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...and European cultural influences in slave songs, spirituals, and traditional gospel favorites, Walker establishes a clear correlation between lyrical content in black sacred music and the social circumstances of black life. In the same way this was true of the African-American spiritual, for example, Walker concludes that it is no less true of gospel music. Furthermore, in the case of gospel music, he attributes certain sociohistorical factors--the Great Depression, the post-World War II migration of blacks from the South to northern cities, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education, and the civil rights movement--as influential to the rise of the genre (132-141). Walker's work demonstrates how, as in the case with vernacular music generally, the content and structure of early gospel music directly reflects a specific social context.
Twenty-four years and several social contexts later, ethnomusicologist and musician Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. (2003) embraces a comparable interpretive framework wherein he advocates "attending to the specific historical moment" surrounding a particular black musical expression. But he further calls for an examination of the particular social setting that gives rise to that expression. For Ramsey, these settings are community theaters, cultural spaces, or sites of cultural memory, which "provide a window of interpretation that allows [us] to enter into some important ideas about the cultural work performed by music in the processes of African American identity making" (21). Community theaters include "cinema, family narratives, and histories, the church, the social dance, the nightclub, the skating rink, even literature" (21). Intrinsic to this "process of identity making" is the meaning making that transpires within these spaces, for in the community theaters, "real people negotiate and eventually agree on what cultural expressions such as a musical gesture mean. They collectively decide what associations are conjured by a well-placed blue note, a familiar harmonic pattern, the soulful, virtuoso sweep of a jazz solo run, a social dancer's imaginative twist on an old dance step, or the raspy grain of a church mother's vocal declamation on Sunday morning" (25-26; see also Walser 1993; Floyd 1991).
From these starting points, and to enhance our understanding of the theological, cultural, and musical significance of the latest installation of black sacred music--contemporary gospel music--I explore here how recent sociological phenomena have affected this genre's development. My thesis is that sociological factors that affect the contemporary black church are largely reflected in various aspects of contemporary gospel music. In the less than forty years that this form of black sacred music has emerged, the community theater that gave it birth and provided the creative, cultural, and spiritual resources for its vitality--the black church-has been undergoing its own transformation. I consider the impact of two social factors that have contributed to this transformation--integration and secularization--and examine their impact on the emergence, development, and proliferation of contemporary gospel music. By considering how these social realities have affected the black community in a broad sense and the contemporary black church in particular, we can transform our interpretive window into a lens through which understanding is magnified.
The Contemporary Black Church and Contemporary Gospel Music
According to the U.S. Census Bureau (1998), there were approximately thirty-four million black Americans in the United States in 1998. Compared with 66 percent of whites, 83 percent of blacks reported that their religious faith was "very important in their lives." Seventy-five percent of blacks agreed with the statement "God is the all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect creator who rules the world today." In 1999, about 49 percent of blacks labeled themselves "spiritual," and 61 percent labeled themselves "committed born-again Christians" (Barna Research Group). The large majority, roughly 80 percent, of these "committed born-again Christians" belong to the seven historically black denominations: three Methodist churches (African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and Christian Methodist Episcopal Church), three Baptist conventions (National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., National Baptist Convention, America, and the Progressive National Baptist Convention), and one Pentecostal church (Church of God in Christ). With the exception of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), these institutions were founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in response to the racism and rejection faced by blacks within white Christian churches. (2) These seven denominations, along with smaller denominations and predominantly black congregations generally, constitute the larger black church in the United States.
As a sociological reference, my use of the term black church refers to the diversity of a shared tradition of Christian commitment that has shaped the collective black community. Theologically speaking:
Black religion has always concerned itself with the fascination of an incorrigibly religious people with the mystery of God, but it has been equally concerned with the yearning of a despised and subjugated people for freedom--freedom from the religious, economic, social, and political domination that whites have exercised over blacks since the beginning of the African slave trade. It is this radical thrust of blacks for human liberation expressed in theological terms and religious institutions that is the defining characteristic of black Christianity and black religion in the United States. (Wilmore 1983, x, italics added)
Decades before the founding of these religious institutions, however, the black church was preceded by what sociologist E. Franklin Frazier (1957) has referred to as "the invisible church." (3) Groups of enslaved Africans gathered in secret meetings on Southern plantations out of view and against the wishes of their owners to engage in worship and socialization in a form very different from that of their European-American slave masters. In a time when slave literacy was prohibited, musical expression reinforced by the indomitable African oral and musical traditions emerged as the lifeblood for faith in the slave community. While the Scriptures and the preached word increased in centrality after emancipation, black sacred music has always played a primary role in the religious tradition of black Americans since the time of its origins in the Africa-influenced slave culture of the antebellum period (Walker 1979, 29-30).
