gospel music

gospel music, genre of American Protestant music, rooted in the religious revivals of the 19th century, which developed in different directions within the white (European American) and Black (African American) communities of the United States. Over the decades both the white and Black traditions have been disseminated through song publishing, concerts, recordings, and radio and television broadcasts of religious services. In the later 20th century gospel music developed into a popular commercial genre, with artists touring worldwide.

White gospel music

White gospel music emerged from the intersection in the19th and early 20th centuries of various European American musical traditions, including Protestant Christian hymnody, revival-meeting spirituals, and assorted popular styles. This musical combination yielded a form that—despite many developments—has maintained some distinct qualities. The music is generally strophic (in verses) with a refrain, and its texts typically depict personal religious experiences and stress the importance of salvation. Most of the repertoire is set in a major key and is arranged in four-part harmony—similar in style to barbershop singing—with the melody in the top voice. Early gospel hymns had a relatively straightforward rhythmic and harmonic structure (using three basic chords: I, IV, and V), but as the tradition absorbed more influences from popular music, both its rhythmic and its harmonic vocabulary expanded.

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In the first decades of the 19th century, gospel songs were transmitted through Sunday-school hymnbooks. Among the most widely used song collections during this period were those compiled by Lowell Mason, William B. Bradbury, Robert Lowry, and William Howard Doane. Fanny Crosby was the leading writer of gospel hymn texts. After the American Civil War (1861–65), the Sunday-school repertoire was appropriated and expanded to serve the Protestant revival movement, especially in urban areas. Singer and composer Phillip D. Bliss was among the most important figures in this endeavour, as were evangelist Dwight L. Moody and his musical collaborator Ira D. Sankey. Together, Moody and Sankey employed the Sunday-school hymns and new gospel compositions in their church services as major instruments of edification and conversion, thus playing a critical role in the establishment of gospel music as a legitimate means of ministry.

Until the early 20th century, gospel hymns were generally serious in their tone, but by the 1910s and ’20s they had begun to lose some of their austerity. Largely through the work of evangelists such as Billy Sunday, working with musicians such as Charles McCallom Alexander and Homer Rodeheaver, the music acquired a more upbeat character. The organ was replaced by the piano, which in turn was joined by other instruments. (Rodeheaver’s musical presentations often included his own trombone solos.) The vocal component of the music also took on a more demonstrative, lively quality, with lyrics that conveyed a more positive message. In the 1930s and ’40s, rural musicians such as the Carter Family infused their gospel music performances with elements of local Appalachian and other country music traditions, effectively blurring the boundary between sacred and secular styles.

In the second half of the 20th century gospel hymnody again played a major role in a Protestant religious revival, becoming even more heavily influenced by popular styles and employing greater harmonic variety. In urban areas the popularized gospel music emerged as the foundation of many Protestant services—especially in Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and various fundamentalist churches. The most productive composer of this new gospel repertoire was John Willard Peterson, while Billy Graham was the most prominent—and internationally recognized—evangelist of the period.

In the rural South gospel gained a new identity as a type of popular country music, sometimes called country gospel, that was both practically and stylistically a fully secular tradition (not intended for use in church), with such exponents as the Oak Ridge Boys and the Statler Brothers. Such secularized gospel music continued to enjoy a wide audience in the 21st century, through the work of many other artists, among the most notable of whom are the Lewis Family, Sandi Patty, Pat Boone, and Dolly Parton.

Black gospel music

The tradition that came to be recognized as Black American gospel music emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries alongside ragtime, blues, and jazz. The progenitors of the tradition, however, lie in both Black and white musics of the 19th century, including, most notably, Black spirituals, songs of enslaved people, and white hymnody.

The roots of Black gospel music can be ultimately traced to the hymnals of the early 19th century. A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors (1801) was the first hymnal intended for use in Black worship. It contained texts written mostly by 18th-century British clergymen, such as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, but also included a number of poems by Black American Richard Allen—the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church—and his parishioners. The volume contained no music, however, leaving the congregation to sing the texts to well-known hymn tunes. After the Civil War Black hymnals began to include music, but most of the arrangements employed the rhythmically and melodically straightforward, unembellished style of white hymnody.

In the last decade of the 19th century, Black hymnody experienced a stylistic shift. Colourful and allusive texts, reminiscent in many respects of the older Black spirituals, were set to melodies composed by white hymnodists. The arrangements, however, were adjusted to reflect Black American musical sensibilities. Most significantly, the hymns were syncopated—that is, they were recast rhythmically by accentuating normally weak beats. Among the first hymnals to use this modified musical style was The Harp of Zion, published in 1893 and readily adopted by many Black congregations.

The immediate impetus for the development of this new, energetic, and distinctly Black gospel music seems to have been the rise of Pentecostal churches at the end of the 19th century. Pentecostal shouting is related to speaking in tongues and to circle dances of African origin. Recordings of Pentecostal preachers’ sermons were immensely popular among Black Americans in the 1920s, and recordings of them along with their choral and instrumental accompaniment and congregational participation persisted, so that ultimately Black gospel reached the white audience as well. The voice of the Black gospel preacher was affected by Black secular performers and vice versa. Taking the scriptural direction “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord” (Psalm 150), Pentecostal churches welcomed tambourines, pianos, organs, banjos, guitars, other stringed instruments, and some brass into their services. Choirs often featured the extremes of female vocal range in call-and-response counterpoint with the preacher’s sermon. Improvised recitative passages, melismatic singing (singing of more than one pitch per syllable), and an extraordinarily expressive delivery also characterize Black gospel music.

Among prominent Black gospel music composers and practitioners have been the Rev. C.A. Tindley, composer of “I’ll Overcome Someday,” which may have served as the basis for the anthem of the American civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome”; Reverend Gary Davis, a wandering preacher and guitar soloist; Thomas A. Dorsey, a prolific and best-selling songwriter whose works included, most notably, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”; and the Reverend C.L. Franklin of Detroit (father of soul music singer Aretha Franklin), who issued more than 70 albums of his sermons and choir after World War II. Important women in the Black gospel tradition have included Roberta Martin, a gospel pianist based in Chicago with a choir and a school of gospel singing; Mahalia Jackson, who toured internationally and was often broadcast on television and radio; and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–73), whose guitar and vocal performances introduced gospel into nightclubs and concert theatres.