in West Chicago), Richard Powers (on the Great Flood of 1992), etc. Oh, and there are some stunning photos, too—not of the city’s grand historic architecture, but of Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes and the Henry Horner Homes. (A shout-out to my brother Don for tipping me off to this issue.)

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2009

Sunday, 11/1/09

Aretha didn’t have to wait until she was grown to be great. She was great when she was 14.

Aretha Franklin (at 14, vocal and piano), “Precious Lord,” live, Detroit (New Bethel Baptist Church, where her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, was pastor), 1956

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The film rights to Zeitoun, mentioned a while back, have been acquired by Jonathan Demme, who’s going to make an animated movie of it.

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I’m nearing the end of Billy Sothern’s Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City. It’s a mixed bag. Some sections are weighed down by political observations that quickly become predictable. But others are alive with the sights and sounds and smells of the streets.

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