Long after a song has ended, you still hear that voice.
Dorothy Love Coates & the Gospel Harmonettes
“They Won’t Believe,” live (TV broadcast)
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“That’s Alright With Me”
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“I’m Just Holding On,” live (TV broadcast)
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Were gospel to be more publicly acclaimed, she [Dorothy Love Coates] might have the stature of a Billie Holiday or a Judy Garland. Instead, for thousands of black people, she is the message carrier.—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (6th ed. 2002)
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[I]t was obvious that Keith [Richards] and Gram [Parsons] enjoyed spending time together. . . . [W]e just all cared deeply about the same things. We just loved, for instance, to sit and listen to Dorothy Love Coates, the gospel singer.—Stanley Booth
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Want more gospel?
A couple weeks ago I mentioned Bob Marovich’s radio show on WLUW-FM (Saturday, 10-11 a.m. [CST]). Another wonderful gospel radio show is Kevin Nutt’s “Sinner’s Crossroads” on WFMU-FM (Thursday, 7-8 p.m. [EST]). Kevin describes the show this way: “Scratchy vanity 45s, pilfered field recordings, muddy off-the-radio sounds, homemade congregational tapes and vintage commercial gospel throw-downs; a little preachin’, a little salvation, a little audio tomfoolery.” If you can’t catch it live, don’t worry—you can listen anytime.
If I didn’t have kids, would my ears be stuck, forever, on “repeat”?
Here’s something my younger son Luke, who just started college, played for me recently, after first pronouncing it, with quiet but absolute authority, the best thing this guy has done (already Luke’s learned that what’s important isn’t to be right; it’s to seem right).
Lupe Fiasco, “Hip Hop Saved My Life,” live, Los Angeles, 2008
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And here’s a track my older son Alex played for me a couple weeks ago, before heading back to school.
Dirty Projectors, “Stillness Is The Move”
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Koan for aging parents: What is the sound of a childless house?
How to be both solid and fluid, both fat and delicate. How to make the beat breathe. These are things that, as a child, Philly Joe Jones began to learn while dancing—tap-dancing. Just watch the way Thelonious Monk, listening to this solo, rocks back and forth (1:25-1:50), as if he’s about to break into a little dance himself.
Philly Joe Jones, live (with Thelonious Monk), 1959
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He breathed our history as/his walking beat . . . The Man/So Hip/A City/Took/His/Name.—Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones, in Eulogies[1996])
The first time I stood before a judge at Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building at 26th and California—this was back in the ’70s (when I was working at Alligator Records)—it was to speak on behalf of this man, Hound Dog Taylor. The day before, during a drunken argument at his apartment, he’d shot his longtime guitarist Brewer Phillips (who survived). In his own way, Hound Dog was a pretty canny guy. When he told me about this incident over the phone, shortly after it happened, he put it this way: “Richard, they say I shot Phillip.”
(No, don’t touch that dial; these stills are way out of focus—which, for Hound Dog, seems just right.)
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Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973
Here one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century (composer Morton Feldman [1926-1980]) pays homage to another (painter Mark Rothko [1903-1970]).
Morton Feldman, “Rothko Chapel” (composed in 1971; first performed, at Houston’s Rothko Chapel, in 1972)
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.
Vernard Johnson, saxophone
Live, Texas (Roanoke)
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reading table
Music . . . helped me to go deeper inside myself, to find new things there: the variety which I had vainly sought in life and in travel, yet the longing for which was stirred in me by the surge of sound whose sunlit wavelets came to break at my feet.
Today at 3 p.m., at a church on Chicago’s south side (First Church of Deliverance, 4301 S. Wabash), hundreds of gospel music lovers (including me) will gather to celebrate the birthday of this group’s lead singer—it’s her 84th.
Chicago, gospel’s Mecca and Vatican, remains the one city where traditional singers comprise a community, and retain a small but steady audience.—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (6th ed. 2002)
If you’re a gospel singer, any time—even (especially?) a sister’s funeral—is a time to sing.
Gene Stewart (of the Soul Stirrers) with Willie Rogers (also of the Soul Stirrers), “The Last Mile of the Way” (recorded by the Soul Stirrers, with Sam Cooke, in 1955), live
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Once you are a Soul Stirrer you are always a Soul Stirrer. Sam Cooke will always be known as a Soul Stirrer regardless of what he did in the world.—Willie Rogers
I’ve been listening a lot lately to a box-set called ‘Goodbye Babylon’ which is 6 CDs of early 20th-century American religious music, black and white music, you know.
It’s got those Norfolk a cappella quartets and it’s got country singers, and there’s church services and everything. It’s the best compilation I’ve seen for years. It comes with a fantastic book. I find that so intriguing that I just listen again and again.—Brian Eno (quoted in L.A. Weekly)
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Sister O.M. Terrell
“The Bible’s Right” (1953, Nashville; included in Goodbye, Babylon)
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“Gambling Man” (1953, Nashville)
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“Swing Low, Chariot” (1953, Nashville)
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Ola Mae Long was born in Atlanta in 1911. She was raised by her mother, a laundress, near Decatur Street, and in 1922 she had a religious conversion at a revival. Thereafter, she began a street ministry under the auspices of the Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God, originally a South Carolina sect. Singing and playing guitar in the slide style, Terrell (her married name) spent the next half-century evangelizing on streets, in churches, and on the radio in South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee.—Goodbye Babylon (accompanying book)
Where did Wilson Pickett (2/12/10) get that clenched, piercing, back-of-the-throat scream?
The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi (featuring Archie Brownlee)
“Never Turn Back” (1948)
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“Will Jesus Be Waiting?” (1952)
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“Save A Seat For Me” (c. 1956)
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“Leaning On The Everlasting Arms” (c. 1959)
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‘Archie started that scream you hear all the soul singers do,’ the great Ira Tucker of the Dixie Hummingbirds observed. ‘Now plenty of us used to scream, but Archie really brought it out.’—Arthur Kempton, Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music(2005)
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After he left gospel, Sam Cooke once told a friend that he would always tear up when he would listen to Brownlee: ‘He’s the only one who could do that—to move me like that.’—Robert Darden, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music (2004)
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].”
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