From the rich musical lineage of slave hollers, work songs, spirituals, anthems, the hymn-lining tradition, the meter music of Watts-style hymn singing, and Charles A. Tindley--influenced improvisational hymn-singing, gospel music surfaced in early twentieth century as the latest in the progeny of black sacred musical expression (Walker 1979, 129; Southern 1997, 461-474). It was the addition of instrumentation--tambourines, drums, horns, piano, guitar, and eventually, the organ--to the voices, hand clapping, and foot stomping that distinguished gospel music. This performance style, with an emphasis on free expression and group participation, was first experienced in the "independent" or "folk" churches of the Holiness, Pentecostal, and Sanctified sects. In later years, the music spread to other parts of the black religious community. It was attractive because it deeply resonated with their African and African-American cultural sensibilities in a way that the white Protestant liturgical tradition did not (Maultsby 2001, 91-93).
A Georgia-born preacher's son who migrated to Chicago and became a bluesman, Thomas A. Dorsey is credited as the "Father of Gospel Music." By wedding a secular blues aesthetic to sacred text, Dorsey and others (e.g., Lucie Campbell, Roberta Martin, and Mahalia Jackson) pioneered a new way of singing. Heavily influenced by the "folk'-style musicianship of Methodist minister Charles Albert Tindley, Dorsey authored more than four hundred songs, the most popular of which is the legendary "Precious Lord, Take My Hand." A skilled pianist, composer, and arranger, Dorsey, like Tindley before him, captured the current socio-religious mood of blacks of the early twentieth century by fusing the hard-times sensibilities of the Great Depression with an otherworldly assurance of hope for better days.
Gospel has thus always been a hybrid musical form, incorporating improvisation, rhythmic patterns, and tonal variations of African music present in the blues with European-influenced hymnody. Its blending of sacred (text) with secular (music) attests to its African cultural inheritance; conceptual distinctions between "sacred" and "secular" had no place in the worldview of Africans. Both religion and music were integrated within the whole of African life and served a variety of practical purposes. As the history of black music demonstrates, and particularly in the case of gospel music, this framework carried over into an emerging African-American community that exhibited a similar ambivalence toward separating sacred and secular musical conceptions. Since the 1960s, the idiom has been grouped into two broad categories: traditional and contemporary.
Contemporary gospel music differs from traditional gospel music in both form and scope. While Dorsey's "gospel blues" was indeed contemporary music in its time, by the 1960s and 1970s, technology had changed considerably. With the advent of new popular styles and technology, the sound of gospel became modernized. During the late 1960s, gospel musicians began using synthesizers, strings, brass, and the electronic musical styles of the burgeoning funk, rock and roll, and soul music. With this more contemporary sound, gospel music reached beyond the church into traditionally secular venues such as concert halls and recording studios. While this was not the first instance of black religious music performed outside of the church setting, it was the first significant, wide-scale introduction of black sacred music into the mainstream consciousness. (4)
A number of sociohistorical factors contributed to the rise of this contemporary musical form. Two in particular, integration and secularization, operated in tandem to bring about key changes in the black church experience of the post-civil rights era. (5) I believe that the political quest for social integration spurred secularization in the black church as well as black life generally. It is no wonder that the development of contemporary gospel music is marked by "musical integration," or "crossover," themes of its own: appropriating secular means toward spiritual ends (e.g., in the marketing of gospel music), fusing black and white musical aesthetics and worshiping communities (e.g., in the music of Andrae Crouch), and singing sacred songs in secular arenas (e.g., protest rallies, college campuses, and television programs).
Integration: Setting the Stage
The political movement for social integration produced a musical integration as well. This sacred musical genre, born and thriving within a Christian subculture of black American spirituality, was now being fused with a decidedly public, and secular, end. The musical result was freedom songs--spirituals or hymns with lyrics espousing resistance to segregation and perseverance during the movement for racial equality of the 1950s and 1960s (Floyd 1991, 200; Reagon 1990, 4-7) These songs became one of the central icons of the civil rights movement and boosted the morale of people from various racial, religious, and national backgrounds who identified with the movement's social and political goals. One of the most popular freedom songs, "We Shall Overcome," is an adaptation of C. A. Tindley's 1901 gospel hymn "I'll Overcome Someday." As the rallying cry of black and white demonstrators and movement sympathizers, these songs, in "gospelized" form, were reclaimed, popularized, and reappropriated for secular, and public, use. This music of the civil rights protesters, exposed largely via television news coverage, greatly affected mainstream white America. As a result, white churches supportive of the civil rights movement incorporated gospel songs into their worship services (Walker 1979, 153-155). This music, which emphasized personal spiritual transformation, was helping to catalyze group cultural and social transformation in both black and white communities (Sellman 2004).
In addition, the struggle for social integration and political equality led to strengthened group solidarity and the reclaiming of African heritage. (6) As a result, many African Americans developed a heightened race consciousness, which during this period eventually led to "a new sense of acceptance and pride ]regarding what had...
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