This morning, like every Sunday morning, gospel will fill the air in churches all over Chicago’s south and west sides, including the Life Center Church of God in Christ at 5500 S. Indiana, where, at 11 a.m., this man will take the pulpit.
In the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), they take Psalm 149 to heart: “Sing to the Lord a new song . . . mak[e] melody to him with tambourine and lyre [and guitar and saxophone and anything else you can get your hands on].”
Much has been written about gospel’s influence on popular music. What’s sometimes overlooked is that influence traveled in the other direction, too. Take this song, for instance: a big hit in gospel circles, it borrows heavily from an old pop song, “That Lucky Old Sun” (1949).
Cassietta George, “Walk Around Heaven All Day” (begins at 3:45; CG, who wrote the lyrics, sang lead on the Caravans’ 1964 recording), preceded by “I Must Tell Jesus,” live
[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
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])
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].
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 its100thpost! (Hmmm . . . if this is where we are now, where would we be without music?)
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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